Farage accused of incitement after ‘fear of God’ comments
▶ Leader of the UK’s new Brexit Party criticised for choice of words after 2015 murder of Labour MP
Nigel Farage, one of the leaders of Britain’s campaign to leave the EU, launched a new party promising to put “the fear of God” into politicians he accused of betraying the UK’s decision to quit the bloc.
In the central English city of Coventry on Friday, Mr Farage told supporters his Brexit Party would field an impressive team in next month’s European Parliament elections.
After Prime Minister Theresa May secured another delay to Brexit in Brussels last week, parties are now preparing for the European elections, despite the government’s insistence that Britain could still leave the bloc without having to take part.
But, with MPs emphatically rejecting Mrs May’s deal to leave the EU three times, most parties suspect they will have to take part in the elections on May 23 – which could become a rerun, albeit on a smaller scale, of Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum.
“I’m doing this because ... I did actually, rather stupidly, for a moment believe that we’d won,” Mr Farage said, taking aim at those who campaigned to stay in the EU.
“But it became clear pretty early on ... that our Remainer parliament, our Remainer cabinet and indeed our Remainer prime minister were going to do their utmost to delay, dilute and in many occasions to actually stop and overturn Brexit.”
He said his new party had raised more than £750,000 (Dh3.6 million) in the first 10 days of its existence and was attracting a pool of leading business people to represent it.
One of his backers was Annunziata Rees-Mogg, sister of leading Eurosceptic Conservative politician Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has campaigned for a break with the EU.
“We have seen over the course of the last few weeks the betrayal, wilful betrayal, of the greatest democratic exercise in the history of this nation,” Mr Farage said, vowing there would be “no more Mr Nice Guy” in what he described as a fightback against parliament.
“We can win these European elections and we can again start to put the fear of God into our members of parliament in Westminster. They deserve nothing less than that after the way they’ve treated us over this betrayal.”
However, some criticised his choice of words, saying that it amounted to an incitement to violence at an already intensely polarising time in the UK.
MPs on both sides of the Brexit debate have faced death threats and a barrage of abuse. Many linked Mr Farage’s words with the murder of MP Jo Cox in 2015 by a man with links to a US far-right group.
Mr Farage’s Ukip party has lurched to the far right since he stepped down as leader in 2016.
It has lost ground as it became embroiled in a series of crises under a succession of short-lived leaders – one serving just 18 days in the post.
The party’s only member of parliament, Douglas Carswell, left the party in 2017 to sit as an independent and in the 2017 local election, the party lost all 145 seats it had been defending.
The sharp decline of the party’s favour after the UK referendum on EU membership led Ukip leaders to debate whether it should be disbanded.