UK politics live: Farage announces defection of Leicestershire’s police and crime commissioner from Tories to Reform UK

Farage announces defection of Leicestershire’s police and crime commissioner from Tories to Reform UK

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, introduces a defector. It is Rupert Matthews, the police and crime commissioner for Leicestershire and Rutland. He was elected to that post as a Conservative in 2021. Before that he was a Tory MEP.

Matthews claims the police are “fighting crime with one hand tied behind their back”. He goes on:

The courts impose sentences that too often are derisory and Labour’s early release scheme means that crooks are back out after serving a fraction of their time in prison.

Now it’s all because our prisons are full. They’re full of foreign criminals who should be deported the day they are convicted, not kept here at the expense of British taxpayers.

It’s no wonder that criminals do not fear the justice system, no wonder that the law abiding have almost given up on reporting crimes, and our wonderful police officers are let down even by their own senior commanders.

Rupert Matthews at Reform UK press conference Photograph: Reform UK

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What Kate Forbes’ departure from Holyrood would mean for future SNP leadership contest

Severin Carrell

Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.

Kate Forbes’s surprise decision to quit frontline Scottish politics next May inevitably raises questions about what this means for the next Scottish National party leadership contest and for the pro-independence movement.

John Swinney, the incumbent first minister and party leader, has insisted he plans to stay in post long after next year’s Holyrood election, quashing speculation his goal is solely to save the SNP from imploding and to secure a fifth term in power.

That promise presupposes the SNP will win next May’s election and that he wins handsomely; Scottish Labour’s collapsing poll ratings suggests for now that that is likely. But whether Swinney would stay on for a full five year term is another question. And if Forbes is no longer in the running, who might the contenders be?

Swinney faces a potential challenger in the shape of Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s hyper-ambitious Westminster leader, who is standing for election to Holyrood in May, and ousted the former SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford in a coup.

However, many see Swinney’s housing secretary Màiri McAllan, who recently returned to the cabinet after taking maternity leave, as his heir apparent. A very able minister, she has the conspicuous advantage of having a powerful coterie of allies in cabinet – mostly women ministers close to Nicola Sturgeon.

Swinney was openly dismissive of Flynn’s potential challenge when he was asked about it after he unveiled the SNP’s slate of Holyrood candidates some months ago – an event where McAllan was prominent and Flynn absent.

However, Flynn, an Aberdeen MP closely allied to Alex Salmond’s former aides, who trades in what he sees as a robustly realist defence of North Sea oil and gas jobs, has a power base too in the wider party.

If he becomes prominent in a post-election SNP government, Swinney will face pressure to give him a ministerial role, and that will then put serious strains on any putative partnership with the pro-independence Scottish Greens at Holyrood.

Like their sister party in England and Wales, the Scottish Greens are embroiled in a live leadership contest. Depending on the result in May, Swinney’s fortunes could well hinge on Green cooperation, and they, for now, are his best bet to hold onto power.

Q: Are you worried that some of the comments made by George Finch earlier might prejudice a future trial, putting a conviction at risk?

(This is a reference to comments that I did not report here, when covering Finch at 11.36am, because some of what said did seem to pose a contempt of court risk.)

Farage said he was not concerned about this. He claimed that Finch was just expressing the concerns felt by Warwickshire residents. “If that means he was slightly emotional, well, you know what, good,” Farage said.

Q: What is your response to Neil Kinnock urging the government to put VAT on private healthcare?

Farage said that was the sort of idea that would encourage even more wealthy people to leave the country. There was already an exodus, he claimed.

In an interview with the i, Kinnock, the former Labour leader, said:

Introducing VAT on private health provision could provide vital funding for the NHS and social care.

After 14 years of underinvestment, many people are turning to private healthcare not out of choice, but because they cannot afford to wait. This has increasingly led to unequal access to care.

Ending the VAT exemption to generate much-needed revenue is a reasonable and widely supported step.

Q: What is your response to the report about Labour using Hope Not Hate analysis of Reform UK voters, even though Hope Not Hate label Reform as “far right”.

Farage said this was “moronic”. And he claimed Labour would find it hard to profile Reform support because, of all the parties, it had the greatest spread of support, geographically and in terms of age, faith and ethnicity.

Farage claims digital ID cards would not work as means of stopping illegal migration

Q: Keir Starmer is reportedly interested in introducing digital ID cards, partly to tackle illegal immigration. Would you back that?

