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Brexit leader Nigel Farage: 2016 was start of global populist revolution
British politician Nigel Farage heralded 2016 as the beginning of global populist revolution during a speech Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Md.
In a speech titled “Brexit and What it Means for the World,” Farage, the former leader of the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), said that future schoolchildren would study 2016 as the dawn of a new political era — ushered in by the so-called Brexit referendum in the U.K. and the election of President Trump in the U.S.
“When in years to come, the generations that follow us study the history of this period, there is one year that will stand out,” he said. “There is one year that every schoolchild will know, and that year is the year of 2016, because in 2016 we witnessed the beginning of a global political revolution and it’s one that is not going to stop. It’s one that is going to roll out across the rest of the free world.”
Farage, who has fought against Britain’s membership in the European Union for decades, said “politically corrupt rulers” had given away Britain’s independence and democracy for 40 years. But he argued that everything changed at 3 a.m. on June 24, 2016, when it was clear that the U.K. had voted to leave the EU.
“2016 was the year that the nation-state democracy made a comeback against the globalists and those who would wish to destroy everything that we have ever been,” he said.
Farage told the crowd that he’s felt a little more American with every visit to the U.S. since Trump’s victory. He said he’s always believed the British people should be free to govern their own country without EU interference and broker their own deals with their allies.
Farage was the leader of UKIP twice: from 2006 to 2009, and 2010 to 2016. The right-wing organization, which has similar values to the Trump administration on a variety of issues, has been criticized as fascist, racist and xenophobic. UKIP denies these accusations. Still, Farage’s speech suggests that he isn’t a major proponent of multicultural understanding, given that he said Britain’s real friends speak English.
“It’s funny, our real friends in the world speak English, have common law and stand by us in times of crisis,” he said.
Farage explicitly compared Brexit with Trump’s presidential campaign, noting that the establishment was aligned against their efforts. He expressed pride in campaigning for Trump in the U.S. and pointed to the Brexit victory to believe that there was still hope despite the polls that favored Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. It appears Trump also believed he could pull the same sort of political upset stateside, referring to himself last summer as “Mr. Brexit.”
“If you’ve endured abuse, if you’ve been called ‘deplorable,’ you’ve only had a few months of being abused — I’ve had 20 years of it!” he said.
Farage said his favorite moment of the election year was watching the stunned looks on the faces of CNN commentators as they realized Trump won the election.
The prominent Euro-skeptic criticized former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led the country’s Labour Party from 1994 to 2007, for having described the shift toward right-wing populism in 2016 as merely a blip on a long timeline.
Blair is active in the Open Britain campaign, which urges the British people to change their minds about Brexit. During a Feb. 17 speech in London, he said the will of the people should prevail but that the terms of Brexit were unclear at the time of the referendum.
“The people voted without knowledge of the true terms of Brexit. As these terms become clear, it is their right to change their mind,” Blair said. “Our mission is to persuade them to do so.”
At CPAC, Farage hit back: “He’s wrong because what happened in 2016 is not the end of this great global revolution. What happened in 2016 is the beginning of a great global revolution. This will roll out across the rest of the West.”
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