Afternoon summary
For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.
Here is John Crace’s sketch of Nigel Farage’s press conference.
And here is an extract.
Meet the Fockers. The shadow cabinet from hell. Rejects, losers and deadbeats. A freak show. A tribute act.
Reform have often been called a one-man band. The Nigel Farage party. So to counter this narrative, Nige took over Church House in Westminster and turned it into a tacky gameshow set. A remake of The Weakest Link. All to parade his new top team. The lucky men and women whose one job is to try not to fall out with one another in the next few years. No chance.
Farage took centre stage; despite pretences, this was still all about him. His team were here entirely at his whim. Without him they would be nothing. The spotlight would remain on him throughout the 75-minute presentation. His appointees would only get their turn under lights for their five-minute introductions. Then they would be cast back into the shadows. Start as you mean to go on.
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What's happening in Gorton and Denton byelection?
The Gorton and Denton byelection takes place a week on Thursday. Here is a round-up of some of the latest news and comment from the campaign.
Owen Jones has written his Guardian column on what he learned on a visit to the constituency, and he says he found a mood of despair.
Walk the streets of Gorton and Denton now and the resulting draining of trust is easily discernible. Labour took half the vote here in 2024. Now its coalition is splintering in two directions at once: towards Zack Polanski’s Greens on the populist left, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on the Trumpian nationalist right …
What should really frighten anyone invested in the future of democracy is the level of angry disengagement on display here. Some of those I spoke to made clear they had given up on voting: that they now had a solidified contempt towards any politicians. These are citizens that the Greens’ brand of populism has yet to convince.
After so many years of living standards and public services in crisis, the hope that sustained so many people has shrivelled. There is frustration, some apathy, but most obviously despair – and if that despair hardens, it could carry this country into far darker territory. Once trust has been eroded, as is evident here, no one can be sure what happens next.
Hope Not Hate, which campaigns against the far right, says in a blog post those campaigning for Matt Goodwin, the Reform UK candidate in the constituency, include “a former Britain First activist, a former Reform parliamentary candidate who promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media, and the party’s interim campaign manager in Tameside who has used the n-word and minimised the Holocaust”. In response to the report, Goodwin said he rejects extremism.
The Green candidate Hannah Spencer has rejected a challenge from Goodwin to a head-to-head debate. She told him:
Matt, we literally just debated in the BBC studio and last week at the Manchester Evening News hustings. It’s not a game of the best of three. It sounds like you’re concerned you didn’t come across very well and want another go. I’m not sure anyone wants any more of your hot air and I’m focusing my time now on knocking on doors to talk about what really matters to the people of Gorton and Denton
Samir Jeraj has written a report for Hyphen on the battle for the support of Muslim voters in Gorton and Denton. He found that “many local Muslims still hadn’t made up their minds, while others felt alienated by parliamentary politics altogether”. Here is an extract.
One notable political absence is that of the Workers Party of Britain, the populist party led by George Galloway, which won a council seat in the area and 10% of the vote at the last general election. The party has announced that it will not contest the by-election and will instead lend its support to the Greens.
“I think Gorton and Denton is one of those grounds that are unpredictable at the moment,” says councillor Shahbaz Sarwar, who represents the Workers Party for Longsight. “That’s one of the reasons why I pulled back.
“When we looked at the scenario, we thought: there’s so many of us on the left and there’s one on the right. Are we going to divide our votes and are we going for the same pockets? And the answer was yes.”
Paul Burnell has a write-up of the BBC’s byelection debate.
Lord Ashcroft has carried out focus groups with former Labour voters in Gorton and Denton and he says the expect Reform to win. In his write-up, he says:
Focus groups are clearly not a quantitative exercise, but it was notable that whichever party they intended to support (and with a couple of weeks of campaigning still to go) most of our participants expected Reform to win the by-election, possibly by some margin: “I don’t think it’s going to be as close as people think. I think there are going to be secret Reform votes as well.” Some said this expectation actually made it easier for them not to stick with Labour: “Reform are going to win. That’s why I’m voting Green. I would rather fail and know I’d been true to myself than vote tactically.”
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The broadcaster Michael Crick says Channel 4 News will tonight be broadcasting a story based on material contained in his biography of Nigel Farage published some time ago. He says:
When Nigel Farage tried to become a Tory MP. On C4News tonight, Gary Gibbon tells the story - based on my biography - of how in 2004, while a Ukip MEP, Farage secretly met a senior Cons MP & a Surrey councillor, seeking their help to defect & get picked for a safe Tory seat.
Uplift, a group campaigning to support the transition to renewable energy, has accused Richard Tice, named today as Reform UK’s business and energy spokesperson, of promoting a Trumpian fantasy.
Commenting on Tice’s attack on net zero politicies, Uplift’s deputy director Robert Palmer said:
Tice is peddling a Trumpian fantasy. The geological reality is that after 50 years of drilling the UK has now burned most of its gas. Government projections show our reliance on imported gas is set to rise from 55% today to more than two-thirds by 2030, and over 90% by 2050. More drilling won’t make a dent in that. What will is, accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels.
