Nigel Farage

Wow, just give me a second, just give me a second, do you like them? Very expensive, expensive but guess what I bought them myself! How about that!

Wow, I got to tell you the energy, the optimism, the enthusiasm that we’ve got in this room is not something that could be replicated by any other political party in this country and indeed I wonder whether there’s ever been a Party Conference in this country with this level of energy and fun? Thank you so much, all of you for coming along and supporting us.

So, it was the middle of May, end of May this year and my life was going pretty well, I’d just had a big 60th birthday, I’m in not bad health which is down to clean living, great job four nights a week at GB News which I was loving, just been voted news presenter of the year for the second year in a row and I had not one but two grandchildren on the way, the first of whom I’m delighted to say was born on June the 23^rd, Brexit day how about that!

So, I was doing well, making money, no pressure, no stress, no abuse from the Press, life couldn’t have been better and then Richie Sunak calls a snap general election and I think to myself given the short time period is there anything I can do and actually would I want to do it? Would I want to give up a really comfortable easy life and one that involved weekends off, would I want to give it up and would it be possible in such a short time frame, well I thought to myself we’ve just had 14 years of Conservative government and the last few years since Boris won in 2019 has been one of a complete breach of trust with the British public on a truly historic scale.

I felt, I was upset about it for the damage it does to democracy but also upset about it because don’t forget I stood aside in that 2019 general election because we wanted to get Brexit over the line. After all those years of agony and struggle and I thought well we have left but have we taken back control of our borders? Have we given our 5 and a half to six million men and women running their own businesses, have we deregulated and made their lives easier and better? In fact at almost every level we’ve been betrayed and then I thought about what was happening on our streets, the rise of knife crime, the rise of gun crime, the fear of people even in the smartest parts of London to go out for a drink or dinner and for a man to wear a watch or a woman to wear jewelry.

I thought about what Mass uncontrolled immigration on a scale the likes of which we’ve never seen had done to divide our communities. I looked at the fact that frankly without massive public borrowing there would have been no growth in our economy for year after year after year. An NHS in which you can’t get a GP appointment, roads that are clogged beyond comprehension and frankly I thought to myself Britain is broken and then I couldn’t help it but if Britain is broken then logically Britain needs Reform yeah, so I was really in a terrible quandary as to what to do, genuinely and then I went down to Dover for a day I went and joined Richard up in Skegness, Lee in his constituency of Ashfield and I began to have people in the street walking up to me speaking to me as if almost I was letting them down by not giving up my lovely life!

Anyway, in the end I thought whatever obstacles the fact we’ve only got a few weeks, the fact that 40% of the population don’t yet know who Reform even is, I thought despite all of that actually there are two achievable goals in those four weeks and three days the first clear achievable goal was to get millions of votes and a second, the second knowing as I do from bitter experience how difficult the first pass the post system is, but I believe that we could establish a beach head in Parliament by getting a few people elected and I’m proud to say that in the early hours of the 5th of July both of those objectives were realized.

That is and all that is, it’s just the first big step and what I now believe if you’re with me if you support me if you’re prepared to help me, well then it will become the first big step on what I believe can be a truly astonishing historic Journey that can do something to do our country good.

To honour those that have gone before us and to give our children and grandchildren a better future. It’s the first step now we could have done better, we could have done better but at that stage of the game and this is absolutely not knocking Richard and what he did to keep this thing alive for all those years we weren’t big enough. Give Richard a round of applause go on, we just at that stage of our development we weren’t big enough, wealthy enough, professional enough to vet general election candidates properly and we were let down.

That amateurism let us down we could have won a lot more votes and there are lessons that we need to learn from that so as I stood after the count in Clacton in those early hours of July the 5th I said that yes of course I would represent the constituency the constituents in Parliament, but I had a job and my job was to professionalize and democratize Reform UK. That was the solemn promise and pledge that I made to you the members on professionalization.

We’ve made some changes, Richard is now my Deputy Leader who also sits in Parliament and subs for me as leader when I am not there and that was a good solid sound appointment, I know you all agree and then somebody of exceptional talent who I’d met over a decade ago reappeared during the campaign on the scene he’s a young man in his middle late 30s who’s done rather well in life, who is really rather patriotic, who just gave a brilliant speech to this conference and I really think having Zia as our Chairman has already made a massive difference to our level of professionalization.

