UKIP LEADER NIGEL FARAGE TELLS FOX NEWS CHANNEL THAT RUSSIAN PRESIDENT “VLADIMIR PUTIN BEHAVED IN A MORE STATESMAN-LIKE MANNER THAN PRESIDENT OBAMA DID IN THIS REFERENDUM CAMPAIGN”
In an interview on FOX News Channel’s Your World with Neil Cavuto this afternoon, the United Kingdom’s Independent Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage discussed the United Kingdom (UK) voting to leave the European Union, the international market reaction to the vote and the UK’s credit rating downgrade with guest host Trish Regan. Please see below for highlights.
Nigel Farage On comparing President Barack Obama’s response to the Brexit vote to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s:
“Ultimately, Vladimir Putin behaved in a more statesman like manner than President Obama did in this referendum campaign. Obama came to Britain and I think behaved disgracefully. Telling us we’d be in the back of the queue, I think you guys say line rather than queue. Treating us, America’s strongest, oldest ally, in this most extraordinary way. Vladimir Putin maintained his silence throughout the whole campaign. I’m not a fan of Vladimir Putin, but you know the Ukrainian crisis actually was smart for the EU saying they wanted to extend their borders to take in the Ukraine which Putin took as being a direct threat. My view on Putin and the Russians is don’t poke the Russian bear with the stick, if you do, you’re bound to get a response.”
Nigel Farage On whether he expected that he would ‘shake things up’ and influence the United Kingdom to leave the European Union:
“Well, I started 25 years ago. I took the view that the European Project was going in the wrong direction and so I decided to get involved with a new political party. For the first ten years, I was laughed at, mocked, derided, called all the names under the sun. And here we are. Over the next 10-15 years, we grew, we grew, we grew. We forced the prime minister into giving us a referendum and then what we saw was the global establishment, not just the conservative and labour parties in Britain, not just the Bank of England, but President Obama, the IMF, the OECD, everyone telling us that dreadful things would happen to us if we didn’t stay part of a political union in Brussels. And you know what? The little people, the real people, the ordinary people, the decent people said no. To be honest, I’m so happy I can scarcely believe.”
Nigel Farage On why the projections leading up to the Brexit vote were wrong:
“Well, I think they wanted to believe that and they thought that Project Fear or perhaps even Project Threat would keep the little people in line, allow the big multinationals, the Goldman Sachs, the people that love the institutions that you can see right behind me at least assumed that would work. Ultimately, this referendum wasn’t decided by economic arguments. It was decided by a basic argument of sovereignty – should we make our own laws in our own country and crucially should we control our own borders. Immigration I know is becoming a hotter in American politics right now too. Think about this, we’re a country of 65 million people. Our population is rising by nearly half a million people every single year just because we have an open border policy with the rest of the European Union. People said enough. We want to govern our own country. We want to make our own laws. We want our own supreme court to be supreme and we want to control our borders. And that is now what must happen. Yet, what we’re seeing today from S&P and others is the establishment having lost, they haven’t quite given in yet.”
Nigel Farage On ratings agencies downgrading the UK’s credit rating following the Brexit vote:
“Well, can I just get the markets thing right? FTSE closed tonight at 6,000 there or thereabouts. 9 percent higher than it was in February. The idea that Brexit is causing stock market losses is rubbish. One of the reasons Barclays is down is that Barclays took a massive punt on remain, winning they were along Sterling at nearly 150, by the way again a lot higher than it was back in February and they were long equities. Barclays frankly got their losses handed to them on a plate and it served them right for taking the positions that they did. On Sterling, let’s get some perspective here too shall we, don’t forget before I was in politics I had a proper job trading commodities and currencies. Sterling entered a bear market, a declining market in July 2014. Why? Because every growth expectation in Britain gets marked down and because our public finances are still way out of control. This hysteria about markets, let’s end that. It’s rubbish.”
Nigel Farage On recent comments that London may no longer be the ‘financial center for Europe’:
“Please, please, please, please. London is not a financial center for Europe. It’s a financial center for the world. Europe is becoming a little back yard. 85 percent of the global economy is not in the European Union. For people to say that unless we stay in a political union governed by unelected old men in Brussels that somehow that will stop us buying and selling goods and services from each other clearly they have no conception of what trade is all about. Trade is not made by politicians. Trade is not made by bureaucrats. Trade is made by people watching this program. They like a car, they like a bottle of wine, they think the price is right and they choose to buy it. The UK trades with the EU at an annual deficit of 70 billion sterling every single year. We are now the Eurozone’s biggest trading partner in the world. And let me tell you something, hundreds of thousands of jobs in the German car manufacturing sector depend on good trade links with the UK so this arguments are spurious, these arguments are being put by the global political elite.”
On whether the Brexit vote will lead others to exit the European Union:
“Let’s get a political perspective now on where we are with this European Union. This club was put together back in the 1950s and the idea was to get the French and Germans around the table to break bread with each other after three wars in 70 years the last two of which dragged in not just my country, but your country too. So the idea of cooperation, the idea of trade was absolutely sensible, but what this has now become is a political union. They want to build a United States of Europe. That’s why they have a flag, an anthem, a president, a police force, it’s why they want to build an army which will ultimately threaten the role of NATO. Nobody in Europe, no one anywhere has ever given consent for this. Frankly, I would say this to you. If the Danes now vote to leave, what’s wrong with that? Let’s have a Europe of sovereign nation states being friends together not a forced political union.”
On whether he thinks Europe will be as strong against ISIS and Russia without being a union:
“Last year, in one of the worst policy decisions we’ve seen in the world since 1945, Angela Merkel said if you want to come across the Mediterranean regardless of what part of the world you come from, regardless of whether you‘re really a refugee or not, you’re welcome. 1.8 million people made that crossing last year. When ISIS say, they will use the migrant crisis to flood the European continent with their Jihadi fighters, I suggest we take them seriously and just three weeks ago the German authorities foiled a bomb plot in Dusseldorf and all four of those people had come in last year on those migrant boats and the Germans are now investigating and hunting down another 180 terrorist subjects. Please don’t tell me that being together in the EU is making us safer, it’s doing quite the reverse.”
Nigel Farage On whether he thinks the United Kingdom will be more isolationist:
“No. A global Britain, please. We are the world’s fifth largest economy and yet because we are a part of this outdated customs union big business cartel we are prohibited and forbidden from making our own trade deals, our own trade deals globally. That for a country that speaks English, a country that is mercantile by its history is mad. We are leaving a failed political union and we are rejoining a bigger, better, modern 21st century world.”
Nigel Farage On what he thinks it means for the United States:
“I would say this to you, militarily, the direction the European Union is going in threatens NATO and the fact we’ve opted out of all that means that the two of us together can continue to be the closest military allies in the world. And in terms of trade, let’s get rid of all these idiot bureaucrats based here in Brussels. Why don’t we together, Britain and America, cut our own trade deal and have a better, stronger, deeper relationship. We now, with that historic, seismic vote last Thursday, are free to come and talk to you as Americans as an independent country and let’s make our ties even closer than they are today.”
Nigel Farage On whether he agrees with comparisons between Brexit and what the United States is going through this election cycle:
“No, your position, and you may have your problems, is nothing like ours. We finished up until last Thursday with 70 percent of our laws being made by foreign institutions with our own Supreme Court being overruled in Luxemburg and with an open border to 500 million people. Whatever problems you’ve got in the USA, they are nothing to what we’ve had. What we did last Thursday is we said, we want our country back and we voted for it and we’ve got it back.”
