Nigel Farage is not the last voice in a field, that of British Eurosceptics, which is shrinking by the day. But he was the most relevant protagonist in that 2016 campaign, riddled with demagogy and lies, which managed to convince a majority of Britons to support the United Kingdom’s departure from the EU. Therefore, that Farage now recognizes that Brexit has been a failure, even if he blames it on the Conservative Party, he has some poetic justice – or revenge – for all the British who fought for permanence.
“What Brexit has shown, I fear, is that our politicians are as useless as the commissioners in Brussels. We have managed this matter absolutely badly”, has admitted the popular ex-politician and today a commentator on a far-right channel such as GB News. “Brexit has been a failure, we have not been able to deliver what we promised, and the tories They have disappointed us deeply ”, Farage has sentenced. Despite the fact that he assures that he will not return to the political scene -although he has not ruled it out entirely-, after having managed to disrupt the strategy of the conservatives and instill fear in their leaders with the threat of UKIP and after the Reform Party, the most popular eurosceptic in the United Kingdom along with Boris Johnson, is reluctant to abandon the front line and stop squeezing the wreckage.
Brexit has been largely to blame for the UK economy trailing behind Western countries on its post-pandemic recovery path. It has not yet returned to pre-COVID-19 levels, and the OECD forecasts a growth path for the country barely similar to Russia’s. The Bank of England and the Office for Budgetary Responsibility no longer use euphemisms or roundabout ways to blame Brexit for an economic decline that will mean about 4% of GDP in the coming years. “We have not been able to benefit from Brexit, even though we could have,” Farage said. “In theory, we have regained control (take back control was the successful slogan of the referendum campaign), but we are regulating our companies with more zeal than if we were members of the EU. In that sense, Brexit has been a failure ”, he has said.
At the time, Farage defended an ultraliberal vision of the United Kingdom’s divorce from the EU, which would have turned the country, and especially its capital, London, into a “Singapore on the banks of the Thames”, an expression that was then popularized by some Eurosceptics and which he entertained the idea of savage deregulation of the economy. Neither did that prediction come about —in which many conservatives neither believed nor dared to put it into practice—, nor was the control of the borders promised by the defenders of Brexit achieved, as has been shown by the recent crisis of immigrants in an irregular situation that come to the shores of southern England.
Sunak’s Challenge
The spark that has brought hitherto silent Brexit fanatics like Farage back to making noise has been Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to delay his promise to expel from British law all acquis communautaire legislation introduced during almost four decades. The Removal of Retained EU Legislation Act (REUL) is still pending in the House of Commons, and there are not enough rebels to stop Sunak’s amendments. But his decision to maintain, for the moment, more than 3,000 of the 4,000 community laws that he had promised to remove from the British legal framework has been interpreted by the most radical, such as Farage, as the ultimate betrayal.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
subscribe
It rained on wet. Sunak’s maneuver to negotiate with Brussels the so-called Windsor Framework Agreement, which put an end to the conflict with the EU over the Northern Ireland lace in the post-Brexit era, has already had a terrible reception among the most recalcitrant eurosceptics. Their weight, increasingly diminished, was revealed when they voted against the text in the British Parliament and barely managed to add 22 rejections. At his best, the Eurosceptic hard-liner could muster more than a hundred votes among Conservative MPs.
Sunak’s spokesman limited himself to denying Farage’s pessimistic statements and recalling that the prime minister was one of the first to defend Brexit, which he considers to have been a success in its final balance.
Follow all the international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.
#Nigel #Farage #main #pusher #Brexit #admits #failure