Farage just gave the most disgraceful sermon of his entire career

Nigel Farage gave a chilling speech to City of London bigwigs on Monday 3 November, in which he laid out his and Reform’s ‘vision’ for Britain. It should strike fear into the hearts of ordinary people, no matter where they live or what ethnicity they are.

Another day, another horrendous Farage speech

The speech started with Farage harking back to his stockbroker days when, he reckons, you only got to work in the City moving money around and betting on stock prices if you were ‘good enough’.

The fact that the City and its fellow financial centres around the world caused the 2008 financial crash and the ‘Great Recession’ that followed it was conveniently airbrushed out – as were reports that Farage himself was reportedly a pretty awful stockbroker who managed to bust at least one company, Farage Futures.

That minor amusement aside, Farage claimed this morning that the stock market is over-regulated – again leaving out that the ‘light touch’ regulation of the Blair-Brown governments and the Tories that preceded them had played a huge role in the crash – and should be allowed to do its thing with minimal safeguards in place.

Scapegoating

It wouldn’t, of course, be a Farage speech without an attack on refugees.

Farage managed, with a straight face, to say both that UK GDP has only risen because of immigration and that migration has “made the average Briton poorer”. He had no shame about quoting a supposed £200bn cost of benefits for refugees given permanent leave to remain – a made-up figure that even the far-right Daily Mail and the ‘think-tank’ that came up with it withdrew because it was so dodgy.

This, along with ‘poor productivity’, is magically somehow the fault of immigrants, not of exploitative employers – no, they need to be protected as we’ll shortly see – and crap wages, which are somehow too high as well as being too low.

But Farage is more than just racist – he has his sights set on all ordinary people and he admits that he is targeting poor people because he wants to protect the poor ol’ rich folk. And not just rich folk generally, but foreign rich folk particularly.

Laced with irony

Ironically for the hate-inciter in chief, old Nige thinks it’s just awful that foreign billionaires may have to pay tax under changes to ‘non-domicile’ rules under which they could live in the UK but not pay tax on the massive wealth they keep outside the UK, so he promised to reverse all that sharpish, along with huge tax cuts so the native-born filthy rich don’t feel like they’re missing out.

Meanwhile, Farage has the British people he claims to want to protect squarely in his crosshairs. Employment rights to protect Brits at work? They get in the way of the thrusting wealth creators so they’ll be out of the window. Minimum wage – already grossly inadequate but at least some level of defence against exploitation? Nope, that’s also a bar to business freedom, so into the shredder it goes.

Energy prices we’re all forced to pay are too high, not because of privatisation and corporate greed gouging customers to fatten the shareholders Farage loves – he made explicitly clear he wants more private industry running everything – but for ‘ideological reasons’.

Bankers

Bankers didn’t cause the crash –  no, they’re the greatest asset Britain has – and we don’t need diversity in the finance industry, nothing wrong with the good ol’ boy, old-school-tie network Farage worked in during the 1980s. Nor do we need those pesky ‘EU’ directives against money laundering – “proliferating” Turkish barbers and hand car washes are Britain’s real problem, along with the apparently pointless push to save the environment.

More banking ‘innovation’ is what’s needed, ‘cryptocurrencies’ are the solution to our ills – Can anyone say ‘Trumpcoin’? – and we should be drilling for more oil and gas everywhere we can. And Farage admits he’ll be slashing the public sector and looking at public sector pensions as an opportunity to ‘save’, presumably with a Reeves-like pension grab for his mates in the finance sector.

The benefits bill isn’t too high because greedy employers aren’t paying decent wages and the inequality of our society is making so many people physically and mentally ill, but because doctors are exaggerating people’s ‘mild anxiety’ and a Farage government would soon put a stop to all that nonsense of medical experts deciding who’s too sick to work, but by political appointees. Not too different from the Tories or Starmer in that regard, are you, Nige mate?

Farage must be stopped

Some lowlights of Farage’s billionaire-nosing speech are below, but if you’re short of time here’s the unsurprising summary: if you’re sick, disabled, poor, have mental health issues, care for a sick family member, have children but aren’t part of a couple that both works, have more melanin in your skin, or generally think human rights are important at work and in society as a whole, Farage and his fascist cronies are poison.

It’s easy to say ‘be very afraid’, but fear won’t stop the fascists. Instead, organise, communicate, and work together to defeat them.

Featured image via the Canary