Reform continues to mimic Trump. Like the US president they are enthralled to the oil and gas lobby. The party is stuck in the last century - actively trying to block cheap renewable energy and denying that climate change is happening despite the evidence all around us.
Diane Abbott says Jesse Jackson was 'an inspiration' - and showed why Labour should not stop talking about racism
Chris Osuh is a Guardian community affairs correspondent.
Labour risks losing loyal Black voters for “not talking” about racial equality, Diane Abbott has said, paying tribute to the late civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.
Abbott, the country’s first Black woman MP, told the Guardian that Jesse Jackson’s message of racial equality was still relevant to today, and yet the “Labour party and Keir Starmer don’t talk about racial equality at all.”
She added:
Jesse wasn’t afraid to talk about racism, and I think if we don’t talk about racism, if we don’t challenge it, then the danger is something like Reform, it will just get stronger and stronger.
Abbott said former Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney “was very much of the opinion we had to chase the Reform vote” and that she hoped that his departure marked a turning point for the Labour party, at a time when it risks losing votes to the left.
Asked if she feared Labour risked losing Black voters, who were most likely to vote Labour in 2024, she said:
I think so … If people can’t see the Labour party speaking up for them, they’re going to sort of move away from the Labour party. It depends where you are, but certainly in London, to the Greens.
Speaking of Jackson, she added:
He really is an inspiration to Black activists and politicians in the UK, certainly my generation of Black activists. What he taught us was to be brave – he had to be brave seeing his mentor, Martin Luther King, slaughtered in front of him. And to speak your mind – I’ve always spoken my mind, even when it gets me in trouble.
Here is our story about the death of Jesse Jackson by Melissa Hellmann and Martin Pengelly.
At his press conference this morning Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said that a poll out later would show that Rupert Lowe, the former Reform UK MP who has now set up a new party, Restore Britain, has very low name recognition. (See 12.24pm.)
Farage was probably referring to the figures in this story just published by GB News. The report by Jack Walters says:
Fewer than one-in-10 British voters can identify Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe, a new poll conducted exclusively for GB News has revealed.
Polling firm JL Partners found Mr Lowe’s visibility has dropped from 14 per cent to just eight per cent in the 10 months after his expulsion from Reform UK in March 2025.
Reform UK voters also struggled to correctly identify Mr Lowe when shown a picture of the former Brexit Party MEP, with the proportion jumping from 71 per cent last March to 86 per cent.
GB News employs Farage as a presenter.
Steep rise in universal credit claims in recent years mostly driven by people switching from older benefits, report says
The steep rise in universal credit (UC) claimants in recent years has been driven mainly by people moving from older benefits rather than brand new claims, figures show. The Press Association says:
The Department for Work and Pensions has for the first time published a breakdown of the proportion of claimants who have been switched to UC from so-called “legacy” benefits, such as income support and jobseeker’s allowance.
The total number of UC claimants in Britain stood at 8.34 million in December 2025, up by almost a million from 7.36 million 12 months earlier.
Data published today shows that more than three-quarters of this increase (775,790) was due not to new claims, but instead were people who moved onto UC from other benefits.
The government has said the roll-out of UC across Britain should be completed this year, with any claimants still on legacy benefits due to be moved to UC by March.
Sam Freedman, the political commentator who worked as a policy adviser in the Department for Education when Michael Gove was secretary of state, is not impressed by the decision to make Suella Braverman Reform UK’s education spokesperson. He says:
Giving Braverman the education brief is quite a choice for Reform. I was on an education commission with her once before she went completely mad and she knew absolutely nothing at all.
Keir Starmer has paid to keep a personalised pair of cufflinks given to him by Donald Trump during the US president’s state visit last year, the Press Association reports. PA says:
The prime minister purchased the gift, which would otherwise have been held by Downing Street, for his teenage son, the Press Association understands.
Details released by the Cabinet Office show Starmer received the cufflinks along with a personalised necklace and a golf club from the president, while his wife was given a pair of cowboy boots.
He initially paid to keep the necklace while the other presents were listed as retained by No 10, but an updated register of ministers’ interests on Tuesday showed he had bought both items of jewellery.
Starmer and his wife, Victoria, hosted Trump and his wife, Melania, at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat, in September following the president’s stay with the King and Queen at Windsor Castle.
They presented the president with a ministerial red box and gave the first lady a silk scarf.
Ministers must declare any gift they receive worth more than £140 and either hand it to their department, or pay the difference between the value and the £140 threshold to keep it.
How Reform UK MPs are almost twice as likely to be privately educated as Tory MPs
It is not hard to see why Nigel Farage reacted so badly when confronted with the question from Anna Gross from the Financial Times. (See 1.07pm.) She asked if British voters really wanted to see US Ice-style deportation units operating in this country. But her main question, addressed to Suella Braverman, the new Reform UK education spokesperson, was what her message would be to people worried about the party’s commitment to state education given that all five people on the platform today – now the party’s core leadership team – were educated at private schools.
