Ezra Levant highlights Nigel Farage’s Reform UK victory in Clacton-on-Sea (July 5), securing just four of 13 predicted seats due to the first-past-the-post system, despite 17% of the vote. Farage blames media manipulation and rejects joining the Conservatives, calling them "ghastly." Five pro-Gaza candidates won in Muslim-heavy districts, signaling a shift toward sectarian politics over British identity, with Farage warning of "demographic replacement" altering demographics—like Malmö’s loss of Swedish cultural markers. Reform UK aims to grow by targeting Labour votes, positioning itself as a center-right alternative ahead of the 2029 election, while Farage vows to revive Clacton’s tourism and economy. The episode underscores rising tensions between immigration-driven identity changes and national cohesion in Western democracies. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm at the Clacton Pier in the town of Clacton-on-Sea.
You can hear the seagulls around me.
It's a lovely British town.
It's, I don't know, about a 90-minute drive outside of London.
There's an immaculately groomed park near the War Memorial.
There's lovely hotels along the Boardwalk, lots of fish and chips places, lots of pubs to get a pint.
And behind me is a pier with an amusement park.
Right now, it's too windy and blustery.
It looks like it's really not operating.
There's, you know, life in this town, but there's also sorrow.
We saw drug addicts.
We saw people who were down on their luck.
You can see, I think, symbolically, I'm looking at a bunch of flags, the Union Jack, they're ripped in half.
They're still flying, half of them that is, but no one has either noticed or cared enough to replace them.
It's still, it's a town that has opinions and wants to fight back.
And last night, it elected Nigel Farage as their member of parliament.
Nigel Farage, of course, is famous for leading the Brexit movement that got the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.
He was the head of a party called UKIP, the UK Independence Party, and he became a member of the European Parliament, where he would antagonize the socialists and globalists there.
After winning that battle, he dabbled in politics a bit, but he really became a pundit and a speechmaker.
He had another important public moment when he was debanked by a bank called Coots.
And by debanked, I mean they suddenly said to him, we don't want your business anymore, and we're not going to tell you why.
He did a kind of privacy request and he found out it was his politics that had him fired.
He pushed back.
The bank had a disastrous PR implosion and he won a battle against debanking.
Those are two important victories for the public interest.
Number one, Brexit, and number two, fighting debanking.
But a month and four days ago, I guess, Nigel Farage jumped in for his third political act, namely leading the new Reform Party here in the UK, a party whose name he himself says pays homage to the Canadian Reform Party.
And last night, it had a similar result to the Reform Party in the early 90s when it received millions of votes in the British election yesterday, largely at the expense of the tired and spent Conservative Party that is Conservative in name only.
If you recall, when the Reform Party had its success in 1993, that was after nine years of Conservatives under Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell.
And by the time that was over, the party was more corrupt than Conservative and people were just sick of it.
Well, imagine if that had drawn on for another five years, if it were 14 years of corrupt, rudderless Conservatives.
That's what it was here in the UK, 14 years.
And in the last year or so, the party had changed leaders a number of times from Boris Johnson to Liz Truss to Rishi Sunak.
I'm forgetting these names, but they're all just footnotes in history.
Rishi Sunak being perhaps the least charismatic, least relatable politician I've ever seen at that level.
And that says a lot because Kier Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, is fairly robotic too.
It was like they were having a contest of who could be less relatable, who would you less like to have a beer with.
So last night was an election and the results were interesting.
We came here, as you know, to study Reform UK and to study Nigel Farage and his chief electoral promise of cutting off mass immigration.
As I mentioned to you yesterday, this has been a key issue for Nigel Farage, frankly, one of the reasons the UK voted for Brexit.
Nigel Farage has gone out in the English Channel in a small boat to personally observe these dinghies coming over from France with migrants claiming refugee status.
You don't need to be a refugee from France.
It is a perfectly safe country.
The only reason to go from France to the UK is if you want more free benefits.
That's not the definition of a refugee.
Nigel Farage was against mass immigration, especially illegal, fake, bogus mass immigration.
