Political campaign group Led By Donkeys has bought the website “thebrexitparty.com” and is offering to sell it to Nigel Farage for over a million pounds. The group said the entire fee, which will increase by £50,000 each day, would be donated to the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.
The move comes after Brexit Party lawyers contacted Led By Donkeys asking them to remove their logo from the site. The party said the campaign group is refusing to transfer the domain name, which is similar to its official site “thebrexitparty.org”.
Hard-right “lies, lunacy and hypocrisy”
The website features a rising total of the cost. It also features an “election advent calendar”, which offers examples of the “lies, lunacy and hypocrisy” of the Conservatives and the Brexit Party every day until 12 December.
Led By Donkeys co-founder Oliver Knowles told the PA news agency:
When Farage and his millionaire backers set up the Brexit Party they didn’t have the foresight to buy up all of the websites with their own name – and we did…
With the advent calendar, we are telling the story of the Brexit Party and the Tory Party who are now election partners – and the threat they represent to the country.
Asked why they chose the immigrant support charity, Knowles said:
Nigel Farage peddles an ideology of hatred and division and it felt like this would be a good and just cause.
Led By Donkeys bought the domain name earlier this year to challenge Farage’s party during the European Parliament elections in May. It also ridiculed the recent approach from Brexit Party lawyers, saying their legal letter cites European Union law five times as justification of its claim:
In the 8-page legal letter we got from Farage’s lawyers he cites EU law *five* times. Who knew Nigel Farage was such a fan of European law? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/OJOQt0T5yu
— Led By Donkeys (@ByDonkeys) November 21, 2019
“Nigel Farage despises our NHS”
Behind the first door of the advent calendar features a video of Farage saying “we’re going to have to move to an insurance-based system of healthcare”.
Knowles said:
There will be a series of other pieces of information about their collaboration and highlighting the lunacy and hypocrisy of their Brexit position over the past few months…
Some are describing it as the most important election in a generation and we’re inclined to agree.
Farage also faces allegations of antisemitism
On 21 November, meanwhile, the Guardian reported that:
Nigel Farage has faced renewed criticism for discussing tropes and conspiracy theories associated with the far right and antisemitism
It explained that Farage had done “an interview earlier this year with a tiny UK evangelical Christian TV channel, Revelation TV”, which “saw Farage single out Goldman Sachs, the investment bank founded by Jewish immigrant to the US that is often the focus of antisemitic conspiracy theories”. It continued by highlighting previous “criticism from Jewish groups and others after it emerged he also repeatedly used themes associated with antisemitism to criticise the financier George Soros”.
Soros is a Jewish immigrant to the US. People on the far right previously claimed that he was funding refugees fleeing to the US, but there was no proof for this claim. This was the kind of antisemitic conspiracy theory that led one far-right fanatic to murder 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue and may have caused one Donald Trump supporter to send a mail-bomb to Soros just days before that. Soros is the high-profile subject of numerous far-right conspiracy theories around the world. Advisers to hard-right Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, reportedly played a key role in sending these theories “into overdrive”.
Not looking good for Farage
As the Guardian reported, election “coverage of the Brexit party has largely focused on [Farage’s] decision to not stand for a parliamentary seat and to withdraw hundreds of candidates from Conservative-held seats”. But as new allegations focus on “his willingness to engage in discussion of conspiracy theories associated with the far right and antisemitism”, Led By Donkeys couldn’t have picked a better time to rub salt into the wound.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons and Gage Skidmore
