Labour will be “smashed to smithereens” in the Welsh Parliament election this week, Nigel Farage has declared. Speaking at a Reform UK rally in Merthyr Tydfil on Tuesday, the party leader asserted that Wales has become a “basket case” after being governed by Labour for more than two decades.
Reform and Plaid Cymru have consistently topped opinion polls in Wales ahead of Thursday’s vote, while Labour has dropped into third place. Farage remarked: “The Labour Party have not lost an election in Wales for over a century, think about that. The party that has been able, frankly, to take Wales for granted for over 100 years, on Thursday, will deservedly get smashed to smithereens by the electorate. And, boy, don’t they deserve it.”
The Reform leader has previously indicated that the Senedd election on May 7 serves as a referendum on Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership. During what he called the “last big speech” of Reform’s election campaign, he predicted his party would capture the “patriotic old Labour vote” in both England and Wales.
Farage stated: “We have a Labour Party in government with, I genuinely believe, the worst, the most indecisive, the most hopeless and, above all, the most unpatriotic Prime Minister we’ve ever had in any of our lifetimes.” He added, “And then they’ll probably get someone even worse. Well, it could be the lovely Angela (Rayner). There was a strange moment last year when she was voted the sexiest female in Parliament, and, even more unlikely, I was voted the most sexy male in Parliament. But, I promise you, we haven’t been out, all right, nothing’s happened, I mean, you know, ‘honestly, your honour’.”
He continued: “No, getting rid of Starmer will begin the descending spiral of this government. The realisation that our economy is broken, that the country is, frankly, bankrupt, and will precipitate an earlier general election. And I still believe that a general election next year is likely.”
During his speech, Farage described pro-independence party Plaid Cymru as “anti-English” and “hard leftists”. He said: “The opinion polls will tell you that Plaid are in the lead… Just as they told us that ‘remain’ would win the referendum. Don’t believe what you’re being told, because the key to success for us here on Thursday is very simple. There is already, in my opinion, a majority for good common sense, a majority for decent, patriotic values, a majority that believe, as we believe, that family, community and country are the things that matter to most of us, that we stand up for, defend and fight for. What we actually have to do is get them to actually, physically go to the polling station this Thursday and put their cross in the right place.”