That's one of the things that we talked about yesterday when we went and did our streeters, our interviews with people on the street.
Some people were shy about explaining why they were supporting Nigel Farage, but those who did speak out often mentioned the immigration issue.
When we got to the vote counting center, which is an interesting story in itself, the Brits bring all of their votes to one central building and then they hand count them.
First, they hand verify them, then they hand count them.
And in fact, it took until almost 4 a.m. last night.
Oh my God, I was so tired.
And our videographer Ed, it was, I mean, I had hopped on a night flight.
I mean, I don't know.
I think I was going 36 hours or something, but it was quite something to see an all-paper count.
No computers, no touchscreens.
So the confidence people have in the vote was very, very high.
Anyways, when we arrived at the counting center, like six hours early, and the election ended formally at 10 p.m., the exit poll data was put on all the TBs.
And by exit poll, you know what I mean by that.
It's people who are asked voluntarily when they're leaving a polling place, how did you vote?
And they answer that.
And it's a way of sort of guessing or predicting several hours early what the result will be.
And the exit poll information that was published at around 10 p.m. was that the Labour Party had a huge win.
The Conservative Party had been cut in half, and that the Upstart Reform Party led by Nigel Farage had a toehold.
They had 2% of the seats, 13 seats out of a parliament of 650.
And that's exciting because getting Nigel Farage into parliament, getting his Upstart Party a toehold, that's what we came here to study.
And it was a victory of sorts.
What quickly became apparent, though, was the nature of the first past-the-post electoral system that they have here, just like we have in Canada.
And it turns out, when the dust has settled, and here we are the morning after, that the Labour Party in the UK did not actually increase their vote.
I think they went up by about 1%, but they received really a landslide majority.
Two-thirds of all the seats in Parliament belonged to the Labour Party, but they only got one-third of the vote.
Just one-third of the vote.
In fact, the party leader himself, Kier Starmer, who's an MP for London, his own personal vote almost fell in half.
I think he got around 36,000 votes last time, down to 18,000.
It wasn't an enthusiastic win for the Labour Party at all.
It was people just absolutely disgusted with the Conservatives moving to reform.
And reform got approximately 17% of the vote.
Forgive me if my stats aren't exact.
And in the end, they didn't get 13 seats.
They only got four.
So they got four seats out of 650.
That's not even 1%.
Four.
You could put them in a little mini Austin Mini or whatever those tiny cute British cars are called.
Four.
And yet they came in third in terms of vote count.
If there were a proportional representation system, first of all, the Labour Party would not have a majority.
The Conservatives would be a strong opposition and Reform Party would be in third.
In the end, Reform Party was pretty much last.
There's a tiny Welsh party called Plaid Simru that I think got a few votes less.
So that was sort of a, I don't know, like air going out of the balloon when the Reform Party thought it had 13 seats, but wound up with four.
Now, Nigel Farage is a charismatic speaker, and he'll make the most of that.
And perhaps it's a good thing because I don't think he even knew who all of his candidates were, and there may have been some wobbly ones elected.
But in the light of day, the morning after the exuberance of Reform Party breaking through, it's still a factor for sure.
But the massive dominant majority of the Labour Party is what terrifies me.
And I mentioned a moment ago that if there had been proportional representation, it wouldn't look that way.
Nigel Farage's Impact00:11:54
But what does the word if do?
That's a hypothetical, imaginary scenario.
As the old saying goes, if grandma had wheels, she'd be a wagon.
Yeah, if.
If is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
The rules are the rules.
And under those rules, Labor has a dominant majority.
And they are radical, transformative, left-wing activists.
And I am actually terrified by what they're going to do on everything from censorship that Keir Starmer deeply believes in to, you know, obviously environmental extremism, ultra-low emission zones.
They're fully into 15-minute cities.
Here's a clip of Keir Starmer, the new incoming British prime minister, saying if he had to choose, he prefers Davos and the World Economic Forum to Westminster's parliamentary system.
I mean, the guy just says it.
Let's just ask you quickly.
