Nigel Farage has launched his general election campaign by saying his Brexit party will contest every seat in the country unless Boris Johnson agrees to drop his deal with the EU and sign up to a “leave alliance”.
The former Ukip leader also praised the US president, Donald Trump, for his intervention in which he suggested the prime minister and the Brexit party should form a partnership and claimed some government ministers have discussed his offer of a pact with him.
At the launch in central London on Friday, Farage said his message for the prime minister was: “Drop the deal because it’s not Brexit. Drop the deal because as these weeks go by and people realise what you’ve signed up to … people will not like it.
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“Simply, it is not Brexit. What we’re doing here is kicking the can down the road.”
He said Johnson’s deal would not “get Brexit done”. Rather, it would “lead to a campaign in which people will say: ‘We have no voice, no vote, no veto.’ It will lead to a campaign for us to rejoin [the EU].”
But the Tory chairman, James Cleverly, rejected Farage’s overture, saying he would split the pro-Brexit vote.
He said: “A vote for Farage risks letting Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street via the back door, and the country spending 2020 having two referendums on Brexit and Scottish independence. It will not get Brexit done and it will create another gridlocked parliament that doesn’t work.”
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Farage said the Brexit party wanted a “clean Brexit”, essentially a form of no deal whereby the country would move on to World Trade Organization terms until it negotiated free-trade agreements with the EU.
He said he was ready to put up candidates in 650 seats but was open to negotiation and has given Johnson until 14 November to take up his offer that Brexit party MPs will stand down in some seats in return for a clear shot at Labour heartland constituencies. He said there were 150 seats that the Brexit party could win in northern England, Wales, Midlands and potentially east London – areas the Tories traditionally cannot reach.
Asked what the benefit would be for a Labour voter of WTO terms and free trade deals and the deregulation that comes with it, he said: “Cheaper food, cheaper bras, cheaper shows, cheaper everything – 12,500 everyday household goods that we buy – everything from underwear to shoes to food that are tariffed because of the common external tariff and our membership of the European Union.”
Much of his campaign launch speech argued that Johnson’s deal was not a “true Brexit” because of what he claimed was the continued regulatory alignment with the EU, three further years of negotiation and abiding by terms set out by Michael Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator.
A delay to Brexit was also preferable over Johnson’s deal, Farage suggested, saying the prime minister should decide to back a genuine free-trade deal such as the Canadian model, with no political ties, and give a 1 July deadline to the EU for this to be accepted.
Failing that, he said he and Johnson could go to the World Trade Organization in Geneva and say they were going to leave on terms as set out in article 24 of the general agreement on tariffs and trade(Gatt) and until free-trade deals could be struck.
Farage criticised the “broken promises” of all politicians and reserved some of his most stinging criticism for Jeremy Corbyn’s party, in a sign the Brexit party is ramping up its campaign against Labour’s remain-backing MPs in leave areas.
He was joined on stage by the former communist Claire Fox, now a Brexit party MEP, and the former long-standing Tory Ann Widdecombe, who also sits in the European parliament for the party.
The Brexit party chairman, Richard Tice, spoke first at the event, listing the party’s five areas of reform beyond Brexit, including abolishing the House of Lords and the potential for a written constitution.
He said the party would invest £100bn in the regions “left behind” and this would be paid for by scrapping the HS2 rail project. It would also scrap business rates for small businesses to “bring life back into our high streets”.
Tice hit out at those who changed political parties, in reference to the raft of defections from Labour and the Tories to Change UK and to the Liberal Democrats.
Widdecombe said the UK now had “rotten politics” and standards needed to be re-established in parliament.
On her defection from the Conservative party, she said: “I have lost any confidence I may ever have had that here was a party striving for the public good.”
Fox, who represents north-west England, said the “tragedy of Brexit” was that despite there having been a public vote for change, it had been overtaken by a technocratic parliament.
She described the Tories’ targeting of “Workington man” – a non-university-educated man, aged over 45, who voted leave – as their key demographic as insulting.
After a lack of investment in the north, she claimed, the idea they could “rock up to northern heartlands” and proclaim themselves the real party of Brexit with “trinkets” of policies was deeply cynical.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/01/farage-to-johnson-join-forces-or-brexit-party-will-contest-every-seat