Nigel Farage finishes his speech by saying this: What I bring to this now is experience. What I bring to this now is passion. What I bring to this now is a kind of courage – or madness – you can take your own pick, which perhaps you only have when you’ve survived a few close brushes with death and even managed to go through the snake pit while I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!. The qualities that I offer are hard work, passion and yes, I’m not afraid of anything. I’m not afraid of a mob. I’m not afraid of criticism, not afraid of protest. I believe that Reform represents a silent majority in Britain. I believe what you’re witnessing is the beginning of a genuine political revolution, something quite remarkable that is happening and will continue to happen in British politics. And if that means I’m pitted against the prime minister and whoever the leader of the Conservative party may be well, so be it. I think I’m ready for that right now. As is traditional at a Nigel Farage event, he is going to take a lot of questions from the media. He says there are 18 journalists down to speak. We’ll bring you any highlights that emerge. Nigel Farage says that the recently announced deal with the EU is “a total sell-out and something that [Keir Starmer] promised he wouldn’t do.” He describes the situation with the Chagos Islands as “the worst deal I’ve ever seen in my life.” He then says: It’s almost unbelievable that he could have done it and not to have even referred to the Chagossian people, who have suffered terrible racism in Mauritius, terrible racism. And now that this deal is done, they’re now fleeing Mauritius and coming to our country, which they can do, of course, because they are British subjects. But I suppose to Keir Starmer, racism only comes from people without university degrees. He probably doesn’t think it happens between other races. Farage also says Labour has also signed up to the WHO pandemic, and “Everything [Keir Starmer]’s done in the last two weeks has been against our national interest.” As briefed in advance, Nigel Farage has said it is Reform UK policy to lift the two-child benefit cap, and the removal of a universal winter fuel allowance. He says this is “not because we support a benefits culture, but because we believe for lower paid workers, this actually makes having children just a little bit easier for them. It’s not a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve all of those problems, but it helps them.” He continues “And I want to emphasise that this is aimed at British families. It’s not aimed at those that come into the country and suddenly decide to have a lot of children.” He says that people will ask where the money comes from, and says that national debt is now £2.8tn, and says that the party will find savings from quangos, excessive costs in local government, and scrapping what he calls “the DEI agenda” and which he claims is “costing the taxpayer up to £7bn a year throughout the public sector.” Nigel Farage says prime minister Keir Starmer doesn’t believe in anything, and that “while I don’t bear him any personal grudge, I don’t think there’s any malice in him at all” he did not appear to have a plan for government. He makes a point of saying that Starmer had to refer to his notes a lot when speaking outside Downing Street. He accuses Starmer of being “clearly without any great feeling, meaning or passion for the job that was ahead.” Farage says: This prime minister has no connection with working people, no connection with what we used to call working-class communities. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to get up at five o’clock in the morning and go out and work physically hard for the day. He doesn’t seem to understand that the tax burden, the cost of living, energy bills, have meant that people genuinely have had a lower standard of living quite consistently over the course of the last 10 years. He has absolutely no conception as part of the north London set of the genuine damage to community that has been done by mass immigration over the course of the last 25 years. His leadership, frankly, is dismal. It is uninspiring. It is disconnected from real life. It is, in my view, unpatriotic. As expected, he has challenged Keir Starmer to go to “a working man’s club somewhere in the ‘red wall’, and we’ll sit there, and we’ll let them ask us questions” Nigel Farage claims that “the exodus in London and in some other parts of the country is now in full flight.” He says it is “the biggest brain drain we’ve had since the 1970s, and yet no one seems to have woken up to it.” Farage says “there is absolutely no contradiction in saying that we are the party of workers but also the party of entrepreneurs. The two can’t survive and exist and succeed without each other.” Nigel Farage has said membership of Reform UK is now “over 235,000”. He claims “I’m not saying we are already the biggest political party by membership, but we must be very, very close indeed.” He says “as to the Conservatives, I don’t think many in the media class yet really understand the extent to which they are dying as a political party. It’s over. It is done. They have ceased to be a national party. They are now an irrelevance in Scotland, an irrelevance in Wales, a complete irrelevance in the ‘red wall’ where nobody will ever trust them again.” He complains that each week at PMQs “an obscure backbench Labour MP gets up and asks the prime minister a question ‘is it true that the honorable member from Clapton is a complete rotter?’” and because of the format he can’t reply. He says this is a “very low grade government” which is off to the worst start of any government since Anthony Eden. He says he thinks Labour have a problem with their personalities, and slights Rachel Reeves and Jonathan Reynolds. He later says Ed Miliband is “away with the fairies”. He says the cabinet is “a bunch of lawyers … a