Nigel Farage is back. The newly appointed leader of the Reform UK party has just announced his intention to run to be the MP for the Essex seaside town of Clacton – the only constituency to have ever elected an MP from Farage’s former party UKIP in a general election.
Farage announced his candidacy by making a speech from London, in which he lent heavily on the kind of rhetoric that mobilised millions of British people in support of Brexit. Farage has long emphasised immigration and the alleged incapacity of Labour and Tories to stop it.
He also made reference to other traditional populist motifs, including excessive taxation and soaring crime, claiming that in modern Britain “you can go shoplifting and nick up to 200 quid’s worth of kit before anyone is even going to prosecute you”.
