Nigel Farage has appeared to take a veiled swipe at Tory leader Kemi Badenoch ahead of an “exciting” opportunity for Reform UK in 2025.
Delivering his New Year’s message from Winston Churchill’s birthplace, Blenheim Palace, Farage hailed Reform UK’s breakthrough in the 2024 General Election and set out his plans for the future.
Speaking for nearly six minutes, the Clacton MP also addressed the economic challenges facing the UK and described the ongoing migrant crisis as an “outrage”.
He said: “I look back on 2024, a year that started with me in almost semi-retirement, not involved in active politics, approaching my 60th birthday with my first two grandchildren on the way, and I couldn’t help thinking about what this country had been, the values that it had represented, and what it was looking like today.
Nigel Farage delivering his New Year address
NIGEL FARAGE
“The fish rots from the head down. We have been appallingly led in this country now for several decades. We are in societal decline, we are in economical decline, most people are getting poorer with every year that passes.
“We are losing any sense of national identity and we are actually teaching kids at school that people like Winston Churchill, born in this palace, are bad people and that our country’s history is something to be ashamed of.
“It was also because I fought so hard and for so long for us to get back our independent: Brexit. Taking back control of our lives and to see that completely squandered by the Conservative Party, who frankly never believed in it but used it for electoral advantage in 2019, and almost knowing that Labour were going to win that I decided that something had to be done.
“I got back involved in politics, took the leadership of Reform UK and made one big promise. I said in that General Election, albeit with four weeks to go, we’d get millions of votes and we’d establish a bridgehead in Parliament. Well, that is what we have done, and I think everybody acknowledges we have made a real impact over the course of these last six months.
“Everything we do is based on values, and those values are around the things that matter to us family, community and country. They’re the things that got me back in politics, and we’re going to campaign for us to look at history in a different way, for our kids to be proud of who we are as a nation.
“We’re going to campaign for proper border controls. The fact that now 150,000 people, nearly all of them young men, have been able to catch dinghies across the English Channel and come into this country, frankly, is an outrage to everybody.
“But it isn’t just that. Legal migration. Look at 2023, a Conservative Party in power promising us that net migration would be tens of thousands a year and it was nearly one million.
“We’re going to campaign to reduce the cost of living. I promise you, the net zero plans put in place at the time of Theresa may, now being pursued by Ed Miliband in the most extraordinary way, will do nothing more than put up everybody’s bills and close down British manufacturing industry.
“We want to make this country prouder. We want to make our borders secure. We want to make our people better off. And that message is resonating. Over the course of Christmas, tens of thousands of people have joined Reform UK. And there is a buzz. There is an energy.
“There is an optimism. We’re not negative. Yes, we know the other lot made an absolute mess of it. That Labour and Conservative are virtually the uni-party. We believe we can turn this country around by 180 degrees and make Britain a much better place.
“But also on the world stage we think of Churchill, we think of what he meant in 1940, and the fact that we could extinguish, with our American colleagues, Nazism and, of course, Imperial Japan.
“Right now, the world is in a more dangerous place than it has been at any point in our lifetime. And I have to tell you, like his style or not, Donald Trump coming back as the American President is good news, not bad news.
“If history teaches us one thing, it’s that dictators and bad-guys only respect strength. And let’s face it, without America we are defenceless, so that relationship is crucial.
“I think what Reform offers for 2025 is exciting. I know it is because the other parties are going absolutely mad. They’re throwing accusations around that I have no doubt that’ll get tougher throughout the course of 2025. But we know what we believe in.
“But I want to say this to you: If you agree with what we’re trying to do, don’t just sit back and nod. Do something about it. Join those 150,000 people who’ve already joined our party, because I promise you this, the only way we win, the only way we mend broken Britain, the only way we get Reform in our country that so badly needs it, is if you who agree with us join our People’s Army.
“So make it your New Year’s resolution. Join Reform UK. Join the fightback. Let’s make Britain great again. Happy New Year.