Gross was highlighting the fact that, although Reform UK is now a party getting much of its support from working-class voters, in parliament its MPs are far posher than those from the other parties, if educational background is taken as a key class metric.
This is confirmed by statistics set out in the recently published The British General Election of 2024, the definitive guide to what happened in the summer before last and the latest in a series of academic election studies going back to 1945.
The 2024 volume is written by Robert Ford, Tim Bale, Will Jennings and Paula Surridge, and this is what the say about the education background of the 2024 intake.
Close to two-thirds of MPs elected in 2024 attended a comprehensive state school – the highest ever recorded, though still well below the 90% figure among the electorate at large.
Fewer than a quarter of MPs from the three largest Britain-wide parties were privately educated, a record low and down from over a third in 2015.
And the school often seen as the pinnacle of privilege – Eton, alma mater of David Cameron and Boris Johnson – has never been less present in the corridors of power. The current parliament contains just four Old Etonians, down from 11 in 2019, 19 in 2015 and 53 in 1979.
That said, the educational experiences of different parties’ MPs remain distinctive – and predictably so.
While a narrow majority of Conservative MPs attended state schools for the third parliament in a row, the share of privately educated Tories actually rose in 2024 and continues to be much higher than for the other main parties.
Labour MPs have been overwhelmingly state-educated since at least the 1970s, and Lib Dem MPs since the 2000s.
By contrast, three out of the five Reform UK MPs were privately educated, making the populist rightwingers fond of railing against an out-of-touch establishment the only party with a majority of privately educated MPs.
With little shift in the mix of educational backgrounds within each party, the overall jump in state-educated MPs has been driven by the turning of the political tides, as state educated Labour and Lib Dem challengers replaced privately educated Conservatives.
Five Reform UK MPs were elected in 2024, and 60% of them were privately educated. Since then two of them have left the party: Rupert Lowe, who was privately educated, and James McMurdock, who wasn’t.
But the party has gained five MPs: Sarah Pochin, Danny Kruger, Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman (all privately educated), and Andrew Rosindell (who was state-educated). Kruger went to Eton. That means six out of eight Reform UK MPs – or 75% – are now privately educated. (The other two who are privately educated are Farage himself and Richard Tice; Lee Anderson was state-educated.)
As this chart from The British General Election of 2024 shows, for the Conservative party the figure is 46%.
The book is invaluable, as well as being a good read; it is the one election book that will stay on my desk for good.
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Labour says Reform UK now led by 'Farage's top team of failed Tories'
Labour has described Reform UK as a “top team of failed Tories”.
In a statement released after the Reform UK press conference, Anna Turley, the Labour chair, said:
Farage’s top team of failed Tories spent over 3,000 days inflicting untold damage on our country in government, trashing our economy, hammering families’ mortgages, and leaving our borders open.
They failed Britain before – they’d do the same again under Reform.
Today’s appointments clearly reveal that neither keeping our nation safe nor tackling NHS waiting lists are priorities for Farage or Reform UK.
Miliband says UK fuel bills would 'skyrocket' if Tice ever became energy secretary due to his 'dangerous' views
Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has said that Richard Tice’s “extreme and dangerous” views mean that he is not fit to be in charge of business and energy in a Reform UK government. And, if Tice did get the job, his policies mean bills would “skyrocket”, Miliband says:
1/ Reform’s energy surrender plan would sell out our energy security to fossil fuel interests, trash the countryside with fracking, cost hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs and cause bills to skyrocket.
2/ Richard Tice is an avowed climate sceptic who wants to “wage war” on good British jobs.
Someone with such extreme and dangerous views should never be put in charge of Britain’s energy security.
A reader asks:
In today’s Q and A, Nigel Farage has claimed the government made untrue claims about the Covid vaccine. [See 1.12pm] Would you be able to remind us who the minister in charge of Covid 19 vaccine deployment was? And what they are up to these days?
Great question. It was, of course, Nadhim Zahawi.
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TUC says Reform UK would make discrimination legal by getting rid of Equality Act
The TUC has accused Reform UK of wanting go make workplace discrimination legal.
Responding to Suella Braverman saying that Reform UK would repeal the Equality Act (see 11.43am and 12.42pm), Paul Nowak, the TUC general secretary, said:
It’s official – Reform UK think discrimination should be legal.
Scrapping the Equality Act would be a sledgehammer to hard-won rights working people fought for over generations.
If you’re discriminated against because you’re a woman, black, disabled, pregnant or gay – that’s fine with them.
This is a blank cheque for bad employers to mistreat their staff.
And it wouldn’t stop there. Scrapping the Equality Act would just be the start.
From ripping up equality protections, to backing fire-and-rehire, to opposing a ban on zero-hours contracts, Reform UK have made it clear whose side they’re on – and it’s not working people.
