Brexit flotilla to hit Thames after Cameron bruising

UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage confronted by the media before his speech focusing on the upcoming EU referendum in London. (Photo: AP)

UKIP leader Nigel Farage said on Friday he would lead a flotilla up the Thames to campaign for Brexit, seizing momentum after a bruising television debate for Prime Minister David Cameron. Mr Farage, who heads the UK Independence Party, said he would board a trawler at the head of a 60-boat procession which will sail to the Houses of Parliament on June 15 in a mass protest organised by campaign group “Fishing for Leave”. “It will be big, visual and dramatic, and the demand will be clear — we want our waters back,” he told LBC radio, arguing that Britain’s fishing industry was in decline because of European Union quotas.

Some recent polls suggest the “Leave” campaign is getting a boost from its call to cut back on the hundreds of thousands of EU workers who move to Britain every year.

Guardian/ICM polls published on May 31 showed the “Leave” vote with 52 per cent compared with 48 per cent for “Remain” in a surprise result that immediately sent the pound sinking against the euro and dollar.

The “poll of polls” average compiled by the independent WhatUKThinks website, however, still puts the “Remain” camp just ahead with 51 per cent when undecided voters are excluded.

The flotilla is one of several colourful initiatives planned by Brexit campaigners ahead of the June 23 vote, including a baking contest featuring anti-EU recipes and a pop concert in Birmingham. Former London mayor Boris Johnson attended a livestock auction on Thursday, telling farmers that Brexit would cut EU red tape and reassuring them that they would continue to receive subsidies.

Mr Cameron came under strong pressure in a live question and answer session on Sky on Thursday when a 22-year-old student accused him of “scaremongering” and running a “complete shambles” of a campaign.

Soraya Bouazzaoui, whose parents emigrated to Britain from Morocco, at one point interrupted the prime minister, telling him: “I’m an English literature student, I know waffling when I see it.”

Cameron told the hostile audience that voting “Leave” would be an act of “economic self-harm”.

“As we go home, as we wake up in the morning, we look at our children and our grandchildren in the eye... Let us not roll a dice on their future,” he told the audience at the end of the show.

“Britain doesn’t succeed when we quit, we succeed when we get stuck in, we work to improve these organisations and we safeguard the prosperity and the security of our great country,” he said.

But reviews of his performance were ruthless.

“Mr Cameron savaged as voters revolt,” read a front-page headline in the Daily Telegraph, while the Daily Mirror said he “took far more blows... Than he would like” and The Sun described it as a “tense clash”.

The British leader took to the airwaves on ITV’s Good Morning Britain again on Friday, arguing that EU reforms he had negotiated on access to welfare for EU workers in Britain would cut immigration numbers.