Nigel Farage accused the Labour Party of trying to blame the anti-mass migration riots on him out of fear of losing votes to his Reform UK party in left-behind areas of the country.
Mr Farage said that it was “despicable” for legacy media and political establishment in Westminster to cast blame on him for the riots that swept the nation in the wake of a mass stabbing at a children’s dance party allegedly by a Rwandan-heritage teen in Southport last week.
The Brexit leader told Sky News on Tuesday the reason there have been attempts to blame him for the violent uprising was that the Labour Party is “terrified that many of their own voters will vote for me”.
While the press and politicians have branded the riots as entirely “far-right”, the violence has almost exclusively occurred in traditional Labour Party-supporting cities and towns, including many in the North and Midlands, which have born much of the brunt of mass migration while suffering from de-industrialisation.
The so-called “Red Wall”, once thought of as unassailably Labour, has increasingly become up for grabs electorally with the region in large part backing Brexit as well as Boris Johnson’s Tories in 2019, at the urging of Mr Farage. In last month’s election, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won back most Red Wall seats, however, Farage’s Reform leapfrogged the Conservatives and came in second in 98 of these seats behind Labour.
In a video posted on Youtube, the Reform boss warned that with Sir Keir Starmer branding the entire unrest in the Labour heartland as “far-right”, it will only convince more people to back reform in the Red Wall, saying: “If you use that term far right you’re using it against your own voters and a majority of the population.”
Farage said that the prime minister has “completely” misread the situation, saying that while placing all the focus of the response on the far-right, it ignores the “general feeling of dissatisfaction” growing throughout the country about “societal breakdown” amid mass migration and economic deprivation.
This anger, Farage argued, has only been compounded by a growing sense of two-tiered policing in the country, the belief that police and authorities take a lax approach to certain ethnic minorities — particularly blacks and Asians — compared to the native white British population, a claim that Starmer denies.
“This perception began back at the time of Black Lives Matter, remember the Churchill statue being defaced, the Cenotaph being abused in central London, and the police response? They knelt down in the street and took the knee to a Marxist organisation that wants to bring down Western civilisation,” Farage remarked.
“Most of us think that ethnic minority groups are policed entirely differently to that of white British people folks… That is how the country feels,” he added.
Despite being accused — without evidence — of stoking and orchestrating the riots, Mr Farage once again called for calm, condemned the violence, and urged people to continue to believe in the democratic process.
“I understand the frustrations, I understand the anger that is felt by huge numbers of people but we do not support, I do not support street protest violence or thuggery in any way and that’s why for 30 years I fought elections because I believe that democracy is the peaceful way to solve problems.”
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