Ex-Tories in Reform UK just as 'unfit to govern' as Tories still in party, Lib Dem deputy leader Daisy Cooper says
Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader, has issued a statement about the Reform UK press conference.
Echoing what the Conservative party said (see 11.57am), Cooper said:
This Reform-Tory ‘Fifty Shades of Blue’ love-in is fooling no one.
Robert Jenrick voted for Liz Truss’s economic disaster of a mini-budget, now he wants to do the same damage to the economy all over again.
Nigel Farage is welcome to give his colleagues new name badges but it won’t change the opinion of the country – that Conservatives, current or former, are totally unfit to govern.
Farage says he '100%' supports MMR vaccine - but claims were made about Covid vaccines that weren't true
Q: There has been a measles outbreak in London. Do you support the MMR vaccine and agree it should not be part of a culture war?
Farage said: “Yes, absolutely, 100%.”
He said he had always thought vaccines had done “a hell of a lot more good than harm”.
But he said that, during Covid, peopl were told the Covid jab meant they would not catch Covid again, or could not pass it on, and that “simply wasn’t true”.
He said the government at the time “told us that while they knew it wasn’t true”.
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'Just write some silly story' - Farage insults female FT reporter after she asks difficult questions
Anna Gross from the Financial Times asked a two-part question at the press conference: about whether Reform UK would create an Ice-style migrant deportation unit, and about all five of the people on the platform having been educated at private schools.
Nigel Farage responded. He said sarcastically that he “loved” the FT; the day after the Mandelson story broke, its front page carried a story about a Reform councillor in Kent, he said. He said there was no point addressing Gross’s question. “Just write some silly story,” he told Gross.
Farage has got form for patronising and insulting female journalists in this way.
(As well as patronising, Farage’s response was unfair. The FT pursued the story about Mandelson’s links with Jeffrey Epstein more aggressively than almost any other UK news organisation.)
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Q: What do you think of Matt Goodwin, your candidate in Gorton and Denton, suggesting women who do not have children should be taxed more?
Farage said he would not want to see anyone taxed more in these circumstances. But he said he could see the case for linking tax breaks to having “quite a few children”.
Q: Do you think Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor should face a police investigation?
Farage said “clearly” he should.
But he also said he wanted to learn more about Peter Mandelson’s links with Russia.
Farage says there's 'nothing socialist' about Reform UK wanting state involvement in industries
Farage said that he did not accept that state involvement in some industries – a policy Reform UK favours – was “socialist”.
Jenrick backed this up, saying he did not accept that reindustrialisation was socialist either.
UPDATE: Farage said:
I don’t think state involvement in strategic industries is socialism.
There’s nothing socialist about saying that the British government should maybe take a stake in some of these strategic industries. That’s not nationalisation, far, far from it.
And Jenrick said:
There’s nothing socialist about saying that our economy should be concerned about salvaging strategic industries like steel or carmaking. We’re losing those strategic industries now.
Updated
Braverman says she wants to scrap Equality Act to get rid of 'divisive notion of protected characteristics'
Q: Reform UK wants to increase the birth rate. But Suella Braverman is talking about getting rid of the Equality Act. If you get rid of those protections, will it lead to fewer women having children?
Suella Braverman said she wanted to get rid of the Equality Act to get rid of the “pernicious, divisive notion of protected characteristics”.
But that did not mean she wanted to get rid of all employment protection, she said.
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Q: Do you want to reduce the proportion of the economy devoted to services?
Richard Tice said he wanted to grow the whole economy. But he said high energy prices had contributed to deindustrialisation. That has been an “absolute disaster”, he said.
He said he would like to see growth back at 3 or 4% per year.
Farage rules out pact with Tories, saying they are 'utterly dishonourable' and he wouldn't trust them
Q: Zia Yousuf hinted at the weekend that he would favour a pact with the Tories, if that was needed to take on a progressive alliance of Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens. Do you agree?
Farage said that was not his view. In parties, sometimes people disagree, he said
He went on:
Look, I’ve no intention of doing a deal and shaking hands with people that I believe to be utterly dishonourable. And that is how I view the Conservative Party.
He said he felt “betrayed” by what the Tories did on Brexit after 2019.
I’ve been in business a long time. I do lots of deals. Some are successful, some are failures. But you know what I do? I look people in the eye. I shake their hands because I trust them. I do not trust this Conservative party.
He said that Kemi Badenoch was “facing both ways at the same time” on Labour cancelling local elections – opposing the policy nationally, while allowing Tory councils to ask for elections to be delayed.
Farage says Rupert Lowe's claim his new party at 10% in polls 'utter rot'
Q: Rupert Lowe claims Restore Britain is now polling at 10%.
Farage says polling out later today will show that Lowe’s recognition is “not very high at all”. So the claim that he is at 10% is “utter rot”, he says. He goes on:
He won’t be on 1% anywhere. Not even probably in Great Yarmouth.