You have to choose now between Davos or Westminster.
Davos.
Why?
Because Westminster is too constrained and, you know, it's closed and we're not having meaning.
Once you get out of Westminster, whether it's Davos or anywhere else, you actually engage with people that you can see working with in the future.
Westminster is a tribal shouting place.
Oh, he's going to be like Justin Trudeau, a blander Justin Trudeau.
Here's a picture of Kirstarmer taking a knee in response to the George Floyd riots in the United States.
George Floyd is an American personality.
He was killed in a police incident.
I'm not going to get into the details of George Floyd other than to say it's an American thing.
But here's Keir Starmer taking a knee.
So he's about racial grievances.
He's about economic grievances.
And he has this massive result, even though he has the weakest mandate of prime ministers in decades.
But what actually scared me the most when I got up this morning after having went to bed at 4 a.m.
Well, actually, I'll get to that in a moment because I want to just show you one video from last night before I forget.
As you know, I had to file my Ezra Levance show on time to go up, but we were in the election office.
I'm not even kidding, almost till 4 a.m.
So the actual results we didn't get on yesterday's show.
It was sort of exciting because Nigel Farage showed up and the entire national press gallery was there because Nigel Farage is an interesting character.
And would the Reform Party break through and what would the results be?
So there were probably almost 100 reporters at what would be a sleepy seaside constituency.
And when Farage showed up, it was after three, I'm sure.
I tried to get a couple questions in and I succeeded.
In fact, I got two questions to the guy and I felt pretty good about that because the regime media here is just as bad as Canada.
They're atrocious.
But here's a couple questions I put to Nigel Farage last night and I'm glad I did.
Take a look.
Is the result a rebuke of the media?
Is the result a rebuke of the British media?
Oh, well, it's a rebuke, actually, of the entirety of the political system.
It's not just the media, it's the electoral system we've got.
It's so many of these things.
And, you know, Britain is broken.
Britain needs reform.
That's our slogan, and I believe in it now more than I've ever believed in it.
Thanks.
What do you think of the exit, Paul?
Are you going to get those fair things soon?
I've no idea.
Will flood a bit of peace to be happy you've won this abroad?
I very much doubt it.
Did you gain more votes from Labour than you thought you might?
I think in the north of England, yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And really, you know, Labour have won this election without any enthusiasm at all.
And we'll now be going after the Labour vote.
You watch.
What's a good vote share for reform for tonight?
What do you want vote share-wise?
As many as possible.
What do you think weren't Lee Anderson?
I've no idea.
You're the clever people, not me.
What do you think's World Lee Anderson?
Lee Anderson.
Do you know what?
Lee Anderson has won because he had the courage to jump to reform.
There are many Conservative MPs who tonight will lose their seats because they lack that courage.
And the really big message is this.
Geographically now, in most of the country, a vote for the Conservatives actually splits our vote and is a vote for Labour.
The argument they've used against us can never be used again.
Would you like to be leader of the Conservative Party now, Mr. Farage?
Conservative Party?
What a ghastly bunch they are.
I wouldn't want to join them.
How awful.
What a terrible idea.
Yeah, the media was just absolutely abominable towards him the whole campaign.
I mean, not just condemning him, which is their right, not just ignoring his successes, which is their right, but actually setting him up, hiring an actor to play a racist on his campaign.
That's something that a TV channel called Channel 4 did.
Handpicking people in a grassroots town hall who were actually activists.
So the media was atrocious, and I think he liked my question about a rebuke to the media.
And there were some places where reform picked up votes from Labour.
So that's how I went to bed last night, feeling pretty excited about Nigel Farage, thinking that he, in fact, would win 13 seats.
But I woke up to him winning four.
And I woke up to the astonishing news that across the UK, in areas where there is a large Muslim population, five candidates won simply on a pro-Gaza platform.
So they weren't with any party.
There was not a Muslim party in the UK that I know of.
There might technically be, but I didn't see any evidence of it.
Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left socialist former leader of the Labour Party, he won as an independent, Gaza being a key part of his platform.
And four others.
