Farage: i will teach Starmer a lesson at the ballot box

Following repeated attacks from the Prime Minister and senior cabinet members over the last 72 hours, Nigel Farage gave his response from Reform HQ in London. 

Full transcript of Nigel Farage's address to the nation: 

Good afternoon. Well, the Labour Party conference is over, the second party conference of our governing Labour Party. A party that won the general election with a massive majority but finds itself just 14 months in, in very deep and in many ways deserved trouble.

It's been an extraordinary conference. I've been watching party conferences for half a century. Never before have I seen one name so dominate a conference, and the remarkable thing is it's somebody that isn't even a member of the Labour Party. Yes, it's me, Nigel Farage, and I thought the Matt cartoon on the front of today's Telegraph summed the whole thing up rather beautifully.

The sketch was two delegates leaving the Labour Party conference, one saying to the other, next year we're going to the Reform conference because they don't talk about Nigel Farage all the time.

It has been obsessive. Whether it's the Home Secretary, whether it's the Health Secretary, it's a constant attack on me and what I stand for and what we as Reform UK – a party that has led the opinion polls now for over 100 polls – it's an attack on everything that we stand for and believe in.

What I've learned this week is that the government are incapable of beating us on our arguments and as a result the Prime Minister has decided to descend into the gutter and all of his cabinet with him.

Let us be clear; Reform want illegal migrants deported from our country. As I speak, a further 400 have crossed the English Channel today. Reform want the benefits system to be for UK citizens, for British citizens only. Not for foreign-born nationals. Reform want foreign criminals removed from our country ASAP.

Labour says these policies are racist and immoral, and by implication Reform supporters, Reform voters, Reform sympathisers, are racists too. Yes, if you think we should control our borders you are, by the definition of the Prime Minister and his cabinet, all racists.

Now, I don't normally worry about abuse being thrown at me. I've gotten used to it over the course of the last few years. But to accuse countless millions of being racist is a very, very low blow. 

Why? Well, this language will incite and encourage the radical left. I'm thinking of Antifa and other organisations like that. It directly threatens the safety of our elected officials and our campaigners. And frankly, in the wake of the Charlie Kirk murder, I think this is an absolute disgrace.

I used to think the Prime Minister was a decent man. Somebody that I could talk to and chat to. We might disagree on worldview, but I thought he was a profoundly decent human being. 

I am completely shocked at his behaviour. I hope when he wakes up tomorrow morning he feels ashamed of what he has done. This is a desperate last throw of the dice from a Prime Minister who is in deep trouble. A Prime Minister who can't even command the support of half of his own party. But I am sorry to say I now believe that he is unfit to be the Prime Minister of our country.

His bizarre attempt this afternoon to invert patriotism and the love of flag is extraordinary. This is still the Labour Party of Gordon Brown. Remember, that ‘bigoted' woman who talks about mass immigration.

It's still the Labour Party of Emily Thornberry who thought the Cross of St George on a van in Rochester was something truly awful. It's a Labour Party that can never accept any sense of English identity even if it was more tolerant of Scottish or Irish or Welsh identity.

Starmer says I don't like or love this country. Well let me say this: for 30 years I've fought for British sovereignty. I've fought for us to be a self-governing nation. Why? Because I've always believed the best people to govern Britain were the British people themselves.

And him? He of course didn't like the vote. The greatest result, the biggest democratic mandate ever given in this country, when in 2016 we voted Brexit. He spent the next few years trying to overturn that result. He doesn't believe we should govern ourselves. He's happy, be it Brussels, be it the UN, be it a series of foreign courts, he's happy for us to be governed from there. He does not believe in Britain, he does not believe in the Britain that most of you out there believe in.

And his total level of denial over broken Britain is quite extraordinary. We all know the roads are clogged in a way they never were before. We all know you can't get a GP appointment. We all know that crime is out of control, so much so that here in London men don't wear watches, women don't wear jewellery, and don't get your mobile phone out otherwise somebody on a moped will take it.

Britain is broken and it needs fixing. And our vision for the future is the positive one. We believe that we can do it.

This Labour conference lacks any vision and we are going to continue, I'm sorry to say, in economic, social and cultural decline.

But Starmer is right about one thing. We are facing a big fork in the road. He is a human rights lawyer who will bow down to foreign courts and to outdated treaties, and he has no idea of the division that open borders have caused within our communities.

Or indeed the anger and the sense of unfairness that people feel over two-tier policing and two-tier justice under two-tier Keir.

What he and the rest don't understand, and the reason we're leading in the polls, is this country has had enough of a failing, gutless political class. It wants real change.

Now look, I'm not a vindictive person in any way at all. But Reform will teach Keir Starmer and the Labour Party a lesson next May. 

Next May are our equivalent of the midterms, when the whole of Wales, Scotland, London and many other parts of the country will go out to vote on the first Thursday in May.

We will teach Starmer a lesson next May that British political history will never forget.

I am now, as a result of this week and the abuse that has been heaped upon our supporters and our voters, more determined than ever. Don't underestimate that.