Nigel Farage MP: speeches

Speeches

• 13 Nov 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Q9. I am sure the Prime Minister and the whole House would wish to congratulate Donald Trump on his landslide victory last week— [ Interruption. ]

• 13 Nov 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mr Speaker. Within a couple of days we had learned of a third assassination attempt. Charges have been laid, and behind it is Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Has the time not come to proscribe what is so obviously a terrorist organisation, and in doing so, not just do the right thing, but perhaps mend some fences between this Government and the incoming presidency of Donald Trump, given that the whole of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet have been so rude about him over the last few years?

• 13 Nov 2024 · Chagos Islands · Hansard source

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  (Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs if he will make a statement on the transfer of sovereignty of the Chagos islands to Mauritius.

• 13 Nov 2024 · Chagos Islands · Hansard source

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  Mauritius has no legal or historical claim to sovereignty over a group of islands that are 1,300 miles away from it, and the opinion of the International Court of Justice was purely advisory. There is no legal reason why we have to do any of this. I warned the Foreign Secretary six weeks ago in this Chamber that it was an enormous mistake to do this, given that we had a US presidential election coming up on 5 November. Ministers might say to me, “It’s okay—the United States is fully in favour.” Really? I can tell the House that the incoming national security adviser Mike Waltz has form on this, going right back to when the right hon. Member for Braintree (Mr Cleverly) was doing his best to give away the sovereignty of the Chagos islands; indeed, Mike Waltz wrote to Secretary of State Blinken at the time. I assure the House, having been in America last week and knowing the incoming US Defence Secretary very well, that there is outright hostility towards this deal. Whatever is said about a lease agreement, these agreements can very easily be broken, as we saw with Hong Kong. Diego Garcia was described to me by a senior Trump adviser as the most important island on the planet for America, so the Minister will find outright hostility. By the way, what happened to the Chagossian people was truly awful, but they are unanimous in their wish not to live under Mauritian rule; they want to live under British rule because they trust us. There is no basis for this agreement. If the Government continue with it, they will be at conflict with a country without which we would be defenceless.

• 30 Oct 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Nice try! I was just gently teasing, that was all. We heard “invest, invest, invest” at the start of the Budget statement, and I thought, yes, that is absolutely what we need—not just from the big multinationals that come to smart conferences, but equally from hundreds of thousands of people putting their own risk capital into start-ups and new businesses. But no, this “invest, invest, invest” is going to be done by the Chancellor on our behalf. Not only was she a top economist at the Bank of England, but she is now going to be the fund manager of the nation, investing money and trying to pick winners. I would suggest that the last time Governments attempted to invest money and pick winners, back in the 1970s, it ended very badly indeed.

• 30 Oct 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I have had plenty of jobs—well, apart from being in the European Parliament, which doesn’t really count, obviously. What is dismal about this Budget is the growth forecast. If the ambition of our Chancellor is that in four years’ time growth should be 1.5%, that is very bad news for everybody, particularly because it takes no account of the rise in population that will happen through legal immigration. It basically means a rise of 0%. Nobody has even mentioned the fact that gross domestic product per capita—wealth per capita—has been falling consistently nearly every quarter for the past two years. The bigger our population becomes the poorer we are becoming, and we must wake up to that reality. The big picture is that we are in decline. We are getting poorer. There is no £22 billion black hole—that is nonsense. It is £2.7 trillion. Our debt repayments are £90 billion a year, and from all the figures I have seen today, that will be worse in five years’ time than it is today. We need a complete change of culture. We need to start saying that success is a good thing, and making money is a great thing. People becoming rich is something we should encourage. We have to change our culture of work. There is this idea, “Oh yes, work from home, do a four-day week, get your work-life balance right”—well actually, why do we not say to young people that hard work is a good thing? Hard work is the only way that anybody succeeds individually, and the only way that we will have a chance as a country to turn any of this around.

• 30 Oct 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I think we have to give credit to the Chancellor for a Budget that, in political presentation, was very clever. The SNP has had an absolutely rotten day, and the decision to put money into potholes was clever. The fuel duty freeze is very welcome, especially for those living in rural parts of our country. But for me, the big one is of course the 1p off a pint off draught beer. I have worked out that it will save me over £1 a week, so I am particularly thrilled about that. I sat listening to the numbers thinking that this Budget is economically illiterate. I do not know who is doing the sums—perhaps it is the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott)—but the sums do not work. The markets now agree with me, because just in the last couple of hours we have seen a very substantial spike in gilt yields. We are not yet quite back to the mini-Budget of 2022, but clearly people are saying that this is not going to work. Even more concerning, I suppose, is that the new head of the Office for Value for Money, David Goldstone, served for many years on the board of HS2, which I would suggest is the very opposite of value for money.