Farage said that was a Blairite idea. “I’m sure that Tony Blair would have us all microchipped,” he said.

He went on:

No, I don’t support it. I don’t trust big government.

If you want to see why my trust in government doesn’t exist, just think about what’s happened in the space of the last week, where they introduced legislation they tell you is purely to protect children [the Online Safety Act], and actually it is having a terrible effect on free speech and democracy.

I would not trust this government with digital ID, I have to say, I didn’t particularly enjoy the vaccine passport phase that we lived through.

As for the argument, it’ll stop crime, it’ll stop illegal immigration, it’ll stop illegal working, well, I don’t think digital ID will stop teenage girls being raped, I don’t think digital ID will stop the drugs gangs, I don’t think digital ID will stop illegal working.

Q: Have you discussed your concerns about the Online Safety Act with the US vice president, JD Vance?

Farage claimed he could not remember.

Q: Will Reform UK councillors block the use of HMOs (houses in multiple occcupation) to house asylum seekers?

Farage said that was “absolutely” the position of Reform councillors. In some ways, the use of HMOs by asylum seekers was “even worse” than the use of hotels.

Finch said that in Warwickshire he wanted to be able to tell residents where HMOs housing migrants were. He claimed not being able to do this was “dangerous” and “against safeguarding”. He also claimed this was “a huge problem for the children in Warwickshire”.

Farage claims Reform UK losing some of its ‘blokeish’ reputation, partly due to its campaigning on sexual violence

Q: Since you have been running a campaign linking sexual crimes with migration, are you picking up more support from women?

Farage replied:

I do think one of the things that’s happened over the course of the last few weeks is, without doubt, we’re definitely seeing, not just high profile women coming to Reform – and you’ve seen one or two of those on the stage here and in Wales over the course of the last few weeks – but I think generally out there there is grave concern, particularly amongst mothers, about their teenagers, whether they can let them out.

So perhaps this issue has spoken the truth to people that they’ve been feeling increasingly for some time.

And I think that may be that changing the complexion of how people view Reform.

When I came back into this last June, people regarded it as being a bit of a blokeish party – something to do my reputation, I can’t quite think why.

But I think that’s changing and changing very rapidly. This campaign is very much a part of that.

Nigel Farage at his press conference. Photograph: Victoria Jones/Shutterstock

Q: Vanessa Frake is calling for supermax prisons. But they are the most expensive prisons to build. How are you going to afford that?

Farage says he is only at the start of this campaign. He suggests it is too early for the party to have full details.

Frake says she was not calling for supermax prisons. She was calling for a supermax regime in some prisons. That could be implemented “relatively easy”, she says.

Farage says coming from dangerous countries like Afghanistan should not stop asylum seekers arriving in UK being sent back

Q: Where should people be deported to if they come from a country that is not safe?

Farage replies:

Sorry. I’ve had enough of this. If you come from Afghanistan, you go back to Afghanistan. End of.

This idea, we can’t send people to certain countries, all the false claims that people make about their own personal lives – I’m sorry. We’re done. We’re done. We’ve had enough.

Farage claims people too afraid to walk through London at night wearing jewellery

Q: Are you trying to make people afraid, to get them to vote for you?

Farage replies:

No, they are afraid. They are afraid.

I dare you to walk through the West End of London after nine o’clock of an evening wearing jewellery. You wouldn’t do it. You know that I’m right. You wouldn’t do it, and that’s just in London – let alone what’s happening in so many other parts of the country, and the genuine fears.

Linking this to immigration, he claims there are “some people who come from certain cultures that pose a danger to our society”.

This is the contested claim raised by Robert Jenrick this morning. (See 9.53am.)

Farage is now taking questions.

Asked what Reform UK would do to stop the small boat crossings, Farage dismissed today’s Home Office announcement about £100m being spent on more officers. (See 10.48am.) He said the UK had already given £800m to France to address the problem. But the boats were still coming.

He said people were still arriving because they knew they had a “99% chance of staying”.

He said the only effective solution would be to turn people away when they arrived. That is what Australia did, he said. He said:

If you enter a country illegally, you will be detained and deported. This is what normal countries do all over the world. We’ve surrendered normality to this new human rights regime.

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UK politics live: Farage announces defection of Leicestershire’s police and crime commissioner from Tories to Reform UK | Politics

Farage announces defection of Leicestershire’s police and crime commissioner from Tories to Reform UK

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