Yahoo Finance Farage claims Hunt's EU Soviet comparison is a 'victory' for UKIP
Nigel Farage has claimed that Jeremy’s Hunt incendiary Brexit rhetoric is a “victory” for UKIP.
The foreign secretary has caused a diplomatic and political storm by comparing the EU to the Soviet Union during his Conservative party speech on Sunday.
The backlash over his comments continued in the European parliament on Tuesday as senior EU figures branded them “insulting” and called for an apology.
But Farage said he was “pleased” to hear Hunt’s comparison and called it a “little victory” for him and his party.
Speaking in Strasbourg, he said: “For a decade here, I’ve noticed that that centralising, authoritarian tone began to sound very like the old Soviet Union – the concept of limited sovereignty of individual nation states.
“I even talked in the past about the Volkerkerker, the old Austro-Hungarian prison of nations. To see the British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, using that language means we have shifted the centre of gravity, we have shifted the debate.”
He also sought to remind the EU of their own provocations during Brexit negotiations, describing the treatment of prime minister Theresa May by European Council president Donald Tusk at the Salzburg summit as “arrogant, low grade, pretty vulgar.”
European commission first vice-president Frans Timmermans said he understood that emotions were running high on all sides at this critical point in the Brexit process.
But he said Hunt’s comparison was “misleading” and “insulting” given that a third of EU commissioners had personal experience of living under Soviet rule.
Lithuania’s EU commissioner, Vytenis Andriukaitis, offered to explain the differences between the two blocs to Hunt based on his experience of being born in a gulag and imprisoned during the Soviet era.
Dear @Jeremy_Hunt
I was born in Soviet gulag and been imprisoned by KGB a few times in my life.
Happy to brief you on the main differences between #EU and Soviet Union. And also why we escaped the #USSR
Anytime. Whatever helps. https://t.co/c2h7gbnj59— Vytenis Andriukaitis (@V_Andriukaitis) October 1, 2018
The European parliament president Antonio Tajani took the unusual step of replying directly to Farage’s speech, saying: “There are differences with the Soviet Union, which caused millions of deaths. I don’t think the EU has done that.”
Hunt was also rebuked by the leaders of almost all the European parliament’s political groups.
Manfred Weber, leader of the largest centre-right group, said Hunt had reached a “new level of populism” and called on him to apologise.
Socialist group leader Udo Bullmann accused Hunt of “irresponsible leadership.”
Green group co-leader Philippe Lamberts: “I shall readily that some statements made after Salzburg were unnecessarily blunt. But they came nowhere close to what we heard from the British foreign secretary, who took over the now common place rhetoric of the far right.”
Liberal group leader and European parliament Brexit chief Guy Verhofstadt told his fellow MEPs they shouldn’t be surprised at the statement given “he once even confused China with Japan.”
That was a reference to an embarrassing gaffe in which Hunt told an audience in Beijing that his Chinese wife was Japanese.
Verhofstadt added: “The previous time he was insulting his wife, but this is something far different: he’s insulting not us but millions of ordinary citizens who have lived under soviet rule for so long time … he has to apologise I think.”
Green MEP Molly Scott Cato offered an apology to MEPs “on behalf of the many British people who respect the brave struggle for freedom fought by our friends in central Europe and the Baltic states.”
“This abuse of history is an insult to those who suffered under Soviet repression,” she said of Hunt’s comments.
MORE: ‘Open a history book’: EU hits back at Hunt over Soviet comparison