Farage welcomes the news that some Chagossians have returned to the Chagos Islands.
Their removal from the islands in the late 1960s was “almost a crime against humanity, frankly”, he says.
He has posted about this on social media.
Farage also welcomes the involvement of Adam Holloway, the former Tory MP who is now a member of Reform UK. As GB News reports, Holloway was with the Chagossians as they landed.
Q: Are you worried about the threat posed by Restore Britain, the party set up by your old friend Rupert Lowe?
Farage says Lowe was not really a friend. He tried to sue Farage.
He says “there is only one proper brand of centre-right politics in this country”, and that is Reform UK.
He says people like Lowe think they can copy the success of Reform UK. But “it just it just isn’t as easy as that”.
He says Lowe favoured the “mass deportation of entire communities”. What he was proposing went “way beyond the point of reasonableness, of decency, of morality”. That is why Reform UK got rid of him.
Farage claims there are now 'very few' frontline Tories he would want to let join Reform UK
Q: You have not appointed a shadow foreign secretary. Is that because you are keeping that available as a bargaining chip to potential defectors?
Farage says there are “very few” people on the frontline of Tory politics that he would be interested in taking as defectors.
But he says he is still talking to potential Labour defectors.
Q: With the SNP likely to win in Scotland, and Plaid likely to do well in Wales, do you think that if you form a government, one of your first jobs will be to keep the UK together?
Farage says when Brexit happened, it was claimed that would lead to the break-up of Britain. That did not happen.
Q: What do you feel about Nadhim Zahawi, who recently defected to your party, complaining about someone on the street looking dodgy. Was Zahawi being too precious?
Farage says people in London who claim that crime has never been lower should get out of their chauffeur-driven cars. He says he thinks Reform UK will win the next mayoral election in London because of the state of crime in the city.
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Tories say new Reform UK line-up looks like 'tribute act to old Conservative party'
Q: The Tories are describing your party as “a tribute act to the old Conservative party”. How do you respond?
Farage says, after the local elections, the Tories will cease to exist as a national party.
The questioner was referring to this comment from Kevin Hollinrake, the Tory chair, released within the past 20 minutes. Hollinrake said:
After months of infighting and leaks, Nigel Farage has unveiled a front bench dominated by ex-Conservatives - a line-up that looks more like a tribute act to the old Conservative party than a credible alternative.
Even now, some are already eyeing their next career move, while others who were clearly expecting promotion have been left out in the cold.
Today’s underwhelming announcement proves Reform remains a one-man band. Only the Conservatives, under Kemi Badenoch, have the depth, experience and serious plan to Get Britain Working Again.
Q: You have fallen out with many of the people who have worked with in the past. Won’t that happen again?
Farage says he has worked with some people for 20 or 30 years.
In a reference to Rupert Lowe, he says there are people who think they can easily do what he does. He suggests Lowe’s new party will soon fail.
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Farage says, if he were 'hit by a bus tomorrow', Reform UK would still succeed because it now has stand-alone brand
Q: What do you say to Reform members who see their party being taken over by ambitious Tories? And have you ever run anything that was not a one-man band?
Farage says he has been successful in politics. He has set up organisations with specific purposes; getting us out of the EU, getting the country back on track.
This is different, he says; it is about “creating a machine for government”.
In the past his popularity and the party’s were different.
But now they are past that phase, he says.
If I was hit by a bus tomorrow, Reform has its own brand, Reform has its own identity, and now Reform has its own senior characters with their own departments to lead. So I’m enormously proud of that.
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Q: How are you going to ensure that you don’t have the same psychodrama problems the Tories had?
Farage says it is very simple; if people behave badly, that won’t be allowed, he says.
Q: Why don’t you hold byelections when people defect?
Farage claims that, of the last 200 defections, only two have resulted in byelections.
And he says he does not have time for byelections. He restates his claim that the next general election will take place next year.
Farage is now taking questions.
The first comes from Chrstopher Hope from GB News, who asks why there is no defence spokesperson, and no roles for Lee Anderson or Sarah Pochin.
Farage says he can’t win; only yesterday, he was accused of running a one-man band.
Braverman says Reform UK would abolish 'equalities department'
Braverman ends by claiming diversity politics is out of control.
She would abolish the equalities department, she says.
(In fact, there isn’t a government equalities department. There was a Government Equalities Office, but now it is the women and equalities unit in the Cabinet Office.)
UPDATE: Braverman said:
Why does no one in this Government seem to care that it’s white working-class boys who have the worst educational outcomes in our country today?
Do you know what a Reform government will do? Well, on day one, we will get rid of the equalities department, we will scrap the equalities minister.
And we will repeal the Equality Act, because we are going to work to build a country defined by meritocracy not tokenism, personal responsibility not victimhood, excellence not mediocrity, and unity not division.
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Braverman says she wants fewer young people going to university, and 50% going into trade jobs
Braverman is speaking now.
She says schools are in crisis.
