Stephen Collinson, CNN, February 26, 2015

British euro-skeptic firebrand Nigel Farage touted his “revolution” against political elites and warned against mass immigration as shared the spotlight with the Republican Party’s top presidential hopefuls on Thursday.

Farage, whose UK Independence Party is tipped to eat into the vote of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives in the UK general election in May, also slammed the “cowardly” politics of multiculturalism before an appreciative audience of grass roots conservatives outside Washington.

“I am here today as the leader of an insurgent political force in the United Kingdom–a force that has taken on the political establishment and rocked them to the backs of their heels,” Farage declared at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Farage drew parallels between his own populist message and that of the conservative base vote in the Republican Party. He said he didn’t want to “meddle” in American politics, but said the GOP needed to win back the blue collar voters that became known as “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s if it is to win the White House back in 2016.

“UKIP began to achieve success because the issues that we were talking about were the very issues that our political elite refused to discuss and the very issues that our so-called liberal media said should not be discussed in polite company,” Farage said.

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