NationBuilder

Dear Supporter

Thank you so much for your incredible support over the last 3 weeks.

We received 1,202 votes which is 2.6% of the total vote and in the process, we beat the Green candidate to buck the national trend despite the fact we ran a 3 week campaign from scratch - no party, no machine and nothing except a bunch of very dedicated and hardworking people. We received a 14% increase on the 2017 UKIP vote (40% up on 2010 UKIP vote) and Labour dropped 7.5% while the Tories hardly moved. It compares extremely favourably with other constituencies and that is down to you!

We know we fought hard in a tough area for every one of those votes and I believe you should all be incredibly proud of an amazing campaign. More importantly, The Brexit Party managed to change the worst Prime Minister in living memory, set Brexit as the most important issue in the election, and we WILL force Boris to make a clean break Brexit. This election was a total disaster for remain supporting parties and that is down to us, the Brexit Party.

Without us the UK electorate would have been denied the chance to vote in an election and probably forced to endure a rigged second referendum on Brexit. The Brexit Party launched in April 2019, shortly after Theresa May failed to meet her March 29th deadline for leaving the EU. Within eight weeks, we had won the May 23rd elections to the European Parliament with 31.6% of the votes cast – far more than Labour (14.1%) and the Conservatives (9.1%) combined. We won in every Leave-voting region of the UK (i.e. everywhere except London, Scotland and Northern Ireland). Our 29 MEPS made The Brexit Party the joint-largest national party in the European Parliament and Ben Habib, MEP was very active in our local campaign, meeting voters in Mitcham and Morden.

It took the Labour Party 45 years from its inception to win the popular vote in a national election. By contrast, The Brexit Party did it within 45 days. This historic result started a political earthquake. From the end of May until mid-June we topped three major national opinion polls, with 26% in each one. At the same time, Theresa May was forced to abandon the attempt to push through her dreadful EU Treaty; on 7 June May announced her resignation as Prime Minister. Boris Johnson ran his campaign for the Conservative leadership as a response to the rise of The Brexit Party. He promised time and again that we would leave the EU on October 31st ‘do or die’.

On July 23rd, just before Boris Johnson took over as PM, his supporter Ian Duncan Smith was asked by Sky News why people should trust the Conservatives to meet his October deadline when they had missed the March one. The response from IDS was revealing: ‘People realise that things have changed since the 29th of March. We’ve got the Brexit Party, a new party, which is likely to destroy the natural set of politics we have in the UK. So we’ve got to get this done. And that’s the way you defeat the Brexit Party and deliver trust back in British politics.’ In other words, the shift in Tory government policy was a response the Brexit Party’s threat to ‘destroy’ the old political order. In Downing Street, Boris attempted to rush his reheated Brexit deal through Parliament and head off a second referendum in order to contain the challenge from the Brexit Party. That eventually led to this General Election. Without us, none of this would have happened and Brexit would be dead and buried. And we will still be fighting. This election has demonstrated the powerful need to Change Politics for Good.

Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson now says that our ‘deal’ with the Tories sank the Lib Dems’ ‘Stop Brexit’ election campaign in August, at the London launch of 500 Brexit Party PPCs, Nigel Farage made an important offer to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Nigel made clear that, if Boris insisted on pushing his reheated version of Theresa May’s surrender Treaty, then we would stand against the Conservatives in every seat. But if Boris was prepared to do the right thing and go for a Clean-Break Brexit, then we would be prepared to ‘put country before party’ and form an electoral alliance with the Tories, ‘perhaps in the form of a non-aggression pact’.

Although the Tories rejected our offer of a Leave alliance, we made clear that it remained open. Then at the launch of our General Election campaign in November, Nigel announced a ‘unilateral Leave alliance’. We would stand down our candidates in the 317 seats won by the Conservatives in 2017, in order to ensure that a Remainer alliance led by Corbyn’s Labour could not win.

The Tories still failed to respond positively to our offer. However, we can now see that we were right, and our tactic has worked. The results show that the Tories won in most of the seats where we withdrew – some of which they may well not have won if we had stood. Meanwhile we took Labour votes everywhere, preventing them taking seats and leading to the annihilation of Commie Corbyn's 70's style Marxist experiment. If the Tories had stood aside in those seats where we are the main challenger and they could not win, a Leave alliance clearly would have won even more seats – as Nigel predicted at the time.

The final evidence came this week when Jo Swinson, leader of the flopping Liberal Democrats, claimed that the Lib Dems’ election campaign to ‘Stop Brexit’ had been scuppered by the ‘cosy deal’ between Nigel and Boris – aka our unilateral Leave alliance. And finally, she lost her own seat. Her undemocratic remain policies were totally rejected by the electorate.

The Brexit Party has made a major contribution to allowing the Conservatives to win. By standing down in the 317 seats that they won in 2017, we gave them a clear run and made sure the Liberal Democrats did not win a larger tranche of seats across the South. This was a Brexit election where many people voted for Leave rather than the Tory Party. Boris’ victory demonstrates that there is a big desire among voters to ‘get Brexit done.’ That is a powerful response to all those demanding a second referendum.

An important question for the coming days is, however, what sort of Brexit will Boris try to get done? A Clean-Break Brexit is still the most popular option among Leave voters. It was Boris Johnson’s stated conversion to a free trade deal with no political engagement that prompted us to stand down in Conservative sets. Today, he has talked about pushing his ‘oven-ready deal’ again – the reheated version of Mrs May’s surrender Treaty. If that is not amended, it will not be a real Brexit.

Top EU negotiator Michel Barnier of the EU has just said that the talks to finalise a deal under the Treaty would take a couple of years, bursting Boris’ claim that Brexit can be sorted by Christmas. The Conservatives still cannot be trusted to deliver Brexit on their own; they need to be held to account. Today, EU newspapers are talking of a delayed, soft Brexit of regulatory and tax alignment where we are still subject to EU laws. If BoJo screws Brexit, there will be a lot of angry people including, new northern Conservative MP's, ERG and above all The Brexit Party. There will be a short-lived honeymoon period which will come to a very quick end if Brexit is diluted to vasal status. The job may not yet be done. But for now, we should sit back and take pride in our achievements.

Thank you and well done. We shall all be meeting for a celebratory drink at 7pm on Wednesday, 18th December - please e-mail me for details if you are able to join us.

Best regards