to stand for parliament in a typically colourful speech in which made several eye-catching claims. How many of these were accurate?Essentially, no, this is false. Official statistics showed that 1.2 million people arrived in the UK in the year ending December 2023, which projected over two years makes 2.4 million, but it is incorrect to say they have all “settled”. Many will have arrived on temporary visas, for example students and workers on contracts.
So it is not quite as misleading as the 2.4 million claim – although it doesn’t take account that the UK’s housing crisis is a question of distribution as well as supply, with an estimated 700,000 homes empty at any one time.Farage told the audience: “We are finding what happened after the local elections just a few weeks ago, candidates winning in Leeds, in Burnley, in Bradford and elsewhere, standing shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’, standing shouting ‘we are coming to get you’.
However, there is no evidence of this happening in Burnley or Bradford, two areas that Farage may have named because they have large Muslim populations. There is also no evidence of a candidate saying “we are coming to get you”.Saying the UK was “in economic decline in relative terms”, Farage added: “OK, better than our former partners in the European Union – we’re massively behind America and many other parts of the world.
And if you take the longer term, comparing the first quarter of 2024 against the pre-Covid first quarter of 2019, eurozone growth has been twice as fast – 3.4% against 1.7%.Farage said crime was “so bad now that people generally don’t even bother to report it”, adding: “But it’s OK, you can shoplift up to £200 of kit before anybody is going to prosecute you.”