Nigel Farage is not the last voice in a field of British Eurosceptics, which is shrinking by the day. But he was the most relevant protagonist of that 2016 campaign, full of demagoguery and lies, that succeeded in persuading the majority of Britons to support Brexit. Because of this, Farage now understands that Brexit was a failure, and even if he blames the Tories for it, he has some poetic justice – or revenge – for all Britons who fought to survive.
What Brexit has shown, I fear, is that our politicians are as useless as the commissioners in Brussels. We managed this very badly, ”admitted the former famous politician and today he is commenting on a far-right channel such as GB news. “Brexit was a failure, we couldn’t deliver on what we promised, and Conservatives They have deeply disappointed us,” Farage ruled. Although he maintains that he will not return to the political scene – although he has not ruled it out entirely – after he succeeded in disrupting the Tories’ strategy and instilling fear in their leaders by threatening UKIP and later the Reform Party, the most skeptical of Europe is popular in the UK on the side of Boris Johnson, reluctant to let go of the front line and stop pressing the wreck.
Brexit was largely responsible for the UK economy lagging behind Western countries on the path to post-pandemic recovery. It has not yet returned to pre-COVID-19 levels, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development predicts a growth trajectory for the country that hardly resembles Russia. The Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility no longer use euphemisms or roundabout ways to blame Brexit for the economic downturn which will mean around 4% of GDP in the coming years. “We couldn’t benefit from Brexit, although we could have,” said Farage. “Theoretically, we took back control (take back control was the successful slogan of the referendum campaign), but we organize our companies with more enthusiasm than if we were members of the European Union. In this sense, Brexit was a failure.”
At the time, Farage championed the ultra-liberal vision of the UK’s secession from the European Union, which would have turned the country, and especially its capital London, into “Singapore on the banks of the Thames”, an expression then popularized by some Eurosceptics. Who adopted the idea of brutal liberalization of the economy. That prediction – which many Tories neither believed nor dared to put into practice – never came to pass and the border control promised by Brexiteers did not materialise, as evidenced by the recent irregular migrant crisis. Mode that reaches the shores of southern England.
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The spark that has brought hitherto silent Brexit zealots like Farage back into turmoil was Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to delay his promise to scrap all domestic legislation vested in nearly four decades of British law. The Repeal of the EU Legislation Act (REUL) is still pending in the House of Commons and there is not enough rebel to stop Sunak’s amendments. But his decision to maintain, for the time being, more than 3,000 of the 4,000 laws of society which he had promised to remove from the British legal framework, was interpreted by the most radical, like Farage, as an ultimate betrayal.
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It rained on the wet. Sunak’s gambit of negotiating with Brussels the so-called Windsor framework agreement, which put an end to the post-Brexit era conflict with the EU over the lace in Northern Ireland, has already won terrible acceptance among the most recalcitrant of the Eurosceptics. Their weight, increasingly diminished, was revealed when they voted against the text in the British Parliament and could barely add the 22 rejections. At his best, a hardline Eurosceptic could garner 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 advocate Brexit, which he considers successful in its final equilibrium.
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