Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher would be both nodding in approval.
UKIP chief Nigel Farage insists, as he visits America and warns that ‘if the Republican Party sticks with the establishment it will LOSE’
- Farage spoke with Daily Mail Online after a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference
- The UK Independence Party leader tried to buck up American right-wingers who see their tea party goals dissolving in a sea of centrist Republicanism
- He insisted that UKIP is ‘not just retired half-colonels who’ve always voted Conservative … We’re dragging them from across the spectrum’
- Bashed David Cameron for refusing to publicly identify ISIS executioner ‘Jihadi John,’ saying ‘we should have heard it weeks ago’
- Complained about ‘politically correct’ groups like CAGE ‘saying and shouting things that if you and I did them, we’d find ourselves behind bars’
- Farage addressed controversies involving Richard Crouch and Rozanne Duncan, admitting: ‘Yes, we get people who say stupid things in UKIP’
Nigel Farage warned Thursday night in America that the U.S. Republican party will become a dinosaur – not an elephant – if it continues to embrace the political center.
‘I suspect that if the Republican Party sticks with the establishment it will lose,’ he told Daily Mail Online after a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference.
The GOP ‘has got to reach the Hispanic community, but it’s also got to reach that blue-collar community that Reagan got to vote for him in huge numbers. I’m not sure at the moment that they’re positioning themselves to do that.’
CPAC is an annual three-day mecca for constitutional evangelists, anti-Obamacare shock troops, full-throated abortion opponents and gun rights activists. Many of them think the Republican Party is only slightly less liberal and nanny-statist than the president.
Farage fit right in, keeping backstage handlers waiting for his appointment to test a lapel microphone while he smoked a cigar in the cold, outside the Maryland resort hotel where more than a thousand stayed into the dinner hour to hear him.
‘I think the Republican Party is going through the same crisis of identity as the Conservative Party in Britain,’ he said in an interview backstage.
The British political contrarian, long at the helm of the UK Independence Party, plied the conservative audience with a dry-witted vision of how his political travails could show disaffected American right-wingers the way forward.
UKIP, he boasted, is ‘an insurgent political force that has taken on the political establishment and rocked them to the backs of their heels.’
But don’t confuse him with the tea party, he said after the applause ended.
‘We’re not the tea party,’ Farage insisted one-on-one. ‘Our job is not to influence one political party. We’re not an outlier from the Tories.’
And unlike the tea party phenomenon, which peels off disaffected Republicans who believe their traditional party has moved too far left, he said, his group ‘is not just retired half-colonels who’ve always voted Conservative and now they’re UKIP. We’re dragging them from across the spectrum.’
Farage’s rhetoric about immigration, Britain’s Judeo-Christian foundation, political correctness and regulation run amok made up a song he sang to a crowd that had already memorized the verses.
‘If you discuss immigration, it means you’re a bad person,’ he complained – ‘that you harbor dislike or hatred or prejudice of somebody else.’