Across our schools, a quiet crisis has taken hold. Violence and disorder have eroded the authority of teachers. Too many teachers now face to face the fear of intimidation and assault in the classroom. Discipline, once the backbone of education, has been weakened in the name of progressive ideology.
At the same time, the foundations of knowledge, literacy and numeracy have been undermined by this Labour government. Changes to offset a dumbed down curriculum are all replacing excellence with mediocrity in some classrooms.
Children are taught to view Britain with shame rather than pride, to focus on grievance rather than gratitude. They talk more about gender ideology than biological fact. This is not education as it should be.
Braverman says she helped establish the successful Michaela community school.
And she say too many young people are going to university.
The truth is that many of our young people have been sold a lie about university, wasting three years of their lives on Mickey Mouse courses, all while we have a chronic shortage of nurses, builders, and care workers.
The system is broken. So I tell you what we need. Instead of Tony Blair’s 50% of young people going to university, this is what we need; we need Nigel Farage’s 50% of young people going into the trades.
Suella Braverman appointed Reform UK's spokesperson for education, skills and equalities, Farage says
Farage says the final appointment is Suella Braverman, the former Tory home secretary. He says she will take on education, skills and equality.
She is itching to get on with this brief because … millions of parents all over this country are in a state of despair about what their children are being taught at school.
[And there are] far too many young people being sent to university and being lumbered with heavy debts without any benefit to them in the workplace.
Farage confirms Zia Yusuf will be Reform UK's home affairs spokesperson
Farage says Zia Yusuf will be “shadow home secretary”. And he will focus on both legal and illegal immigration.
Yusuf starts by claiming that “one in every 25 people wandering around in Britain today arrived in the last five years”.
He says, as the son of immigrants, he knows the contribution that immigrants can make.
He goes on:
But we have to be honest. The sheer scale of immigration over the last three decades has broken Britain. More people have turned up on our beaches, uninvited in the last seven years, than stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. And those people, instead of being detained and deported, have been given free accommodation, free meals, free access to health care, free taxis, free leisure activities at the expense of the British people to the tune of tens of billions of pounds every single year. And that’s just illegal immigration.
If we talk about legal immigration just since 2010, the equivalent of the populations of Edinburgh, Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Stoke, Bristol and Cardiff have been added to our populations. So is it any wonder why it’s so difficult to get a GP appointment? Why everyone feels unsafe? Because violent criminals are let out of jail because of overcrowding and we don’t have enough prison places. Why tens of thousands of people to our eternal shame as a country are forced to wait more than two days in accident and emergency?
Yusuf describes mass immigration as “the most profound betrayal of the British electorate in history”.
He says, if he is home secretary, Reform UK will stop the boats, implement the Operation Restoring Justice programme, taking the UK out of international treaties, and tackle “radical Islam”. He will “ensure that if you come to this country with the goal of upending and usurping our laws, you will be deported forcibly”.
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Robert Jenrick says as Reform UK's Treasury spokesperson he will develop policies for 'alarm-clock Britain'
Farage confirms Robert Jenrick is his “shadow chancellor”.
Jenrick says the economy is not working. We have had decades of mismanagment, he says. But this Labour government “is in a league of its own’.
He says Labour’s “crazy energy policies” are a problem.
And there have been tax rises worth £60bn, because Labour “have not got the courage to tackle our ballooning welfare bill”.
He says people do not have enough money to pay for things like taking their kids out at the weekend.
He thanks Farage for giving him the opportunity to take on the “wrecking ball” that is Rachel Reeves.
He claims he will produce the most comprehensive plan of any party to revive the economy. He will work on this with people with business experience.
He claims no one in the Labour cabinet has that experience.
He goes on:
Nigel and I are going to be saying more about this tomorrow [they have already scheduled a press conference] but I’ll just end by saying this.
Together we are going to build an economy that serves alarm-clock Britain; the people who got up early this morning to go to work to look after their family, the people who want a hand up, not a handout, people who just want to get on in life, who want to feel better off. And there’s no shame in that.
People like my dad, Bill, who left school at 16, became an apprentice, set up a small business. People like those I grew up around in Wolverhampton and represent now in north Nottinghamshire. Decent, hardworking, family oriented, community oriented, patriotic Brits who just want to get on.
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Tice says Reform would set up sovereign wealth fund to help with reindustrialisation of UK
Richard Tice is speaking now.
He says he is qualified for this post because he has worked in business creating millions for shareholders.
He says the proposed new business department would cover housing.
He says he would reindustrialise Britain.
And he would also set up a sovereign weath fund.
I’m going to be talking this time next week in the Midlands in great detail about this, a sovereign wealth fund that backs British companies, that buys and promotes British products and that helps ensure that we build hundreds of thousands of affordable homes in our towns, our rural areas and our cities. This is how we make real progress.
Richard Tice would run Reform UK's new Department of Business, Trade and Energy, and be deputy PM, Farage says
Farage starts with Richard Tice, the deputy Reform leader.
