FARAGE IS ONCE AGAIN TRYING TO ATTRACT ATTENTION

With billion pounds promised to the UK’s National Health Service, “aid to British women and to their protection from migrants” by bidding on the years when “the European Union will fall apart”, this man is a constant source of false claims and manipulations with which he persistently attracts the attention of the public.

Original title: FARAGE PUT EU TO BED WITH A SHOVEL, HE SAYS – The European Union Will Disintegrate in Less Than 10 Years

On May 23, 2020, the portal infomax.mk published an article with the following headline: FARAGE PUT EU TO BED WITH A SHOVEL – HE SAYS: the European Union will fall apart in less than 10 years. It is obvious that the purpose of this text is to contribute to the spread of Euroscepticism in the Republic of North Macedonia.

This is a statement by Nigel Farage in a conversation with the magazine “EU Parliament” from January this year, and the portal transmits it four months later.

In fact, it is a flat statement from a controversial politician who very often changes his statements and assessments and even denies of ever making them. Of course, not every reader follows him or is familiar with this politician and his speeches on stage, and consequently after reading the article in question will find it difficult to analyze the credibility of his statement, especially since Mr. Farage does not give any explanation for his assertion, nor figures or any kind of facts. This would mean that this statement could be accepted as credible, and so the spread of Euroscepticism would continue.

But first, a question needs to be posed, especially for all those who have not heard of this politician, so that his statement can be properly interpreted and assessed. The question “floating” in the air is: who is Nigel Farage?

Nigel Farage is a British politician and public figure. He is a controversial man and a populist who knows how to attract the attention of the media. Farage comes from a small village in Kent, England. He studied at Dulwich College from 1975 to 1982 and served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Southeast England from 1999 until the United Kingdom left the European Union in 2020. In the past, Farage has twice served as chairman of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Namely, after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 by the Conservative Party, which advocated “a union closer than ever”, Mr. Nigel Farage left the Conservative Party and was one of the founders of the United Kingdom Independence Party. From that moment until today, he is known as a major Eurosceptic in the United Kingdom. So, Mr Farage has been politically active as an Eurosceptic for 27 years and is committed to disintegrate the European Union.

His goal, and at the same time his greatest success, is that he is the man who initiated the referendum in June 2016 on the withdrawal/staying of the United Kingdom from/in the EU, through which the Brexit was voted, i.e. the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from EU. The political slogan of the Farage-led referendum campaign for the UK’s exit from the European Union was “I want my country back.” He is also known for his speeches in the European Parliament and as an opponent of the euro as a currency. In 2019, he formed a political party named “Brexit”, as he was publicly known as “Mr. Brexit”, a nickname he received from US President Donald Trump.

However, the most important thing to note in this context is that Nigel Farage is a politician who very often changes his views depending on the circumstances, once saying one thing, and then denying of ever saying such a thing at all. For example, in this latest statement transmitted to the portal infomax.mk, Mr. Farage says that the European Union will disintegrate in 10 years, although on August 31, 2019 he stated that the EU will disintegrate in just 2 years after the end of Brexit. Changing his estimates in such a short time, and changing them so drastically, does not contribute to the credibility of his statements.

However, one of Mr. Farage’s biggest populist lies refers to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) that a huge amount of money will flow into the HNS after leaving the EU, because that amount of money will no longer be needed to flow for the needs of the EU institutions. In a speech on February 23, 2015, more than a year before the referendum, Mr Farage said his UKIP will find 3 billion pound to flow into the NHS if the  funds the UK pays as a member of the EU are reduced. But what is tragicomic is that just hours after a referendum in the United Kingdom in which the majority decided that their country should leave the EU, on June 24, 2016, Nigel Farage stated that his claims regarding the huge number of funds that his party would secure to flow into the HNS are “sinful.” Imagine how many of the 17,061,744 citizens who voted in the referendum to leave the EU took into account Mr. Farage’s statement that 3 billion pounds would flow into the NHS. It speaks a lot about the way this politician behaves, as well as the reliability and credibility of his statements.

Furthermore, Mr. Farage said weeks before the referendum that if the United Kingdom remained in the EU, British women would be sexually assaulted by migrants and asylum seekers of North African and Arab descent. The racist statement drew sharp criticism from both blocs campaigning for the referendum. Meanwhile, his response was that he was concerned about the safety of British women due to the UK’s membership in the EU.

No less “famous” are Mr. Farage’s speeches before the European Parliament, where he has repeatedly made provocative and inappropriate statements. One such statement was addressed to Mr. Herman Van Rompuy, to whom Mr. Farage addressed the following words: “You have all the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk and the question I want to ask is: ‘Who are you? I’d never heard of you. Nobody in Europe had ever heard of you. No one in Europe has ever heard of you. I would like to ask you, Mr. President: who voted for you? […] I feel that you are competent, capable and dangerous, and I have no doubt that your intention is to be the quiet assassin of European democracy and of European nation-states.” This addressing in the European Parliament to a man who was Belgium’s prime minister from 2008 to 2009. and who was the first permanent President of the European Council from 2009 to 2014 is obscene, unprofessional and unacceptable, and one more time speaks a lot about the manner in which Mr. Nigel Farage has acted politically.

Due to all of the above, the readers of this article on infomax.mk should ask themselves how should they approach this statement of Mr. Farage. His history does not leave much room for us to rely on and formulate relevant conclusions based on this statement. In any case, any statement that is not supported by facts, figures, or in this case a credible analysis that would lead to a certain conclusion, should be taken with caution. And even more so because we are in a state of sensitive public sentiment because of the global coronavirus pandemic, and perhaps a politician and Eurosceptic like Nigel Farage now has fertile ground to further propagate and spread his ideology and his “ideas”.

With 1billion pounds promised to the UK’s National Health Service, “aid to British women and to their protection from migrants”, by bidding on the years when “the European Union will fall apart”, this man is a constant source of false claims and manipulations with which he persistently attracts the attention of the public.