bunch of people prepared to bow down to this concept of international law, but without the economic competency to run a country.” Zia Yusuf, the Reform UK chair is up next. He has claimed Reform UK has experienced over the last year “the greatest political acceleration in British history, and we’re just getting started.” He thanked supporters and volunteers who he said “stuck their heads above the parapet during an hour of need for their country.” He says that a year ago Reform UK was polling at 10%, and now it is “polling north of 30%”. He also claimed the number of people paid up to Reform UK has increased eightfold from 30,000 a year ago (which my maths makes 240,000). He said: So this is a dark time, no doubt, for our country. There are many people who frankly felt pretty hopeless that no matter whom you voted for, the red team or the dark blue team, you basically got the same thing. What’s clear now is that there is really, for the first time in about a century, a real, viable alternative. The stranglehold the two old parties have had on British politics is decisively over, and now there is hope. There is hope for the people of Britain, for millions across the country, that there can once again be common sense, competence and patriotism brought back to Westminster. And the political class, who, certainly for my lifetime, have failed in their most basic fundamental duty, which is to put the interests of the citizens of the UK first, are facing a reckoning. He then introduces Nigel Farage as “the next prime minister of the UK.” Sarah Pochin, the recently elected Reform UK MP for Runcorn and Helsby byelection, has opened this press conference. She said “The mood of the nation was reflected in the mood of the voters in Runcorn and Helsby, this was their chance to vote for change, and they did in their droves. “Reform had something to prove. It had something to prove to the political establishment, to the pollsters, to you guys – the press, and most importantly, to the public. “We had to prove that if you vote Reform, you get Reform. And they did vote Reform, and they got Reform. This was a powerful win and a powerful message. A vote for Reform can no longer be ridiculed or brushed aside as a protest vote by other parties. A vote for Reform means you get a Reform politician in power.” She said that Reform councillors elected that same night would “make some big changes in the way our local government is run. They are going to bring back common sense to local politics.” She added “we are the real opposition to Labour. We represent the mood of the country and the will of the British people.” Parliament isn’t sitting this week, which is often when Reform UK stage their events, as it maximises the chances of getting airtime. You will be able to watch the Nigel Farage press conference here if you would like. The contents of this press conference from Nigel Farage have been heavily trailled in advance. He is expected to say that Keir Starmer is “a man that puts international courts before British sovereignty” and the “most unpatriotic PM in history.” He will also accuse Labour of lacking the will to bring net migration down to zero, and claim Labour’s recent deal forging closer trade ties with the EU “betrays the very essence of Brexit.” The event is expected to be attended by recently elected Reform UK councillors and mayors, as well as their fifth MP, after the acrimonious suspension of Rupert Lowe, Runcorn byelection winner Sarah Pochin. Pochin was on Times Radio this morning, and PA Media reports she confirmed another element of the Farage speech, that he will commit to more spending on the winter fuel allowance and removing the two child benefit cap. She told listeners: A Reform government will completely reinstate the winter fuel allowance across the board. Why should people who have worked so hard all their lives, paid their taxes, they get to retirement, and they get this payment taken away. It’s an absolute betrayal of that generation. She added that Reform would “support hard working families” with changes to the Married Couples Allowance and the two-child benefit cap “going out the window”. The MP for Clacton last spoke in parliament on 14 May. We’ll bring you any key lines from the Farage press conference as they emerge. The co-leader of the Green party of England and Wales, Adrian Ramsay, has renewed his call for Russia to face greater sanctions. Posting to social media, the MP for Waveney Valley said “Putin has stepped up attacks on Ukrainian civilians because he thinks he’ll face no consequences. Much tougher sanctions are urgently needed to bring him into serious peace talks to end this horrific war.” As well as appearing on the media round today, shadow chancellor Mel Stride has written for the Daily Mail, saying that the Conservatives continue to back the two-child benefit cap. In a post to social media promoting the article, he said “The two-child benefit cap must stay. It’s not just responsible – it’s fair. Labour and Reform must come clean: where’s the money coming from? Will it be more and more debt, or higher taxes? The public deserves the truth.” Separately, speaking on GB News, he said “Nigel Farage today, I believe, is going to stand up and say that they would reinstate the winter fuel payments, that they would also abolish the two child limit, meaning that if you have more than two children on benefits, the taxpayer will pay benefits towards the cost of those decisions. And these are big spending commitments.” Shadow chancellor Mel Stride also took a swipe at Nigel Farage while appearing on GB News this morning, saying the Reform UK leader was “trying to be all things to all people” which was not “serious grown-up politics.” He told GB News viewers: Reform, of course, have done well out of the fact that this is a deeply unpopular Labour government. They’ve done well out of the fact that we have had a crushing general