Farage confounds Cameron’s claims he led a party of ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’

LONDON: Britain’s vote to leave the EU is a triumph for Nigel Farage, the abrasive anti- immigration politician who tapped into a deep well of popular anger that rivals failed to understand.

“The EU is failing, the EU is dying. I hope we’ve knocked the first brick out of the wall. I hope this is the first step towards a Europe of sovereign nation states,” he said yesterday.

The result had been achieved “without a single bullet being fired”, he said, a comment that drew accusations of insensitivity after the shooting of pro-EU MP Jo Cox last week.

A triumphant Farage said yesterday: “It’s a victory for ordinary people, decent people. It’s a victory against the big merchant banks, against the big businesses and against big politics.”

Farage languished for years on the fringes of British pol- itics. A member of the European Parliament since 1999, he was best known for trying to disrupt it from within.

So marginal was he considered that in 2006 David Cameron, then leader of the Conservative opposition, dismissed Ukip supporters as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly”.

But Farage, always ready to talk about immigration in blunter terms than other politicians, reached neglected parts of the electorate.

“People here (in London) don’t understand,” Farage said yesterday, speaking outside the Houses of Parliament. “They’re too wealthy, they don’t get what open-door, mass immigration as a result of EU membership has done to people’s wages, to people’s availability of getting doctors’ appointments, or their kids into local schools. This was the issue ultimately that won this election.”

Rob Ford, professor of political science at Manchester Uni- versity, said Farage had tapped into deep disenchantment with politics among people who felt left behind by Britain’s globalised economy.

“In terms of the impact he’s going to have on Britain and its place in the world, he’s more significant than most prime ministers have been.”

Farage, who went to a prestigious private school and later worked as a commodities trader, has been called hypocritical for presenting himself as a man of the people.

But Ford pointed out that the fact Farage left school at 16 and didn’t go to university set him apart from almost all other significant British politicians.

“There was something about his manner and way of thinking... that completely resonated with non-graduates at a time when they feel that their entire lives are being run by the know-it-alls, the elites.

“He waved the flag, he went down to the pub, he didn’t like immigration, he was their man. Simple as that.”

Farage was a key factor in bringing about the Brexit.

In 2013, with Cameron in Downing Street and Ukip looking like an electoral threat, Cameron promised a referendum on the EU in an attempt to defuse internal party tensions and neuter Farage.

This strategy looked good after the Conservatives won a parliamentary election in May 2015.

Ukip won 4 million votes but got only one parliamentary seat. Farage failed to win the seat he was contesting.

During the referendum campaign, he was marginalised by the official Vote Leave campaign who deemed him divisive.

But voters sided with him. Yesterday shortly after Cameron announced his resignation, an ecstatic Farage tweeted: “It’s right that David Cameron has gone. Not a bad man just on the wrong side of the argument.” – Reuters