NIGEL Farage’s new anti-lockdown party will be contesting the next Holyrood elections, The National can reveal.
The former UKIP chief has applied to the Electoral Commission to rename his Brexit Party as Reform UK.
In a joint article in the Telegraph, he and party chairman Richard Tice said they felt they needed to take action because lockdowns don’t work and “cause more harm than good”.
According to the paper, hundreds of thousands of pounds is said to have been pledged for the new party.
Farage said he expected to find support among people whose businesses have been affected by the lockdown, such as those in the hospitality industry.
He said: “We feel there is a massive political hole at the moment. The crisis has shown how badly governed we are – everything from our quangos to the £12 billion we have wasted on track and trace to firms being given the most ludicrous contracts. The whole system of government in the UK is not working. Brexit is about making us free, but beyond Brexit we have to be governed better. Brexit is the beginning of what we need. Brexit gives us self-governance – we now need to have good self-governance.”
On Twitter, Tice made clear the ambition of the party.
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He tweeted: “Time for Reform UK: our candidates will stand in elections next May. UK Reform is needed in so many areas so government works for people. People furious with incompetence of Boris’s Government on Covid. There’s a better way.”
Asked specifically if Reform UK would be standing in the Holyrood election, a spokesman for the party said: "Yes."
In their joint article, Tice and Farage called for governments to adopt the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for “focused protection”.
Instead of a lockdown, they call for resources to be targeted towards those most at risk: “the elderly, vulnerable or those with other medical conditions” .
This “focused protection” would, they add, mean “the rest of the population should, with good hygiene measures and a dose of common sense, get on with life”.
Devi Sridhar, the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh and a scientific adviser to Nicola Sturgeon, has long been critical of this approach.
She recently told The New Statesman: “We can’t shield the vulnerable, we tried that, it didn’t work, so a lot of people are going to die ... It will put you into cycles of lockdown and release because of rising hospitalisation. Young people don’t die of this but they are hospitalised: those in their thirties, forties, fifties. And if your hospitals are full, all the other health stuff can’t run, which means you’re forced into a lockdown.
“Then you have long Covid, rising morbidity in young people. We’ve never used this approach to any infectious disease in the past, we’ve never let them spread, we’ve used control and elimination strategies ... Focused protection doesn’t work. It’s unethical and unscientific, it’s telling people what they want to hear and giving it a veneer of scientific credibility.”
In its short existence, the Brexit Party was relatively successful south of the Border, winning 29 seats at the 2019 European Elections.
However, their one Scottish MEP, Louis Stedman-Bryce, resigned in response to the “decision to select a Scottish candidate who has openly posted homophobic views”.
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