election defeat, but they are now coming under more scrutiny. In their manifesto, Reform said they take everybody earning up to £20,000 out of income tax altogether. That is £60bn worth of commitment. There are £140bn of giveaways and tax cuts in that manifesto. None of it is thought through. None of it has sat down and done the hard yards of working out how that’s all going to be paid for. It is all fantasy economics, and it’s really dangerous for our economy. Reform are now going to come under the kind of scrutiny that they have not faced so far. And I think it’s really important that that happens. What you’re seeing is Nigel Farage trying to be all things to all people, with lots of announcements and no thinking behind how he’s going to pay for any of these things. He will play whatever tune he thinks appeals to the people he’s playing the tune too, but that’s not serious grown-up politics. We’ve got four years to this election, and he’s going to have to try and keep this juggling act going for another four years, and it’s our job to now hold him to account and give him the kind of scrutiny that he has enjoyed not having. What the government has done is to mismanage the economy, destroy a lot of growth and put us in a very parlous position when it comes to the public finances with rising tax rates. That’s not right. What Nigel Farage is doing is just simply running around saying, well, everybody can have whatever they want, including lots of tax cuts. If he gets into government with that approach, the markets are going to run a mile. Shadow chancellor Mel Stride has also been on the media round this morning, and also been attacking Reform UK. Appearing on Times Radio, and with it pointed out to him that the Conservatives were currently fourth in national polling, Stride said “Look, where we are is in a multi-party system at the moment, under first past the post. So things are indeed quite volatile. But these polls will move around.” He continued by saying: Rather than reaching for these quick, popular policies that you’ll see Nigel Farage wheel out left, right and centre, without any thought about how they can be delivered or indeed funded. We’ve got to do the hard, serious, grown-up thinking over the next months and years to get together that policy platform that can truly address the big challenges that our country faces, to put to the British people. And that’s exactly what under Kemi’s leadership, we’re doing. In another section of the interview talking about the Reform UK leader, Stride said “don’t get carried away with this idea that the Nigel Farage is a party of the right, OK? He is about big government.” Stride claimed the Reform UK manifesto at the last election contained “£140bn of giveaways in it, both tax and spending.” The shadow chancellor continued: [Nigel Farage is] now, today, standing up, he’s going to say something about winter fuel payment and the two-child benefit cap, meaning that people can continue to have more children, and that will be funded and covered by the state. That is a left wing position, and it also comes with a price tag of £5bn between those two measures. He has not got a clue as to how any of that is going to be funded. And we’ve seen that playbook before, and it doesn’t lead to a good place. Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has announced new foundation apprenticeships, which she claimed “will make a really big difference to the lives of young people.” Speaking on BBC Breakfast, she told viewers: I’m announcing today a big step change that is really good news for young people across our country. 120,000 new opportunities to get on into trades like construction. So announcing foundation apprenticeships that are an earlier step in the career for young people. But we know we’ve got to go further, because I hear from apprentices how amazing that opportunity is, how optimistic they are about their future. I met with some bricklaying apprentices recently, really optimistic, wanting to start their own business, get on in construction. It’s a brilliant career, but under the Conservatives, too few young people had those opportunities. And we’re refocusing the system, the apprenticeship system, and our training system overall to better support young people and those starting out in this, right at the start of their careers. This government takes skills seriously. It’s time we took skills as a country far more seriously than we’ve done in recent years, and give young people the chance to get on. The shadow business secretary, Andrew Griffith, is unimpressed however. Seizing on the fact that Labour’s new apprenticeship policy also sees government funding cut for some apprenticeships for those aged 22, he described it as “another prejudiced Labour policy which will actively harm businesses, the economy and ladders of opportunity for young people.” The education secretary has defended the removal of tax breaks for private school, saying “the vast majority of parents in our country, what they want is a fantastic state education for their children.” Asked on Sky News about figures suggesting there had been a slight fall in private school students over the last year, and therefore the policy might have costs as well as benefits. She said: I back parents to make decisions about what’s right for them. For some parents that will involve sending their child to a private school, but actually for the vast majority of parents in our country, what they want is a fantastic state education for their children. That’s what we’re delivering. That’s what we’re investing in. And the money that we’re raising by ending the tax breaks the private schools enjoy is being put towards investing in a fantastic state education for children in our country. I think we’ve heard a lot from the private schools over an extended period, scaremongering about the impact. It’s never come to pass. What I’m determined to prioritise