• 30 Oct 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  No, please sit down—honestly, you’ve had a go. We are in much deeper trouble than anybody on either Front Bench dares to admit. That is a reality we should all face. We have a Labour party that could not define what a woman is or what a working person is, and after today I am pretty convinced that it cannot define what economic growth is.

• 30 Oct 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Maybe one or two Members of the House ought simply to grow up, but there we are—it’s a bit sad. I have worked in private business, and I do think picking winners is wrong. I think we leave that to the free market, and we let people either make money or lose money. Frankly, if they do their dough, well, that’s just the way these things work. Any business employing five or more people has been hammered today. I have set up and run companies, but nobody on the Government Front Bench has ever worked in private business. None of them understands what genuine risk capital is. From what I can make out, our Business Secretary has never even had a job.

• 22 Oct 2024 · British Indian Ocean Territory: Sovereignty · Hansard source

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  Since the mistaken opening of negotiations by the last Government on the sovereignty of the Chagos islands, it turns out that the British high commissioner and others appear to have been bugged by the Government of Mauritius. If the police investigation proves that to be true and we can see that Mauritius—their Government at least—are bad actors, is the 99-year lease on Diego Garcia even worth the paper that it is written on?

• 22 Oct 2024 · British Indian Ocean Territory: Sovereignty · Hansard source

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  3. What the planned timetable is for implementing the agreement with Mauritius on the sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory.

• 7 Oct 2024 · British Indian Ocean Territory: Negotiations · Hansard source

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  It would appear that the judgment—the potential next judgment—of a spurious, rather political foreign Court matters more than the issue of national sovereignty. The Foreign Secretary boasts that President Biden likes this deal. The Speaker said earlier that this House should not be affected by elections that take place in foreign countries, but how confident is the Foreign Secretary that Donald Trump, if he becomes the 47th President of the USA, will approve of this deal, given the importance of our relationship with America?

• 11 Sept 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Yesterday, we witnessed some extraordinary celebratory scenes outside Britain’s prisons, where in some cases serious career criminals were released. That was to make way for—yes—rioters, but equally those who have said unpleasant things on Facebook and elsewhere on social media. Does the Prime Minister understand that there is a growing feeling of anger in this country that we are living through two-tier policing and a two-tier justice system?

• 10 Sept 2024 · Illegal Immigration · Hansard source

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  Just a few weeks ago, for the first time, Border Force did an emergency pick-up on the other side of the line. Rather than bringing the people back to this country, as previously Dover lifeboat and Dungeness lifeboat had done, it actually took them into Calais. That is the way we do it. Yes, these are far flimsier vessels, but the principle of taking people back whence they came is the point that I am trying to make. We can do this. We can do it under the international law of the sea. I ask the Minister to say that, given the money that we have given to the French, we will no longer accept escorts from the French navy. The day after 12 people died in the channel, a French naval vessel escorted a dinghy from a couple of hundred yards off Wissant all the way to our 12-mile line. No more French naval escorts—I think that is vital. We need political will. The Germans, of course, are now showing it. The Germans will ignore the ECHR; the Germans, by the way, sent a plane full of young men back to Afghanistan the other week. With political will and by leaving the ECHR, we can solve this. I promise the Labour Government one thing. This issue caused great pain to the Conservative party, and it had an impact in the general election. This issue of illegal migration and the crime that it leads to, which is a conversation that has barely started in this country but that in France and Germany is now very big, will do massive damage to Labour’s electoral chances. You are going to have to get tough, and I am afraid your leader is going to have to rethink his position on the ECHR.

