Nigel Farage tells North East 'vote with your heart' at Sunderland rally

Speaking to the Press Association ahead of a rally at the Rainton Arena, the party chairman said: “The polls at the moment show we’re second place to Labour in all of these seats.”

“What I’m saying to people here is… vote with your heart.

“If you believe in what I say, if you believe I’m standing for the right things, if you believe that I’m your champion, vote for us and we can win some of these.”

With just a week until Britain goes to the polls in the General Election, Mr Farage told the rally there was a ‘deep sense of unease’ and something was ‘very wrong’ with the UK: “We all have a deep sense of unease.

“Something is going very, very wrong with the country that we’re part of, with the country that we believe in, with the country we want our kids and grandkids to grow up in.

“We have spent time indoctrinating a younger generation, that everything about our past is wrong. We’ve been poisoning the minds of our young people, that I think is absolutely appalling.

“I want them to learn that whilst not everything in our history is perfect, actually, there is no country in the world with a better past than us.”

Moving on to discuss knife crime, Mr Farage said: “The number of young people out there now threatening people, stealing mobile phones and carrying knives makes us all, wherever we live, think twice about going out in the evening, and I’m aiming this particularly to young people.”

The Reform leader was met with cheers and applause when he discussed small boats crossing the Channel, stating “If it’s not an invasion, what the hell is it?”

He said: “As for the small boats, well, it was me going out into the English Channel repeatedly in the spring of 2020 filming, explaining that unless we got a grip on this, that it would be a huge problem.

“And I dared to use a word, a word so repulsive that it must never be repeated in polite society. A word so awful that I’m to be a pariah for the rest of my life.

“I dared to say that I feared there would be an invasion of small boats across the English Channel. Well now – 4,000 boats and 128,000 people later – if it’s not an invasion, what the hell is it?”