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Eugene

(62,627 posts)
Mon Nov 2, 2020, 11:12 AM Nov 2020

UK's Farage tries to harness COVID lockdown anger to take on PM Johnson

Also: Reform UK: Brexit party to rebrand as anti-lockdown voice (The Guardian)

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Source: Reuters

RACE FOR A CURE
NOVEMBER 1, 2020 4:52 PM UPDATED 35 MINUTES AGO

UK's Farage tries to harness COVID lockdown anger to take on PM Johnson

By Guy Faulconbridge
3 MIN READ

LONDON (Reuters) - Nigel Farage, the British politician who helped force a Brexit referendum and successfully campaigned to leave the European Union, will fight Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s COVID-19 lockdown by recasting his small Brexit Party as Reform UK.

Cast by his supporters as the godfather of Brexit, Farage said Johnson had terrified the United Kingdom into submission over COVID-19 and squandered vast amounts of taxpayers’ money while holding out hopes of a “miraculous” vaccine.

“What we’ve seen in this pandemic I think is a total failure of leadership at almost every level,” Brexit Party leader Farage told Talk Radio from Pennsylvania.

“What about the millions of people out there running their own businesses? This second lockdown is the death knell economically for many of those people,” Farage said.

Johnson on Saturday ordered England back into a national lockdown from Thursday morning after the United Kingdom passed the milestone of one million COVID-19 cases and a second wave of infections threatened to overwhelm the health service.

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Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-farage/uks-farage-tries-to-harness-covid-lockdown-anger-to-take-on-pm-johnson-idUSKBN27H1TW

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Source: The Guardian

Reform UK: Brexit party to rebrand as anti-lockdown voice

Party chairman Richard Tice says country must ‘learn to live with’ Covid not ‘hide in fear’

Clea Skopeliti
Mon 2 Nov 2020 00.01 GMT

The Brexit party has applied to the Electoral Commission to change its name to Reform UK in a bid to rebrand the party, which has no elected representatives, as a voice in the anti-lockdown movement.

The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, and chairman, Richard Tice, first announced the plan in a joint article in the Telegraph where they wrote it was “time to redirect our energies”. The name change is subject to approval of the commission.

The Brexit party gained 2% of the vote in the 2019 general election, and none of the 275 candidates it stood won a seat.

Prior to the December election, Farage had announced the party would change its name following the UK’s exit from the European Union and focus on campaigning for changes in the electoral system.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/nov/02/reform-uk-brexit-party-to-rebrand-as-anti-lockdown-voice
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