Nigel Farage says Labour has 'abandoned' its pro-Brexit voters

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Nigel Farage
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Nigel Farage claimed Labour had "betrayed" its own supporters

Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage says his party will target traditional Labour seats in Wales in a general election.

He said his party will challenge "in seat after seat" because Labour has "completely abandoned" its Brexit-supporting voters.

Mr Farage said the Brexit Party's comfortable victory in Wales in May's European elections was a "good start".

He was speaking at a Brexit Party rally in Newport on Saturday.

Several speakers at the rally were critical of Boris Johnson's attempt to reach a fresh Brexit deal with the European Union, labelling it "the worst deal in history".

The prime minister is in talks with the EU to remove the controversial "backstop" - an insurance policy to keep an open border on the island of Ireland - from Theresa May's Brexit deal.

Mr Farage said: "If we go down that route, we are in for years and years of acrimony because we won't have left anything."

He told his audience he could not think of a part of the UK "less represented" than Wales, saying only one of the 40 Welsh MPs - Conservative David Jones - had consistently voted against Mrs May's Brexit deal in the House of Commons.

Asked by BBC Wales' Sunday Politics programme if his party would be targeting Labour seats in a general election, Mr Farage said: "Absolutely, no question about it.

"We didn't just make a good start in the European elections - looking at polling right now, we are the challengers to Labour here in seat after seat."

In December 2014, when Mr Farage was leading UKIP, he told BBC Wales that his party at the time would be targeting seven or eight Welsh seats in a general election.

But in the 2015 election, UKIP failed to make a breakthrough.

Mr Farage said the circumstances had changed, claiming "Labour at that stage hadn't actually directly betrayed their own voters".

"There was a sense and a feeling that a London-led Labour Party was out of touch with its old traditional seats, but now it's there for all to see," he said.

"The Labour Party wants a second referendum, the movement within the party to be all-out Remain is there, and we'll see it at the conference this week," he added.

Sunday Politics Wales is on BBC One Wales at 10:00 BST on Sunday 22 September.

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