Nigel Farage has used his maiden speech in the House of Commons to launch a furious attack on fellow parliamentarians.
The Reform chief says he and his party colleagues have found themselves “outnumbered” in the Commons on the matter of Brexit, claiming the chamber has a majority of pro-EU MPs.
Sitting alongside fellow Reform MPs Lee Anderson, Richard Tice, Rupert Lowe and James McMurdock, he told MPs: “I spent nearly 21 years as a member of the European Parliament in Brussels.
“I have to say, this place is very different indeed. It’s smaller, there is no chauffeur driven Mercedes available for each member, no large lump sums of money which you don’t have to spend on anything or show receipts for, and I wonder, perhaps that is why so many in the British political system love the European Union so much.
Nigel Farage won the Clacton seat
PA“It is a rather wonderful place to work. What I perhaps didn’t expect was to come here and find I am more outnumbered here with my Reform team than we were in the European Parliament.
“There are more supporters of Brexit in the European Parliament than I sense there are in this Parliament of 2024.
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
“This is very much a Remainers’ Parliament, I suspect in many cases, it’s really a Rejoiners’ Parliament.”
Quickly turning his attention to Keir Starmer and his Labour Government, Farage laid bare his frustration at the King’s Speech, which was delivered last week.
He said Labour’s plans, which King Charles read out in the House of Lords, lacked a coherent strategy on dealing with the migrant crisis.
The former UKIP leader told his fellow MPs that he expects a busy time in the Commons for him and his Reform colleagues as they seek to hold the Government to account on the matter.
Nigel Farage was sat next to former Reform boss Richard Tice
PARLIAMENT
“The word immigration is mentioned only twice and asylum just once, and perhaps this is not a surprise”, he said.
“When Keir Starmer laid out his six big priorities for the General Election, he did not mention legal or illegal immigration. That is the area I think the five of us [Reform MPs] will find ourselves massively outnumbered in this house.
“We actually do want to talk about these issues. I believe that the population explosion is having the biggest impact on the quality of life of ordinary folk than any other issue.
“It all started when the current Home Secretary became a member of Parliament back in May 1997. It’s worth reminding ourselves that net migration was the same during the 1940s, the whole of the 1950s, the whole of the 1960s, the whole of the 1970s, the whole of the 1980s, and the 1990s until Mr Blair.
Nigel Farage lambasted Labour and the Tories
PARLIAMENT
“Net migration had run at 30-50,000 a year for over half a century, then Mr Blair decided ‘we’re going to open the doors like never before’, to the delight and joy of big companies and giant multinationals who wanted as much cheap labour as they could get, and to hell with the consequences of ordinary working people.”
The Tories were then the subject of Farage’s ire, as he accused them of 14 years of failure on the issue of migration.
Farage has long been an outspoken critic on the matter, demanding radical action such as leaving the EU, leaving the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) and implementing a policy of net zero migration.
Speaking on Tory failures, he told MPs: “It was even more of a surprise to see that massive acceleration in our population through immigration would then, through a Conservative Party, actually accelerate what had happened under the years of Mr Blair.
“We have seen a population of almost 10 million people since that Labour landslide.
“Even the net figure is a migrant a minute, even in the course of this debate, many hundreds more will come to our country. No one is making the argument that there aren’t some exceptional people among them, there are.
“But the sheer level of population means we have to build a new house every two minutes. Even if a Labour government is able to fulfil the one and a half million houses it wants to build in the lifetime of this Parliament, it will make no dent at all in the current shortage of housing.
“Rents have risen by 25 per cent by 2021. Why? Population increases and pressure. The population crisis is the biggest impact on people’s lives, damaging their quality of life, and virtually nobody in this place wants to talk about it.”
He spoke after winning the Clacton seat with a resounding 46.2 per cent of the vote share.