Around them are a small but very professional team, just look at what they put on in this conference isn’t it truly incredible, isn’t it beautifully done and we’re recruiting, we’re recruiting right now to get full-time regional managers and Regional organizers so I feel that my promise to professionalize the party is now on track.

I also promise you that in future we will be vetting candidates rigorously at all levels, I promise you that we haven’t got time, we haven’t got room for a few extremists to the work against the party that now has 80,000 members and rising by hundreds every single day, amazing.

But, it’s almost a democratization of the party where perhaps I’ve been the most criticized, although having said that I’m quite used to being criticized for virtually everything, any major terrible event that happens in the country is clearly my fault, lucky I don’t care really, they can write what they like, I don’t care because I know what I believe in.

Now, I set this up as a limited company guaranteed by shares and I owned 60% of the shares now I could make a joke and say that it led to streamlined decision making but I did it for two reasons one we had no time, no time to get established and it needed somebody of experience to make decisions right or wrong and that structure allowed me to do that, but secondly I did it because new or entry political parties are vulnerable to being hijacked by extremist groups and bad actors and all the while I had control of it that could never happen, that could never happen because we don’t want extremists, we don’t want bigots, we don’t want people who think that way because we represent the silent, decent majority of this great country that we live in.

But the time has come, the infant that Reform UK was has been growing up, we had the teenage tantrums which were those that caused us harm in the general election but we’re now at a different point. The Party is an adult and this weekend, this weekend is when Reform UK comes of age, we come of age and so I’ve got to make and I want to make the necessary adjustments there will be before you tomorrow, you’ve had it already on email there’ll be a vote tomorrow morning on a constitution for the party we change the structure of the party.

No longer will it be a company guaranteed by shares but a company limited by guarantee, it’ll be a nonprofit making organization and I will not be the shareholder, in fact do you know who’s going to be the shareholder of Reform UK? You the members will own this party, you will own this party not me and we will have a board to manage the Party with significant elected representation from the members and that board will be there to safeguard how we’re operating, to prevent entryism.

We wouldn’t want a Corbyn style takeover would we of our party as Labour suffered a few years ago, but the real story of this conference and of the plan for the future is not the share structure, it’s not the management board, it’s this, we have already set up and we are in process of setting up right now across the country and bear in mind we’ve done this in two months, 266 constituency associations, that is an incredible move, but we need those branch associations in literally every constituency in the land.

I went up in the campaign to Sunderland to do a public event it was organized at 48 hours’ notice and a thousand people arrived it was incredible and we were there in Sunderland where they don’t generally like people from Newcastle but we had Sir John Hall who was there, who’s here with us today, welcome Sir John, lovely to see you, really good to see him and John said to me and he’s getting on a bit but he’s done a few things in life and he’s rather bright, he said to me the problem is these thousand people you remember they’ll all go home and not know anybody else and it’s really what Ant Middleton was talking about this morning, it’s about building teams, it’s about having unity and it’s through the branches that we get these structures, it’s through the branches that we raise money, it is through the branches that we find the necessary candidates to fight elections, it is through the branches that we actually become part of the local community not just a national political party and there is a template for this now.

I never thought I’d say this but we have to model ourselves on the liberal Democrats, now that doesn’t mean that you’ll see me cascading down waterfalls and I won’t behave in a way that I think is particularly stupid, even if others think I do now.

The Liberal Democrats build branches the Liberal Democrats win seats at district, county and unitary level the Liberal Democrats build on that strength, the Liberal Democrats put literature and leaflets through doors repeatedly in their target areas and despite the fact they haven’t got any policies at all in fact the whole thing’s really rather vacuous isn’t it, but they manage with a vote much lower than ours to win 72 seats in Parliament, so not only not only am I giving you the shares of the party I’m actually giving you the responsibility for making this a success.

Whatever we do, whatever I do or Richard does or Zia does or the rest of the MPs do, whatever our management team do, whatever our social media guys do, that can only take us so far, we will not realize our dream unless the People’s Army of supporters are organized, unless the People’s Army of supporters are helped to professionalize, unless that people army fight elections not just as a paper name on the ballot but with the intention of winning as many seats as we can.

This party will succeed or fail in its historic mission according to what you 4,000 good folks are able to do and to impart over the course of the next few years. It’s up to you, it really is up to you now, I’m used to being on impossible political journeys, I was told Nigel you’re wasting your time, you’re wasting your breath, Britain will never ever leave the European Union, well it might have taken a long time but you know what, we damn well did it against the entirety of the British establishment and so when Zia comes along as chairman and says well it’s obvious, we’re fighting to win the next general election and people think that Zia bloke you know, I mean he might have been all right in business but he’s lost his marbles, but I don’t think there’s ever been a time when there is greater disenchantment in the two big parties that have dominated our political life for the last 100 years.