is investing in our state schools. And we’ve taken that decision to in to impose VAT on private school fees, to deliver free breakfast clubs, to deliver more teachers, to deliver more investment into our state schools. That’s what a Labour government believes in. The education secretary has said that removing the two-child benefit cap is “not off the table”. Asked on Sky News if it was something the government was considering, Bridget Phillipson said it was “not off the table – it’s certainly something that we’re considering.” She continued, telling viewers “we’ve always been clear that social security measures are an important part of what the child poverty taskforce is looking at. “What I think your viewers will also appreciate is that we inherited a really difficult situation where it comes to the public finances. These are not easy or straightforward choices.” The MP for Houghton and Sunderland South went out of her way to say that the two-child benefit cap was “not something a Labour government would have introduced. It was a Conservative measure.” She said: We had to make some difficult decisions early on in order to stabilise the economy, because it’s working people who lose out when you see the kinds of terrible impact that we saw under Liz Truss. But we know that we have to take action on child poverty. It is the moral purpose of Labour governments to ensure that everyone, no matter their background, can get on in life, and child poverty holds back far too many of our children and young people, and we are absolutely determined to tackle it Phillipson said “it’s personal to me, because, you know, for part of my childhood, I experienced what too many children right now in our country are experiencing, and I know the damage it does.” She said that the government were expanding childcare provision and had raised the minimum wage, adding: That’s the kind of commitment that you get from a Labour government on the side of working people putting more money back into their pockets. The child poverty taskforce will report later on in the autumn. But we’re not waiting for that to take action. We’re already taking serious action to support families right now. Bridget Phillipson has said Reform UK are “just not serious people” when asked about the expected announcement from Nigel Farage later today that it would be their policy to make winter fuel payments universal. She told viewers of Sky News that “I don’t think anybody would seriously believe that millionaires should be getting it.” Broadening her attack on Reform UK, which has been leading in recent polls, the education secretary said: On the wider question of Reform, look, they’re just not serious. They’re just not serious people. It’s not credible. This is a party, after all, that doesn’t believe in the NHS. That would dismantle the NHS as we know it. That has consistently opposed the measures that Labour has brought in to back workers through the employment rights bill, making sure, for example, that more workers can have access to sick pay. Those are the kinds of decisions that Reform are interested in making. The one policy that they have in education is to reintroduce tax breaks for private schools, which would massively undermine our ability to deliver free breakfast clubs, the kinds of measures that working families are benefiting from right now. That’s Reform. That’s who they are. They’re not on the side of working people. They’re not serious about how they deliver change. And every time they get the opportunity to back working people, for example, with better rights at work, they oppose it. Labour party chair Ellie Reeves has launched an attack on the “self-interest” of Nigel Farage ahead of the Reform UK leader making a speech today in which he is expected to label prime minister Keir Starmer “unpatriotic”. Reeves said: Nigel Farage, a private-educated stockbroker and career politician, has only ever cared about his own self-interest and personal ambition, never about what is good for working people in this country. Farage wants to abolish the NHS, praised Liz Truss’ disastrous mini-budget, opposed Labour’s landmark employment reforms and said Jaguar Land Rover, a huge employer, deserves to go bust. His Reform manifesto included billions of pounds worth of unfunded spending pledges but did not commit to the triple lock. Farage must urgently clarify whether he will cut the state pension to pay for his reckless tax cuts. Keir Starmer’s Labour government is delivering real improvement to working people’s lives through our plan for change that has seen NHS waiting lists fall, wages rising faster than prices, and four interest rate cuts in a year, turbo-charged by a trio of trade deals that are good for jobs, bills and borders. Nigel Farage is expected to give his speech at 11am today. Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of UK politics for Tuesday. Here are the headlines … Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has said that removing the two-child benefit cap is “not off the table” as she defended Labour’s record on introducing measures to tackle child poverty Labour party chair Ellie Reeves has said that Nigel Farage cares only about his own “own self-interest” ahead of the Reform UK leader giving a speech this morning in which he is expected to call Keir Starmer unpatriotic Nearly half of all “red wall” voters disapprove of the way Starmer’s government has dealt with benefits-related policy, a poll has found, as ministers faced continued pressure over winter fuel and disability payments, and the two-child benefit cap More than 100 of the UK’s most high-profile disabled people have called on the prime minister to abandon “inhumane and catastrophic plans to cut disability benefits” It is Martin Belam with you today, and you can reach me at martin.belam@theguardian.com via email if you spot typos, errors, omissions or have a question.
Author: Martin Belam