Here's a constituency in Birmingham, the second city of the UK, where a Labour candidate won, but a Islamist challenge narrowly lost, if I understand the breakdown there.
And watch how the Labour candidate who is a woman is shouted out, shouted at and heckled by pro-Gaza extremists in the crowd.
Take a look at this.
This is a Labour woman in a Labour district.
Take a look.
This election has been the worst election I have ever stood in.
Today, a brilliant community activist who puts on events for every single part of our community came out to campaign with me and people filmed her on the streets and then slashed her tires.
A young woman, a young woman on her own delivering leaflets, was filmed and screamed at by a much older man in the street.
Today, I was to be joined by the family of Joe Cox, who wanted to come out and campaign with me.
And there is absolutely no way I could have allowed for them to see what was aggressive and violence in our democracy.
She's terrified, I think.
And in, like I say, a total of five districts, the Muslim candidate, pro-Gaza candidate won.
So those are districts that in the past were Labour districts.
So Labour now, having lost five seats to the Islamist faction, will surely be tilting hard to the Gaza left because all of their MPs who had a narrow win will be saying if we don't do so, we're going to lose next time.
Here's a chart I saw by one analyst showing how in this multi-party world in the first past the post system, the margin of victory for most MPs is much smaller this time than it was last time.
So if there's four, five, ten, fifteen percent of a community that's Muslim and that is voting based on ethnic lines, that's going to command the attention of all party leaders much more than if we were in a world with large majorities.
And of course, there are some districts with 20, 30% Muslim population.
Those places in the UK are going full on Gaza expat politics.
There's an interesting wrinkle here in that Keir Starmer's wife is Jewish.
And I see news that she intends to keep the Jewish Sabbath at 10 Downing Street.
I don't know what that means.
I can't imagine she's religiously observant in a significant way.
But it'll be fascinating to see what Keir Starmer himself does.
Does he tack his party to the hard anti-Israel left?
Does he change the way the party votes?
Does he put sanctions on Israel?
It would not surprise me if he does those things despite his own wife's Jewishness.
So I wake up today excited that Nigel Farage is in parliament, but I also wake up terrified for the future of this country.
I should say that it's not just a labor problem.
The last 14 years of mass immigration has happened under a Tory watch.
So people who say, well, if you voted for the Reform Party, you're a splitist, and you allowed the Labor to win.
I don't think you can say that.
I think the Conservatives stood for nothing.
They really were you could find no difference between them in significant policies between them and the Labor.
I'm worried that unintegratable, unassimilable immigration will continue.
I'm worried that it will, in fact, increase.
I'm worried that sectarian voting will increase, that there will be true no-go zones in the UK where entire political apparatuses start to resemble places in Pakistan, for example, or Syria,
where city councillors, mayors, MPs, police, social services, the entire institutional nature of towns and cities will cease to be British in anything other than postal code.
I'm in Clacton, which is a fairly white city, and we heard people tell us that they left London, not just because the cost of living is absurd, which is a function of immigration, but because that's not, they didn't feel at home there anymore.
I think there's a lot of white flight from London, but that's going to happen not just in London, but Manchester, Birmingham, and any other places.
The United Kingdom is changing.
United Kingdom's Shift00:06:55
When Tommy Robinson was on tour with us in Canada, he talked about demographic change, and frankly, some of the language he used was harsh.
He talked about demographic replacement, and that's a delicate matter to talk about.
But whether it's the purpose or just the effect, it is happening.
I mean, in the UK, mass immigration and a high birth rate means the demographic, the demographics of this country are changing.
And whether that's an accident or an unintended consequence or an intended one, it is the consequence.
And I think that there will come a tipping point when certain places no longer are British in any essential meaning of that term.
You might recall a few years ago I went to the Swedish city of Malmo, which is just across the sea from Copenhagen.
Malmo is about, well, when I was there, it was about 40, 45% Muslim, and I'm sure it's much more now.
And I was in a neighborhood called Rosengard for the entire day I was there.
I saw just one ethnic Swede.
