Memory is a funny old thing. With the passing of time, it often has us remembering events in a totally different light, tricking us into believing occurrences which didn’t happen quite as we think they did or in fact didn’t happen at all.
Anyway, to ensure I wasn’t somehow deliberately deceiving myself, I checked back on news footage from the period and, yes, apparently I was right. On June 23, 2016, I along with 17,410,741 others elected to leave the European Union. Furthermore, there was Nigel Farage, Ukip’s former leader, victoriously proclaiming that this was a date which would go down in history as our Independence Day,
Unfortunately, his bold proclamation is yet to materialise. Worse still, we’re about to go to the polls to vote to send 73 MEPs scurrying back to Strasbourg. This is surely a case of rats returning to a sinking ship.
In what could almost be billed as a boxing grudge rematch to rival that of Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazier, these elections will ironically end up being the People’s Vote many are presently clamouring for. Out of interest, do you know what the turnout was for the last European elections in 2014? Let me enlighten you. It was 35.6%. Needless to say, this time around, it’s destined to be a lot higher. Potentially even greater than the 72.2% who felt compelled to get off their normal: “Oh, I can’t be bothered” electoral backsides to vote in the referendum three years ago.
Echoing Churchill’s time in the wilderness, Farage is back and on a roll. If every dog has its day, then this is surely his. Seldom has there been a more tenacious parliamentary terrier. With the Brexit bone firmly clamped between his jaws, woe betide anyone who tries to prise it away from him. As the head of the Brexit Party, he is now firmly off the leash and bolting for the ballot box.
And for someone who has thus far failed to become a Member of Parliament a staggering seven times, might he soon be about to go one better and become Britain’s next prime minister?
In my opinion, here are 10 reasons why Nigel Farage and his merry band of Brexiteers could, before the year’s out, find themselves as the latest inhabitants of Number 10.
1. There will never be any form of cross-party unity to achieve a Brexit resolution. Disagreement is practically the only thing anyone can agree on.
2. The European Elections will simply end up delivering the biggest protest vote our nation has ever witnessed, only further increasing the stalemate in the Commons.
3. The only way out of this stalemate will be to have a general election prior to the final October 31 EU deadline.
4. Voters are worn down by the internal bickering and pointless squabbling of the main parties. They feel betrayed by both Labour and the Tories in equal measure.
5. There’s no natural successor to Theresa May. All of the likely candidates are similarly tainted by the recent shenanigans. Whoever replaces her will automatically be blamed for consigning the Conservatives to a generation in opposition.
6. Jeremy Corbyn is unquestionably desperate enough to be Prime Minister, but are the public desperate enough to vote him in? It seems doubtful.
7. Britain will never buy his or anyone else’s brand of left-wing socialism. After all, if voters genuinely wanted a return to strikes, the three-day week and power cuts, then they’d hop into their poorly built British Leyland Austin Allegro and go back to the future to 1974.
8. The UK is ready for a change, but it isn’t Change UK, which at its heart doesn’t represent any kind of change whatsoever. Instead, it’s sadly more of the same from the same failed politicians. And if that’s what people are after, they can always choose the Liberal Democrats.
9. Farage is a revolutionary at his core; a charismatic powerhouse who speaks for and engages with the masses in a way only true revolutionaries can, but career politicians can’t. In essence, he is a capitalist Che Guevara, only with a different taste in headgear. Mark my words, in the future, it will be Nigel and his trilby adorning the walls of student radicals.
10. Joining the ranks of the Brexit Party, there’s already the slightly odd bedfellows of Anne Widdecombe, George Galloway and Annunziata Rees-Mogg. Who knows if and when big brother will follow her.
Love or loathe Farage, he and his party are certainly shaking things up and should you decide to vote for them in any upcoming election, you definitely won’t be alone. Indeed, not since the heyday of the Monster Raving Loony Party has British politics suddenly made more (or less) sense.