“Help us take the first really big step”, Brexit’s Nigel Farage says on the final day of his last-minute, four-week campaign to get a foothold in Britain’s Parliament with Thursday’s national election.
The United Kingdom will vote in its first national election in five years on Thursday to select the next parliament, and consequently Prime Minister and government. Polling showing the Labour party being all but certain to take a massive majority in the house — possibly the largest in modern British history — has been taken essentially as fact, and the race for second place is the only game in town.
In normal times and for a century the positions of government and opposition change hands between just two parties, Labour and the Conservatives. Yet the Conservative Party has cynically betrayed its own voters to a degree possibly unprecedented in history, and even worse in the internet age where the legacy media can no longer be relied upon for avoiding scrutiny.
So having promised to reduce mass migration to the “tens of thousands” a year but actually boosted it to a million every 18 months, and having promised to deliver on Brexit but squandered it, and having promised to cut taxes but having actually increased the burden to post-war highs, the moral authority of the Conservatives appears comprehensively broken.
Enter Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. There’s no doubt this very short surprise election campaign has damaged Reform, just as Farage predicted itself at the beginning, but nevertheless the party is regularly polling at-parity with the Conservatives and has been for weeks. This is a remarkable achievement for a party that barely existed two months ago, to be menacing one of the oldest and most established political parties on planet earth.
Voting is tomorrow and, largely thanks to Britain’s electoral system which does a good job of shutting out outsider candidates — don’t forget this is Nigel Farage’s 8th attempt to get a Westminster seat — whether Reform walks away with dozens of new MPs or just enough for a game of bridge simply can’t be foreseen. The polling industry is very focused on understanding the balance between the Conservatives and Labour, made a dreadful job of trying to predict Brexit, and quite possibly has done a bad job of estimating Reform in this election too. We’ll see.
Mr Farage himself is making his final appeal for support to voters today, and will hold a rally in Clacton tonight. This morning, he said:
…we’re the only party saying what the silent majority think. We’re prepared to tackle immigration. We’re prepared to try and lift those on low pay out of the tax system. We’re bold, we’ve got a vision for the future. Help us take the first really big step. Vote with your heart.
The Sun newspaper published short calls to action by leaders this morning and in his Mr Farage emphasised the plan he’s been talking about on the campaign trail, that the ambition is to take over the British government. He said: “this is just the start. Over the next five years I am serious about building a mass movement for real change.
“A vote for Reform UK is not a protest vote, it’s not a fantasy vote, it’s not a wasted vote. It’s a vote to change Britain for good.” Far from just being an election, Mr Farage said, it had become a referendum on “on the corrupt political establishment” and the “rotten two-party system”.