He says he will be deputy PM if Reform form a government.
And he will also lead a Department of Business, Trade and Energy.
Farage says this will be “a new super economics and business department, in many ways modelled on what the Germans did after world war two”.
Farage says he is looking for three things in potential shadow cabinet appointees: youthful energy; experience in government; and expertise.
He says:
We then need people who are genuine experts in their area to take junior ministerial positions because frankly, the lack of real world experience in government is being felt by every business in the land.
Farage says at the time of the election he said he would establish a toehold in parliament, and then replace the Tories as the opposition to Labour.
He says Reform UK has now led in the last 200 opinion polls.
It has an average lead of 9 to 10 points, he says.
Farge holds press conference
Nigel Farage is speaking.
He starts by saying that 4.6m voters will get the right to to vote in the local elections because of his party.
That is a “big win” for his party, he says – and for democracy.
The veteran reporter John Sweeney has announced he is writing a book about Nigel Farage.
I am writing a book on Nigel Farage for @headlinepg.
No holds will be barred.
Nigel has said of me that I caused him “more misery than any other in my 25 years in politics”.
Hello Nigel.
Out in September.
The Reform UK press conference is about to start.
There is a live feed here.
Commons business committee may investigate Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's work as trade envoy, its chair says
The Commons business committee could investigate Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s work as a trade envoy, its chair, Liam Byrne, has said.
Byrne, a Labour MP and former cabinet minister, told the Today programme this morning that “nothing is off the table” and “MPs are not in the market for letting anything slip through the cracks”.
Referring to allegations that, as a trade envoy, Mountbatten-Windsor shared information relating to trade policy with Jeffrey Epstein, Byrne said:
The committee’s not had a chance to reflect on these allegations because recess means Parliament isn’t sitting this week. My task this week is to make sure that the committee’s got options in front of them when they meet on Tuesday for how we might or might not take this investigation forward. Obviously, we can’t and don’t want to compromise a police investigation.
We’ve got quite strict rules about sub judice and getting involved in things that may come before the courts, but this is obviously a matter of huge concern, and I’m going to make sure that my committee has got the full options available for how we take our investigations forward when they convene next Tuesday morning.
Byrne said he did not want to “pre-judge where the committee is going to go on this at this stage”.
But, when asked on the programme if it could potentially ask to speak to the former prince, he said: “At this stage, all I can say is, nothing is off the table.”
He added:
This is something we’re going to take acutely seriously, and I can guarantee you that MPs are not in the market for letting anything slip through the cracks.
Mountbatten-Windsor, who served as the UK’s special representative for trade and investment between 2001 and 2011, has always denied any wrongdoing.
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150,000 working-age disabled adults to gain at least £400 per year as government raises minimum income guarantee by 7%
Stephen Kinnock, the care minister, was giving interviews this morning in the hope of promoting a government announcement that will lead to 150,000 disabled adults getting an income boost of at least £400 each year.
That is because the minimum income guarantee – the amount of money that working-age adults who receive social care are allowed to keep, before they start having to contribute to the cost of their care – is rising by 7%.
In its news release, the Department of Health and Social Care explains:
Government is increasing the amount that working age adults who receive social care must be able to keep after paying for home care (known as the Minimum Income Guarantee) by 7% from April – strengthening this safety net to ensure that people have enough for daily expenses and helping to ease financial pressures.
This is the largest above-inflation uplift in more than a decade and means working-age adults receiving care in the community will have more money left over for everyday essentials such as food, heating and bills. Those eligible for the disability premium, an additional amount for people with greater disability needs, will keep up to £510 more per year.
The government has also announced that it is spending £723m on the disabled facilities grant next year – money available to help older and disabled people adapt their homes so that they can carry on living independently.
Kinnock said:
We are determined to not only reform adult social care but do it in a way that helps some of the most vulnerable people in society with the daily pressures they face.
From April, more than 150,000 disabled adults will keep hundreds of pounds more each year - putting extra money back into their pockets to help with everyday costs.
At the same time, we are putting more money into funding life-changing home adaptations so older and disabled people can live safely and independently.
These steps are part of our wider plans to build a National Care Service rooted in quality, fairness and dignity for all that use it.
For adults over the age of 65, the minimum income guarantee is rising by 3.8% from April.
Labour and Tories both braced for bigger losses after U-turn allows 30 local council elections to go ahead
A minister has sought to defend Steve Reed, the local government secretary, against opposition calls for him to resign over the U-turn on postponing May’s local elections.
Stephen Kinnock, the care minister, said Reed was doing “an excellent job”.
Kinnock was doing an interview round on behalf of the government this morning and, asked about Reed’s position, he told Sky News:
Steve Reed is doing an excellent job as secretary of state, pushing through the Pride in Place programme, pushing through renters’ reforms, bulldozing all of the bureaucracy and regulations that stops us building things in this country.
Steve is doing an excellent job as secretary of state and he will continue to do that and to deliver for the British people.
