Prime minister claims he is handing over country in ‘better shape’ than he found it
Ben Quinn is a Guardian political correspondent.
Nigel Farage has made an explicit pitch for support from an international gathering of thousands of social conservatives and hard-right activists, likening “family breakdown” to “community breakdown” as populations grew more diverse.
The Reform UK leader was speaking a day after the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference, which is backed by influential right-wing funders including including donors to Donald Trump.
“I think family breakdown is pretty much the same as community breakdown,” Farage said in an interview on the event’s main stage with Philippa Stroud, the Tory peer who set up ARC with others including the controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and Paul Marshall, one of the backers of GB News.
When people live together in the same communities and they all speak the same language and they all have something in common and they all know their neighbours’ christian names and they all take part in community events ... And when that starts to break down what happens? People become more individualised, more selfish.
They don’t know the names of their next door neighbours and I think downstream of that a similar thing has happened in families and I am not pretending that government can on its own wave a magic hand. But we can at least start to make the argument that living in a family, living in a genuine sense of community, is a better way of life and start unashamedly champion that.
