News
Andy Gregory
Jul 11, 2019
As Nigel Farage goes from strength to strength, the more worrying his rhetoric becomes.
Our likely future prime minister Boris Johnson has today been roundly slated for his noncommittal answer to whether he supported Britain’s now former US ambassador Sim Kim Darroch, whose professional assessment of Trump’s administration as “inept” was leaked, drawing the POTUS’ unpredictable wrath.
While thankfully still resigned to the realms of possibility labelled “in a galaxy far, far away”, given the collapse in popularity of our two major parties, if it all goes incredibly up the wall, Nigel Farage and his Brexit Party could conceivably seize power in the coming years.
This makes his recent comments on LBC all the more disturbing.
A caller named Željko asked him to clarify earlier comments that it was “crazy” to have a Remainer as US ambassador, saying: “Does it mean that, if we are Brexiting, that every civil servant, every ambassador, even the head of the army or head of the navy? Would they have to be replaced if they are Remainers? Is that democracy, Nigel?”
The Brexit Party leader replied:
“Well absolutely, the job of the civil service is to do what the elected government of the day tells them to do, and I know this government doesn’t look like a Brexit government very often, but the fact of the matter is they were elected in 2017, on a manifesto to deliver Brexit and if civil servants are seen to be in obstruction to that, they should either change their ways or be removed.”
The caller then asked again:
Is that democracy?
Mr Farage then backtracked somewhat on the military “because we very rarely hear or know what their political opinions are”, but doubled down on his comments saying in over 20 years, every single Foreign Office official that he's met has been pro-EU.
Never mind the fact that civil servants are duty-bound not to let their personal views impact the impartiality of their work.
Mr Farage then said he had done more than anybody else in modern British politics to get rid of the far-right, after Željko asked:
Do you feel responsible for the rise of the far-right in the UK?
People were shocked by the politician's comments.
More: Brexit campaigner claims Boris Johnson will ‘drain the swamp’ and everyone points out the same thing
Top 100
The Conversation (0)