As America continues its march beyond the pandemic, some of her allies continue to stumble. In the UK, that reopening was scheduled for July 19th. While it’s happened on paper, the reality looks a lot different, according to former UK Member of the European Parliament, Nigel Farage.
“In theory, we had our ‘freedom day’, they called it, last Monday,” Farage told The Cats Roundtable on Sunday. “But actually, huge numbers of people are being forced to self-isolate.”
Farage, who spearheaded the Brexit movement, railed against the “heavy government restrictions” imposed on UK citizens, telling The Cats Roundtable the confusion could “go on for months.”
“The rules keep changing here,” Farage said. “We had half a million people who had gone to France on holiday, on business, thinking they could come home.”
While Farage praised the UK for its vaccine roll-out compared to lagging EU efforts, he said the leaders had fallen short of Brexit’s goals, which included securing the borders.
He told The Cats Roundtable the UK faced “the same problem” as the US does on the US-Mexico border: an immigration crisis.
“1,300 people crossed the English Channel this week from France,” Farage told The Cats Roundtable but clarified that while UK prime minister Boris Johnson was “in trouble,” the crisis was ‘nothing like the trouble” facing the US and President Biden.
“The numbers coming into America now are mind-blowing,” Farage said, “and it means that effectively, because of the dispersal of people, every state becomes a border state.”
And while Brexit aimed at putting the fate of the UK back into its own hands, Farage critiqued leaders on both sides of the Atlantic for turning the fear of inflation into a full-blown specter.
“The western world is entering into a new phenomenon,” he declared. “It’s called inflation. Everyone thought it had gone away. It hasn’t. It’s come back.”
He reflected that the government was repeating many of the same mistakes that led to the dramatic inflation of the ’70s and ’80s, calling it a “disease of money that is caused by government” spending.
Farage told The Cats Roundtable he was taken aback by Biden, the Federal Reserve, and the Bank of England’s lackadaisical response, which didn’t seem bent on stopping the inflation: in fact, Farage believes their decision-making seems intent on causing it.
“During the pandemic, the government had run up massive debt,” he explained. “We’re going to see a policy that allows inflation so that they can reduce their debt burdens. And that’s going to have huge implications for ordinary families paying the weekly shopping bill; for savers who, if they leave their money in cash, will see it devalue; and I think that the lessons from the ’80s are: once you have got this disease of inflation, it takes a very long time to cure.”
