Wait, who is the UK's Nigel Farage?
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Ready? And good morning. This is the Daily Oz. This is the Daily Oz. This is the Daily Oz. Oh. Now it makes sense.
MUSIC
Good morning and welcome to The Daily Oz. It's Thursday the 9th of July. I'm Elliot Laurie.
Who is Nigel Farage and what is his political background?
I'm Billie Fitzsimons.
Yesterday, right-wing politician Nigel Farage resigned from the UK Parliament.
Today, I will resign as a Member of Parliament for Clacton-on-Sea, thereby forcing a by-election.
The resignation comes as an investigation into his finances is currently underway. But who exactly is Farage and why have we been hearing so much about him lately? On today's podcast, we're going to get to the bottom of that question and work out why he's just walked away from the seat that took him seven attempts to win.
Elliot, there is so much going on in UK politics at the moment. And I feel like I've always known a lot about US politics. I have to admit that I don't know that much about UK politics. So I'm excited for you to explain it to us today. What I do know is that Nigel Farage is a politician in the UK that in recent years, maybe even in the past 12 months more so, his popularity has increased exponentially. Yes. I keep hearing about him and it's, I think, kind of mimicking a little bit what's happening in Australia with the rise of Pauline Hanson. Yes. I know that their policies are somewhat similar. Yeah.
But not exactly the same, but yeah.
Yes. So I think before we get to his resignation, kind of slash not really resignation.
Put a pin in that.
Yes. I think we should go back to the basics and explain to anyone like me who knows that he is this really important figure or becoming a more important figure in UK politics, but doesn't know exactly who he is.
Let me tell you about him.
Yes, go.
So he is the leader of Reform UK, which is Britain's right-wing populist party. He's been a politician on and off for almost three decades now, or I think it's actually even over three decades. And before that, he was actually a commodities trader in London. Do you know what that is?
A commodities trader. Putting me on the spot.
It's a little bit different to like a stockbroker where they're dealing with companies. Commodities is things like oil, gold. So they're trading those sort of physical items, but they're trading the value of them.
Right. So trading physical things.
But he's not actually trading a gold bar. He's trading on the value of gold.
I see.
Or he was anyways. Cool. So he's now 62 years old. He was born in Kent, which is in the southeast of England. And after leaving his career as a commodities trader, he built a bit of a reputation for being what's kind of been described as the architect of Brexit. Brexit famously being the policy that saw the UK leave the EU. Right.
Yes. And so he was a proponent of Brexit.
Yeah, so he's actually described as the architect, so the creator of the idea. And he definitely was someone who worked to get it across the line in terms of campaigning for the referendum and campaigning for a yes vote to leave the EU.
Right. And that was 10 years ago, right? It was in 2016 that the referendum happened.
Yes, but the UK didn't formally leave the EU until 2020. Much later, yes. What's a really interesting point in this discussion is that Farage was actually an MP in the EU parliament up until that point in 2020. So he kind of built this reputation as the leader of it's called UKIP, which is the UK Independence Party, their whole platform being leading the EU. And he built this reputation on this whole platform of wanting to separate from the EU whilst he was working directly inside the parliament of the EU and kind of getting paid by them to separate.
That's so interesting.
Yeah.
That's like me plotting tedious downfall.
Yes, exactly.
Whilst I'm in the house.
Yes.
Not quite like that, but let's just go with it. So how does he get from that to, well, I guess it makes sense that once the UK left the EU, he was out of a job.
By his own intentions, yes.
And so then he straightaway becomes a British politician?
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