• 10 Sept 2024 · Illegal Immigration · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) for calling this debate. He must find it excruciatingly embarrassing how badly the previous Government dealt with this issue. With my strong connection in Kent and Sussex with the commercial fishing industry, the angling trade and indeed the lifeboats, I started to feel in early 2020 that —after the odd boat had crossed in 2018 and 2019, as the hon. Member for Dover and Deal (Mike Tapp) mentioned—something big was about to happen. The gangs had realised that the chances of deportation from this country were very low. So I went out repeatedly from Dover into the English channel, filming boats and meeting face to face with boatfuls of the young men who have been described—in many cases, very aggressive young males. I also got to the bottom of the use of the word “escorts”. I kept being told that escorts were crossing the channel. I was not quite sure what that meant, to begin with, but then I understood that it was the French navy—that the French navy literally escorted boats across the English channel and handed them over to Border Force or the Royal National Lifeboat Institution —so I made a bit of a fuss about the whole thing. I said that unless something was done, huge numbers would come. I said that there might even be an “invasion”, a word that got me in very big trouble. Given that we are pushing up towards 140,000 who have come, I do not think I misused the word. The efforts of the last Government to deal with this were frankly pretty pitiful. Rwanda might have worked in theory, but of course in practice it was not going to work. All the while, we are subject to that Court in Strasbourg, as we saw that evening. More interestingly, the incorporation of the convention into British law means that actually British judges will always rule in favour of the ECHR, so we have to face up to that reality. I also believe that what we are facing is a national security emergency. When ISIS boasted in 2015 that it would use the Mediterranean to get its operatives into Europe, perhaps the European Union should have taken it more at its word. It was interesting to note that Sir Keir Starmer himself used the phrase “national security emergency” during the general election, so he is going to have to act accordingly. Appointing a new border chief commander? Yes, we may get some better intelligence—fine, but the French, whom we have given hundreds of millions of pounds, already stop a lot of dinghies from crossing. They put knives in the dinghies, but the problem is that the prospective illegal immigrants just hide in the dunes and come back the next day. So that is not going to work. Smashing the gangs? Well, I don’t know. What I have been hearing for the past 30 years is that we are going to smash the drugs gangs in this country, and yet there are more class A drugs being taken today than there ever were before. A good operative gang, working out of those sand dunes in northern France in a reasonable week of weather, can expect to make at least €2 million. The financial rewards are very, very high. Really, what this comes down to is two things. No. 1 is political will. Successive Australian Prime Ministers attempted to deal with the problem; they all failed. They tried offshore processing and so on, until in the end Tony Abbott just towed the boats back to Indonesia. There was international outrage from the UN, the EU and indeed the Foreign Office.

• 4 Sept 2024 · Preventable Baby Loss · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson) has raised a subject that is, for many families and communities, a taboo. It is very, very difficult to talk about. When it comes to prevention, he is quite right to pay tribute to the hospitals where every week, thousands of healthy babies are born. Where there have been errors—we have seen it not just in Nottingham; one of the Kent hospitals had a particular problem with this—everything should be done to make sure these deaths are prevented. Whatever we do, however, naturally some stillbirths will still happen. I have seen the effect of stillbirth in my own family. It is pretty devastating. It does not go away or get forgotten. Are those that go through this, particularly the women, able to talk about it? Can they share their experiences? A problem shared may not be a problem solved, but it might just make life a little bit more bearable—a little bit easier. I must be honest: when my niece had that stillbirth, I did not feel I could face her and talk about it. I felt too awkward. Would I say something that was wrong? Was it best we just did not discuss the subject? A decade on, even though I am close to her, I have never discussed it. I have just felt too awkward to do it. I suspect that is the case with many men, including husbands and partners. It is just something that is not talked about. I want to pay tribute to councillor Jeff Bray, the former leader of Tendring district council, who has talked about the stillbirth experience as a father. I am also encouraged by Maria Gormley’s charity in Clacton, where women—and men if they want to—can come together regularly and share their experiences. It is not an easy thing to do. I have admitted my own failings, but I suspect I am far from alone in finding this subject incredibly difficult. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield said, anything that can be done to prevent avoidable disasters must be, but I want to put it on the record that naturally, these things will happen—hopefully in very low numbers. There needs to be counselling and support for people who have been through that experience. To be honest, I feel that in most parts of the country, it is very sadly lacking.

