Farage accuses May of stealing his policies

Former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage has accused Prime Minister Theresa May of stealing his policies and implanting them into her campaign for the upcoming general elections.

Farage told ITV on Sunday that May has been copying the style he adopted in 2013, which helped him win the local council elections “on a manifesto of bringing back grammar schools, getting Britain outside the European Union, controlling immigration.”

“Four years on, the British prime minister was running on exactly the same ticket and swept the board,” he said.

“She is using exactly the same words and phrases that I have been using for 20 years. I thought bashing Brussels bureaucrats was purely my domain,” Farage said, referring to May’s recent attacks against the European Union (EU).

Last Wednesday, May said the “bureaucrats of Brussels” were using Brexit as an excuse to influence the outcome of the June 8 snap vote.

She also attacked the European media, saying they had “misrepresented” her government’s stance on negotiations concerning the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.

Farage, a main Brexit leader, has been an outspoken critic of Brussels ever since last July, when 52 percent of Britons voted to end their country’s decades-long membership in the EU.

In early April, Farage drew an analogy between the EU and the mafia, saying the bloc was keeping the UK hostage.

“You’re behaving like the mafia, you think we’re a hostage, we’re not! We are free to go!” he said during a rant at the European Parliament. Faced with criticism from others, he sarcastically changed mafia with “gangsters.”

SS