Labour have not won through love so the opportunity is there and that is why we must take the English County Council elections next year plus areas like Doncaster and areas like Thurrock where the district councils are up our first big test of fire comes on the first Thursday in May next year. We’re going to need over 2,000 candidates, we’re going to need you organized behind them, helping them.

I genuinely believe if we get next May right we can produce a result that is truly astonishing, we can get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people elected to councils to be given positions of responsibility, to make us part of the lives of folk living in their communities. The opportunity is enormous, so I ask you are you going to help us in this historic mission? Thank you and we’ll go on, we’ll go on the next year Scotland what a remarkable, well done for coming thank you, saw a couple of kilts earlier I thought they must have come from there.

The fact we’re neck and neck in the polls with the Conservatives in Scotland already, the fact that a small team managed to fill candidates who didn’t embarrass us in every single one of those Scottish constituencies there are opportunities as there are in Wales.

Wales will elect under the devolved proportional representation system, is it not David the most astonishing opportunity and these are all our building blocks these are all the big hurdles, I guess that we have to get over but if we succeed in 2025 we build even bigger in 2026 and we keep going then I promise you the sky is the limit and you know have a look at what we’re up against.

The journalists are obsessed with who is going to be the next Conservative leader, who is the one I most want, who is the one I least want? Well, from what I could work out one of them is campaigning as a Liberal Democrat, one of them thinks that having worked in McDonald’s for a week makes them working class, one of them appears to have had a damascene conversion from being part of the establishment and the established view to suddenly saying things that many of us in this room would agree with, but lacks any discernible personality whatsoever and would lead a party that is split down the middle anyway and the last of the four has got the most inappropriate surname I’ve ever come across in my life, which indicates an IQ rather higher than I actually believe they have and the truth is I don’t give a damn who the next leader of the Conservative party is, I really don’t.

The point about them, it doesn’t matter who leads them the brand is bust, the brand is broken, people will not go back to them, they’ve let us down so badly and as for Labour, I mean goodness me have you ever known a new prime minister get off to a worse start than Keir Starmer?

It’s truly shocking, I mean the message of things can only get worse is hardly inspiring is it and now we’re living in a state and you all know it but they’ll deny it in Westminster until the cows come home we’re living in a state with two tier policing, we’re living in a state we’re living in a state with two tier Justice, we’re living in a state that is led by Two Tier Keir and we’ve had enough already, one in four of those that voted Labour in the general election on July the 4^th, one in four already say they are considering, they are inclined to vote for Reform UK already, we do not need to change the mind of a single person living in this country because the silent majority is already with us on the key issues that we care about.

We can win the next general election just with the numbers of people that agree with our principles, that agree that family, that agree that community, that agree that country, should be the things that absolutely that everybody in British public life campaigns for because they are the most important things to all of us that live here.

No, what we have to do is to be credible, what we have to do is to be on the ground everywhere, what we have to do is to show that we can bring success, after success, after success. If we do those things we genuinely can, I never thought I’d say this but I genuinely believe we can change the future of politics, we can change the future of our country we can perhaps get back a little bit of pride in what it is to be British, what it is to respect our history, what it is to stand up for our values, what it is to understand the Judeo-Christian culture underpins everything we are, everything we’ve ever stood for everything we believe.

To end this madness that is going through corporate life, that is going through in fact most of the public sector which reminds me there’s a lady called Dame Allison Rose now she was the head of Nat West Bank but saw fit for her organization not just to debank me but to leak confidential information about me to her mates at the BBC. Well, of course she was fired and I was delighted but she’s now got a big new highly paid job, isn’t that good, she’s gone to Mishcon de Reya and she’s in charge of equality, diversity and inclusion so given her track record we wish Mishcon de Reya the very best of luck!

We believe in meritocracy, we believe that a society looks after its weak but encourages everybody else to do the very best they can and we don’t care in this party, we don’t care about skin colour, we don’t care about orientation, we couldn’t care less who you are, we care whether you share the values of this country, we care whether you obey the law and we’ll judge you on who you are, we’ll judge you on who you are as a person isn’t this what everybody wants? Is that what we’re going to fight for? Can we sow seeds? Can we make history? Are you going to be part of it? Thank you very much indeed, thank you.