Nigel Farage calls for tactical voting to deliver Brexit Party victory in Peterborough

Mr Farage encouraged voters to elect Brexit candidate Mike Greene to Parliament who, he assured, “will get Brexit done”.

Speaking to an audience of about 120 people packed into the conference room at the Great Northern Hotel, Mr Farage said: “Peterborough disproves much of what is being written and said about politics and elections.

“In 2015, when I led UKIP here in Peterborough, UKIP got a big, solid 16 per cent of the vote and the Conservative candidate, Stewart Jackson, won the seat.

“When it came to 2017 UKIP decided not to stand against Stewart Jackson because we felt at that time we might split the Leave vote, and guess what happened! Stewart Jackson lost to the Labour Party.

“We all know that in 2019 there will be large numbers of Labour voters who will vote for the Brexit Party because they feel betrayed by Jeremy Corbyn.

“They wanted to Leave the EU and all he now offers them is a second referendum which is simply never going to happen.

“But these are people who will never vote Conservative. They wouldn’t vote Conservative if you paid them. But they will vote Brexit because they want out of the EU.

“So, the idea that a vote for the Brexit Party puts Corbyn in Downing Street is absolutely wrong and has been utterly disproved by history here.”

Mr Farage stated that in his opinion the turnout at the election was likely to be low, but added: “We need to encourage tactical voting here in Peterborough.

“All over the country people are making assessments of ‘do they want to get a Remainer or a Leaver into Parliament?’ and that’s because we now identify more with those particular tags than we do with any particular political party.

“The problem we had here in Peterborough was that many people still voted Conservative, even though they knew that Mike Greene was the main challenger and tactical voting will correct that.

“Firstly, the Brexit Party and Mike Greene absolutely stand for a clean-break from the institutions of the European Union and he will hold Boris Johnson to account.

“Secondly, we cannot just go back to business as usual – we need radical political reform in this country. Increasingly we look at the institutions of our nation - the House of Lords, the postal voting system - with contempt, and Mike Greene is going to be a radical campaigner to change politics for good.”

Mr Farage confirmed that there are now 274 Brexit Party candidates fighting for seats up and down the country on December 12.

One of his concerns was the way that the postal voting system can easily be corrupted as happened in Peterborough 15 years ago.

There have been allegations of it happening since, but none of these have ever been proven by the police.

Mr Farage said: “The postal vote in many constituencies is huge, and it is open – wholesale – to fraud and intimidation.

“I hope that it doesn’t happen here again, but there is that possibility which is why we want to scrap the way postal votes work at the moment – let’s go back to postal votes being for people who live overseas or are elderly and infirm like they used to be.

“That’s what it was designed to do for decades, that’s what it has to go back to, and we will campaign for that.”

Talking about Mr Greene, the Brexit Party leader said: “He’s got this city in his heart and soul, hasn’t he? He must be involved in more local charities that anybody in history.

“He cares about this place, he’s involved in this place, and I think coming into politics in his early fifties from outside of mainstream politics, as an entrepreneur, a businessman and a member of the community, I would think he’s ideally placed to do a great job.”

A list of all the candidates standing in Peterborough can be found on the Peterborough Telegraph website at - https://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/news/politics/general-election-every-candidate-standing-in-peterborough-s-two-constituencies-revealed-1-9143439.