Kinnock also told LBC government legal advice originally said a delay was justified. He went on:
That legal advice has now changed. That is not ideal. I’m not going to stand here and pretend to you that it is, but we’re a government that works with the rule of law.
In the Times, Max Kendix and Oliver Wright say that one factor that led to change of heart was the fact that, while governments had in the past delayed local elections on a case-by-case basis, Reed had argued that this round of elections was relatively pointless anyway. They report:
There was another difference to the previous year as well. Steve Reed, the local government secretary, had been actively promoting the idea of cancelling elections this year before he’d announced which areas, if any, would be covered.
In The Times, Reed said the public would support cancelling “pointless” elections to “zombie” councils — calling them “time-consuming”.
Sources suggest these kinds of statements contributed to a final assessment by lawyers. They came back to ministers in recent days with a stark warning: if you go ahead with delays, you may well have to fight Reform UK in court, and there is a good chance you will lose.
Yesterday’s decision means that Labour and the Conservative party are now braced for even bigger losses in the local elections.
In the i, Will Hazell reports:
According to a poll by JL Partners for The Telegraph, Labour is forecast to lose control of six councils due to elections which will now proceed: Blackburn with Darwen, Cannock Chase, Exeter, Preston, Thurrock and Worthing.
And a report in the Financial Times quotes Prof Sir John Curtice, the leading elections expert, as saying the biggest impact of the U-turn will be on the four county councils — Norfolk, Suffolk, East and West Sussex — three of which are currently controlled by the Conservatives. “Those are large councils where all the seats are up for grabs, and these are the type of areas that should mimic where Reform did well last year,” Curtice told the paper.
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UK unemployment rate hits five-year high of 5.2% as wage growth cools
Unemployment in the UK has risen to 5.2%, the highest level in nearly five years, while wage growth continues to slow, raising the prospect of another cut to interest rates in the spring. Tom Knowles has the story.
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Most people in a future Reform UK cabinet would not be career politicians, Zia Yusuf claims
Most people in a Reform UK cabinet would not be career politicians, Zia Yusuf has said.
Today the party will announce what it calls some “shadow cabinet” appointments and the most prominent is likely to be Robert Jenrick as Treasury spokesperson. Less than 18 months ago Jenrick was runner-up in the contest to be Conservative party leader.
But Yusuf told Times Radio this morning that ex-Tories would not dominate a Nigel Farage cabinet.
Yusuf said:
I can tell people listening to this that the majority of our parliamentary class will be people who are fresh to politics.
I think the majority of Nigel’s cabinet, if we win and he’s the prime minister, will also have people who are not career politicians.
Farage has repeatedly talked of his desire to give cabinet jobs to people who are not MPs and who have experience outside Westminster. His appointees could be given peerages, but Farage has also floated the idea of appointing some ministers who do not sit in parliament. This is constitutionally permissible, but has only happened in the past very rarely.
Yusuf himself is expected to be named today as the party’s home affairs spokesperson.
Yusuf was critical of Jenrick on social media before his defection to Reform UK, and it has been claimed that he has mixed feelings about having the former shadow justice secretary as a colleague.
But Yusuf told Times Radio that Jenrick was an asset to the party. He said:
I’ve gotten to know Robert quite well. And I speak to him almost every day. He’s a thoughtful, serious man. I think he does believe clearly the things that he has talked about, and he got extremely frustrated inside the Conservative party.
And he is somebody who is already adding value in terms of helping with his experiences that he had in government.
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Reform UK no longer ‘one-man band’, Farage says as he prepares to announce ‘shadow cabinet’ appointments
Good morning. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is holding a press conference today where, according to the party, he will be “announcing members of his shadow cabinet”. In Westminster politics only the official opposition (the Conserative party, for this parliament) has a shadow cabinet, but other opposition parties sometimes use the term and, given his poll ratings, it is not hard to see why Farage thinks he has a better chance of forming the next government than Kemi Badenoch.
Farage is expected to announce four appointments. Robert Jenrick, who only defected from the Conservative party recently, is expected to be appointed Treasury spokesperson. Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader, is expected to be given responsibility for business and energy, and Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, is expected to be given the Home Office portfolio. There will also be a fourth appointment, but there has been no proper steer as to what this will be.
Here is Jessica Elgot’s preview story.
Speaking at a rally last night, Farage said that these appointments would show that Reform UK was no longer a “one-man band”. He said:
I think the moment to properly move away from the potential criticism that we’re a one-man band has been there now for a few weeks, and that’s why I’m doing this.
Am I concerned? No, I’m relieved actually. I’m relieved that other people are taking up these big areas, and from [reporter’s] perspective, on a given issue, you will know who to call.
The press conference starts at 11am in London.
There is not much else in the diary for today, but I will be covering other politics too, including the ongoing reaction to yesterday’s U-turn on the cancellation of local elections, which Kiran Stacey covers here in our overnight story.
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