10 years on, Farage says Westminster never intended to deliver Brexit

Nigel Farage has claimed that the Westminster establishment never intended to deliver Brexit, in an essay marking the tenth anniversary of the 2016 referendum.

The Reform UK leader published the piece on his Substack on Tuesday (23 June), ten years to the day after the vote to leave the European Union. Farage wrote that the two-party system proved unwilling to accept the result or implement it as voters wanted, and argued that the country had passed through six Prime Ministers in seven years as a consequence.

He said he had personally seen off four of them, naming David Cameron, Theresa May, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, and predicted a seventh within months. He added that if Andy Burnham heeded his demand for an early general election, the country would be on its eighth shortly afterwards.

Farage said the collapse of the voting blocs that sustained what he termed the “uniparty consensus” was a direct result of that betrayal.

He pointed to the Red Wall, which he said had turned Conservative as voters sought to deliver Brexit, returned to Labour in punishment for Tory failures, and had since backed Reform UK in two consecutive sets of local elections.

Negotiations and delay

Much of the essay focused on the period after the referendum. Farage characterised Theresa May’s negotiations with the EU as one-sided, claiming the bloc’s negotiator Michel Barnier had outmanoeuvred her.

He said the EU had used Northern Ireland’s place in the Union as leverage and had sought £39 billion, while May signed up to a backstop arrangement and a continuing role for the European Court of Justice.

Farage wrote that May had promised 108 times that the UK would leave on 29 March 2019. He recounted the series of indicative votes in the Commons, the rejection of May’s deal, and the role of then-Speaker John Bercow, whom he accused of bending parliamentary rules to frustrate a no-deal exit.

He described his return to frontline politics through the Brexit Party, which he said won more than 30% of the vote at the 2019 European elections to become the largest single national party in the European Parliament.

Farage said he stood down candidates in the 317 seats the Conservatives had won in 2017, a decision he attributed to principle rather than gain.

Immigration and Reform’s pledges

Farage said the most significant betrayal of the Brexit vote was on immigration.

He cited net migration of 944,000 in a single year and total immigration of 1.2 million, and said 3.8 million long-term visas had been issued in three and a half years, with just 17% of arrivals on work visas.

He set out Reform UK’s position, including a pledge to abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain and replace it with a five-year renewable visa carrying no access to welfare or social housing, alongside higher salary thresholds.

Farage said a Reform government would remove the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights under a policy he called Operation Restoring Justice, and would review and revoke the status of those granted asylum who had arrived illegally.

Energy, fishing and regulation

On energy, Farage claimed British businesses now paid almost twice as much as their French counterparts and described Net Zero as a domestic policy choice rather than one imposed by Brussels.

He said a Reform government would abandon Net Zero targets and expand North Sea oil and gas extraction.

Farage accused Starmer of signing over British fishing waters for a twelve-year span in exchange for accepting EU agricultural regulations.

He also said the previous Conservative government had scrapped only around 700 of more than 5,000 retained EU laws, citing what he called the failure of the Retained EU Law Bill under former Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch.

He concluded that Reform UK was the only party willing to remove EU regulation from the statute book, claiming Brussels had demanded a “Farage clause” in its talks with Labour as a safeguard against a future Reform government.

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