And it dawned on me what makes Sweden Swedish?
Is it its geographical location?
Is it the buildings?
Or is it the people?
And I saw just one Swede left.
And how long before they rename Rosengard or Malmo itself?
Why would you keep those Swedish names if it's now essentially Islamic in character?
And we see the tearing down of history, the tearing down of statues, the tearing down of figures in the past historically.
I think they're raising to the ground, they're tearing down all traces of British history and culture and national identity.
And into that void, many things come.
Environmentalism comes, other, you know, communism, wokeism.
But I think the most powerful and confident ideology that's coming into that void is Islamism.
That is political Islam.
And I find it absolutely terrifying that there are five members of parliament, more than in the Reform Party, who are elected on a Gaza platform, nothing to do with the British interest, everything to do with a sectarian interest.
It's a gloomy gray day here.
I've never seen the sea that colour.
It's sort of a dirty green color, those British flags ripped in half, fluttering in the wind, the shrieking of the seagulls.
That's how it feels here, not just observing the outdoors.
That's how I think the politics in this country feels.
I love the United Kingdom and I want to see it and I want my kids to see it, but I think it's changing and I don't know what it'll look like in 25 years.
And I'm a Canadian though, and I don't know what Canada is going to look like in 25 years.
You know, there's a saying, if you continue on the path you're on, you're going to wind up where you're going to.
And we are going to the same destination that the UK is.
Justin Trudeau has quadrupled immigration.
He has no values testing.
We see that on the streets with the anti-Semitic, anti-Canada hate marches that go unchecked, unchecked by politicians and police that are starting to do the same political math as here.
I should say that Kirstarmer's vote fell in half, and much of that went to a pro-Gaza candidate to his left in his own constituency.
I'm scared about the UK, but I'm not a Brit.
I'm scared about Canada, and I am Canadian, and I think that's something we have to think about.
I'm going to head back to Canada now.
Thanks for joining me on this adventure in the UK.
And hopefully we can learn some lessons from the Brits.
Well, Mr. Returning Officer, all here at Tendering.
And I have to say, fellow candidates, it's been a well-run, well-fought, and remarkably clean election battle.
Well, I think we'll all agree on that.
And thank you for your services.
I promise that I will do my absolute best as a member of parliament.
Leave the, but it's not quite the same link or same responsibility with constituents.
I will do my absolute best to put Clangton on the map.
I'll do my best to bring more tourists.
I'll do my best to try and bring some private investment.
It's over 30 years ago that I fought my first parliamentary by-election.
I fought lots of them over the years.
And I've had big successes in European elections and perhaps less so under First Past the Post, which is a very demanding, very, very demanding problem for smaller parties.
I will say this.
It's four weeks and three days since I decided to come out of retirement and throw my hat in the ring.
I think what Reform UK has achieved in those just few short weeks is truly extraordinary.
Given that we had no money, no branch structure, virtually nothing across the country, we are going to come second in hundreds of constituencies.
How many seats we're going to win, I don't know.
But to have done this in such a short space of time says something very fundamental is happening.
It's not just disappointment with the Conservative Party.
There is a massive gap on the centre right of British politics.
And my job is to fill it.
And that's exactly what I'm going to do.
But it's not just what we do in Parliament as a national party that matters.
It's what we do out around the country.
Getting 5,000 people in that room in Birmingham last week, the energy, the optimism, the enthusiasm, the belief that Westminster is just completely out of touch with ordinary people says to me that my plan is to build a mass national movement over the course of the next few years and hopefully be big enough to challenge the general election properly in 2029.
What is interesting is there's no enthusiasm for Labour.
There's no enthusiasm for Starma whatsoever.
In fact, about half of the vote is simply an anti-conservative vote.
This Labour government will be in trouble very, very quickly.
And we will now be targeting Labour votes.
We're coming for Labour.
Be in no doubt about that.
I want to thank the team that have helped me do this over the last few weeks, my fellow candidates who are behaving as impeccably as they have.
Believe me, folks, this is just the first step of something that is going to stun all of you.