UK’s Nigel Farage set to relaunch Brexit Party as anti-lockdown party

FILE PHOTO: British Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage speaks during a visit at Dover harbour, in Dover, Britain August 12, 2020. REUTERS/Matthew Childs/File Photo

(Reuters) – Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage will relaunch the group as an anti-lockdown party called Reform UK in an attempt to fight anti-coronavirus measures imposed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government.

The new party will back a policy of focused protection from the coronavirus for only the most vulnerable, and allow the rest of the population to develop herd immunity, Farage and party Chairman Richard Tice wrote in an opinion piece in The Telegraph on Sunday.

Papers seeking the name change have been submitted to the Electoral Commission, they added.

The Brexit Party was set up in early 2019 by Farage, whose years of campaigning against membership of the European Union played a major part in delivering the 2016 referendum in which the UK voted to leave the bloc.

“We are showing the courage needed to take on consensus thinking and vested interests on Covid. But there are so many areas of public life that can be improved to benefit ordinary people. That is why we will campaign for Reform”, Farage and Tice wrote.

“We want to be known as the party of Reform. The name reflects the ambition: Reform UK”, they added.

The prime minister on Saturday ordered England back into a lockdown after the UK passed the milestone of 1 million COVID-19 cases and a second wave of infections threatened to overwhelm the health service.

The UK has the world’s fifth-largest official death toll, after the United States, Brazil, India and Mexico, according to a Johns Hopkins University tally.

Reporting by Rebekah Mathew in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter Cooney