• 23 Jul 2024 · Immigration and Home Affairs · Hansard source

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  I believe it is customary in a maiden speech for the Member to pay tribute to their predecessor, which I am very happy to do. Giles Watling is a very decent, nice, honourable man. He is a former actor who wears his Garrick club tie. There is nothing even vaguely Conservative about him, but he is a jolly nice chap, and it was a clean-fought campaign. Earlier, the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) made reference to Clacton as being the place for a traditional English seaside holiday, and indeed it is, with its pier, miles of sandy beaches and arcades. Perhaps it is not as popular a holiday destination as it used to be, now that people go to Spain and elsewhere, but it is still there. Other parts of the constituency are genteel and quite wealthy, but if we go to Jaywick we find the most deprived community in the whole United Kingdom. Those communities have little faith, trust or belief that Government can make their lives better. Indeed, what I found, when knocking on doors, was that people were saying, “We want to work—we want to get on and make money—but as soon as we work 16 hours a week or more, our benefits get taken away, so we’re better off staying on benefits.” I feel immensely sorry for those people, because the benefits system, which is designed to help them, is actually keeping them trapped in levels of relative poverty. I will do my best as the MP for the area to bring business investment—private money—into the constituency, with jobs, training and skills. I cannot promise that I will do it, but I will do my absolute damnedest to make it happen. It is funny, because I spent nearly 21 years as a Member of the European Parliament, in Brussels and with its monthly journey to Strasbourg. I have to say that this place is very different indeed. It is smaller. There is not a chauffeur-driven Mercedes available for each Member. There are no large lump sums of money that Members do not have to spend on anything or show receipts for. I wonder whether that is why so many in the British political system seem to adore the European Union so much, because it is a rather wonderful place to work. What I did not expect was to come here and find that I, with my Reform team, am more outnumbered here than we were in the European Parliament, because there are more supporters of Brexit in the European Parliament than I sense there are in this Parliament of 2024. This is very much a remainers’ Parliament. I suspect, in many cases, that it is really a rejoiners’ Parliament. If we look at the King’s Speech, it is interesting that the word “immigration” is mentioned only twice and “asylum” just once. Perhaps that is not a surprise, as when the now Prime Minister laid out the six big priorities for the Labour party before the general election, he did not mention legal or illegal immigration. That is the other area in which the five of us sitting on the Reform Bench will find ourselves massively outnumbered in the House, because we actually want to talk about these issues. I believe that the population explosion is having a bigger impact on the quality of life of ordinary folk than any other issue. It all started, of course, when the current Home Secretary became a Member of Parliament back in May 1997. It is worth reminding ourselves that net migration was the same during the late 1940s, the whole of the 1950s, the whole of the 1960s, the whole of the 1970s, the whole of the 1980s and in the 1990s, up until Mr Blair. Net migration ran at 30,000 to 50,000 a year for over half a century. Then Mr Blair got in and decided that we were going to open the doors in a way that had never been done before, to the delight and joy of big companies, especially giant multinationals, who have always wanted as much cheap labour as they can get, and to hell with the consequences for working-class families and people. Perhaps it was even more of a surprise to see that massive acceleration in our population through immigration then further accelerate, because despite promises in four consecutive manifestos, the Conservative party actually accelerated what had happened under the years of Mr Blair, so we have seen a population increase of 10 million people since the time that Labour won its last landslide. Even the net figure is a migrant a minute. Even during the course of this debate, many hundreds more people will have come to our country. Nobody is making the argument that there are not some exceptionally wonderful people among them—there are, of course—but the sheer level of population means we have to build a new house every two minutes. Even if the Labour Government are able to fulfil the 1.5 million houses that they want to build during the lifetime of this Parliament, that will make no dent at all in the current shortage of housing. Rents have risen by 25% since 2021. Why? Population increase and pressure. The list goes on, from access to health services to congestion and pressure on infrastructure. The population crisis has the biggest impact on people’s lives, damaging their quality of life, and virtually nobody in this place even wants to talk about it. It is on illegal immigration that I really want to make a point. Four years ago, I went out into the English channel repeatedly, filming dinghies coming across the channel, with an average of 16 people per boat. I was described as being a sad, lonely, desperate figure, always seeking attention, and I have no doubt there are some who think that is still the case today.

• 9 Jul 2024 · Election of Speaker · Hansard source

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  Mr Speaker-Elect, thank you very much. We are the new kids on the block. We have no experience in this Parliament whatsoever, even though some of us have tried many times over the years to get here, so we cannot judge you from working in this place, but we can judge you from how the outside world sees you. I mean not just the United Kingdom but the world, because Prime Minister’s question time is global, box office politics. It is pretty clear to everyone that you act with great neutrality and that you have brought tremendous dignity to the role as Speaker, so we absolutely endorse you entirely for this job. That is, I must say, in marked contrast to the little man who was there before you, who besmirched the office so dreadfully in doing his best to overturn the biggest democratic result in the history of the country. We support you fully, Sir.