On May 23, two months after the country was scheduled to leave the EU, the UK will take part in the European elections unless Britain negotiates a Brexit deal before May 22. Britain’s two main parties are facing serious competition from brand new and much smaller Europhobic and Europhilic parties led by prominent politicians who are trying to capitalise on the poor state of support for the Conservative and Labour parties. YouGov has found that only 63 percent of people support either of the two main parties, down from 80 percent as recently as December.
Eleven Labour and Conservative MPs formed an anti-Brexit party called Change UK, and former UKIP leader Nigel Farage launched the Brexit Party to “start the fightback” against an establishment that has “will-fully betrayed our trust.” Both groups have promised to introduce a new kind of politics: Change UK’s slogan is ‘Politics is broken. Let’s change it,’ while the Brexit Party’s website repeatedly features the slogan ‘Change politics for good.’
Despite the party being its in infancy, an opinion poll published by YouGov put Farage’s new party in first place in next months elections. The party is on 27 percent, ahead of Labour on 22 percent, and the Conservatives on 15 percent. Sky News reports that its findings “will heighten fears in Downing Street that the Tories are on course for a damaging defeat that will likely reignite calls for Theresa May to resign”. While The Guardian says that the polling “shows that a significant chunk of voters who backed the Conservatives in 2017 are dissatisfied with the direction the party is heading on Brexit”.
WHAT IS THE BREXIT PARTY AND WHAT IS ITS PURPOSE?
The Brexit Party formally launched on April 12 and is led by Ex-UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who is proud to be referred to as “Mr Brexit”. Farage was one of the most prominent and instrumental figures of the leave campaign and so it is unsurprising that he is leading a party that revolves around the Brexit issue and exists to defend it. Farage and many other leavers feel betrayed by the current conservative government and believe that their delays and tactics go against the will of the people. “What we have seen over the last few weeks is the willful betrayal of the largest democratic exercise in the history of this nation,” he told the audience during the launch event of his new party in Coventry.
The launch of the party comes after Prime Minister Theresa May agreed on a Brexit delay to 31 October with the EU, with the option of leaving earlier if her withdrawal agreement is approved by Parliament. Farage had previously promised that if MPs “kick the can down the road” by extending Article 50 “then logically we would have to fight the European elections and I would certainly stand in them in those circumstances”. MP’s considering such a move “need to be aware there could be a very serious electoral threat to them”, he warned.
The Brexit party has nine MEPs - all of whom are UKIP defectors - making them the third biggest UK party in the European Parliament. This puts them ahead of the party that they left which is now the fourth biggest party. The Brexit party have a new batch of MEPs running and looking to gain more seats for the party. Farage said the Party had an "impressive list" of 70 candidates for the elections. Among those revealed at the launch was Annunziata Rees-Mogg, sister of leading Conservative Brexiteer MP Jacob Rees-Mogg.
The Brexit party aims to change politics and claims to represent people that aren’t currently being represented. “This party is not here just to fight the European elections... this party is not just to express our anger - May 23 is the first step of the Brexit Party. We will change politics for good,” Farage said.
"Yes I'm angry but this is not a negative emotion, this is a positive emotion. I said I wanted to cause an earthquake in politics... but now we will achieve a democratic revolution in politics."
The EU elections tend to be used as protest votes against the main parties if they are unpopular. This, along with the proportional representational system used to elect MEPs, allows smaller parties to do a lot better than they do in the UK parliamentary elections. In the 2014 EU elections, Farage’s old party, UKIP, won more seats than any other party, yet they have never had more than two MPs in the UK parliament at the same time. This marked the first time the Conservatives or Labour hadn’t topped the ballot in a nationwide election since 1906.
Farage promised that the Brexit Party would be "deeply intolerant of all intolerance" and would represent a cross-section of society. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "In terms of policy, there's no difference (to UKIP), but in terms of personnel there is a vast difference.
"UKIP did struggle to get enough good people into it but unfortunately what it's chosen to do is allow the far right to join it and take it over and I'm afraid the brand is now tarnished."
“OUR TWO PARTY SYSTEM IS SHATTERED”
Farage says that the British public no longer identifies along party lines and are now increasingly affiliating themselves with Leave and Remain camps instead. He, therefore, believes that a Brexit party would draw “support from across the entire spectrum.” Farage revealed on April 20 that 60,000 people have become paid supporters raising a grand total of £1.5million
In an article published in the Daily Telegraph, Farage explained that the current democratic system is broken and that our representatives in Parliament do not represent the people who elected them on the matter of Brexit. He said that the main political parties had underestimated the extent of voters’ anger over the failure to leave the European Union. He added: “A lot of Conservatives are disgusted with what the party has done.”
“Our two-party system is shattered. It must be put out of its misery. The electorate has the power to effect this desperately needed change if it acts now”, he wrote.
During a rally on Sunday attended by around 700 activists, the party leader launched a fresh attack on the dominant two-party establishment, and said: “Our intention is to fight these European elections and our intention is to win these European elections.”
"We have not formed this party just to protest, just to stick two fingers up to the establishment on May 23, just to get our own back and tell them what we think of them.
"No, our ambitions are much, much higher than that. I think it's obvious that our two-party system simply doesn't work any more,” he said.
According to two surveys, Conservative members and activists are likely to abandon the party in vast numbers in the European elections in favour of the Brexit party. The survey by leading Conservative party website ConvervativeHome found that more than 60 percent of Conservative Party members will vote for Nigel Farage’s party in the European elections. ConservativeHome regularly publishes surveys of what party members think that in the past have served as broadly accurate guides to how members end up voting in internal elections, but Paul Goodman, a former Tory MP and the editor of ConservativeHome, said the results released on Sunday were “the most astonishing we have ever published”.
He said that there are four reasons why almost two-thirds of the members were willing to abandon their party: “sheer anger” at the Brexit delay; a belief that the European elections do not matter; a sense that voting for the Brexit party is respectable because it is less extreme than UKIP; and the hope that a terrible result could prompt May to resign.
A similar poll of Conservative councillors by Survation for the Mail on Sunday showed that 40 percent of Tory councillors also planned to back their rivals. Researchers were bombarded with vitriolic remarks including: “The Conservative Party is dead. It will take a strong leader to dredge it out of the mud.”
Another councillor said: “For God's sake get on with it [Brexit] - it is killing us on the doorstep.”
Many Tories are likely to point to the latest polling as fresh evidence for why May should resign and allow the party to elect a new leader.
It’s not just the Tory party that are feeling under threat from Farage’s Brexit party. In an extraordinary intervention that exposes the tensions at the top of the party over its Brexit strategy, the Labour party’s deputy leader Tom Watson warned that Labour will lose to Farage’s new “far right” Brexit party in May’s elections if it continues to give the impression that “we half agree with him” and called for a more enthusiastic backing to a second referendum by his party.
“We cannot just sit back, watch this fight on the far right, and allow Farage to prosper with a backward-looking brand of politics that offers no solutions. Instead, we must offer a radical alternative based on our values that speaks directly to the people we represent and demonstrate Labour as a way forward out of the crisis,” he wrote in the Observer.
With the traditional two-party system in deadlock over Brexit and new political forces emerging to challenge the status quo, the first battleground for profound changes in British politics looks likely to be the European elections next month.
