Stephen Timms, social security and disability minister, says government is ‘fully supporting’ people who would always be unable to work
The Reform UK press conference is about to start. There is a live feed here.
Nigel Farage is going to announce that 29 councillors have defected to his party, according to the Guido Fawkes website.
Continue reading...Pair recently met to discuss Donald Trump, Elon Musk and other political matters, Sunday Times says
Nigel Farage has reportedly met Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s adviser turned nemesis, after the Vote Leave founder suggested voters should back Reform UK at the local elections.
Cummings, who was once a sworn enemy of Farage during the EU referendum as he battled to keep control of the leave campaign, is reported to have met the Reform leader to discuss Whitehall changes, which allies said was the strongest sign yet that Farage was taking seriously the idea of becoming prime minister.
Continue reading...Labour won the seat last year with more than 50% of votes – now polls suggest it will just hang on or lose to Reform UK
On a weekday morning, an advertising van is weaving its way through the narrow streets of Runcorn town centre. On the side is a black and white picture of Nigel Farage with a quote from the Reform UK leader: “We are going to have to move to an insurance-based system of healthcare.”
The starting gun has been fired in the byelection that has been on the horizon since the sitting MP Mike Amesbury announced his intention to resign, and which could prove a huge test for Keir Starmer’s government.
Continue reading...Ben Habib, an ex-Reform deputy leader who was also forced out by Nigel Farage, makes offer to Great Yarmouth MP
The ousted Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe could join forces in a breakaway rightwing party with a former deputy leader of the party who was also forced out by Nigel Farage.
The offer came from the former Brexit party MEP Ben Habib, an outspoken critic of Farage, who said he was “constantly in touch” with Lowe.
Continue reading...Contest in Runcorn and Helsby will be a challenge for Labour
Around 80 Labour MPs could refuse to back government plans to cut billions from the welfare budget, Amy Gibbons and Tony Diver claim in a story for the Daily Telegraph. They report:
The Telegraph understands that around 80 Labour MPs – roughly a fifth of the parliamentary party – “won’t tolerate” billions of pounds of welfare cuts set to be announced by the Chancellor later this month.
The anger is said to have spread beyond the “usual suspects”, with MPs who would not typically criticise Sir Keir threatening to “give the government a slap” over the proposals.
Our Labour values are built on a simple but powerful idea: that every individual, regardless of background or circumstance, should have the support they need to make the most of their lives. Everyone who is capable of working deserves the security, dignity and agency that employment offers. Of course, there are some people who are not able to work and they must be treated with compassion and respect. But for those that can, we must restore the pathways to opportunity which are currently so sparse for millions of people. It is exactly what a Labour government exists to do …
As MPs, we understand that delivering this new social contract requires hard choices to be made. We welcome the work that has begun to rebuild our welfare system, and we are fully supportive of it. We believe reforming our broken system is not only necessary, but also a truly progressive endeavour. And so we have established the Get Britain Working Group to make that argument, insistently.
The radical package of reforms will see:
-£5bn in savings by making it harder to qualify for Personal Independence Payments - a benefit not linked to work that is meant to help people with the additional costs of their disability
This government is determined that instead of facing a life on benefits … we stretch every sinew and pull every lever to ensure that we can get those people into work, because that is the best way for them to have a successful and happy life into the future.
So I think it’s quite right to look at a benefit system which is clearly broken.
Continue reading...Lowe’s online presence, helped by Elon Musk, dwarfs that of Nigel Farage, but may not bring him new Reform voters
If you were to looking for answers as to why Rupert Lowe, a relatively little-known Reform UK MP, thinks he can lecture Nigel Farage about running a party and winning an election, there is one place you should probably start: X.
For all that in person Lowe can sometimes resemble a slightly embarrassing uncle at a wedding, on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, the Great Yarmouth MP is a big name – and by some metrics, a notably bigger one even than his party leader.
Continue reading...Internal row in party over ‘messianic’ leader becomes public amid competing members’ allegations of bullying and dirty tricks
Just a few short weeks ago, Nigel Farage’s Reform party was riding high. It was consistently polling above Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative party and in some surveys had even edged ahead of the Labour government.
Donors who had previously handed over large amounts to the Tories were switching sides, while Farage was relishing having the ear of US president Donald Trump, touting himself as a far better representative to the leader of the free world than Keir Starmer.
Continue reading...MP accused of threatening party chair says dealing with leadership is like smashing his head against a brick wall
Rupert Lowe has compared dealing with the Reform party leadership to smashing his head against a brick wall amid a public war of words that has revealed deep tensions at the heart of the rightwing party.
Lowe posted a statement on X asking the party leader, Nigel Farage, to have dinner with him less than 24 hours after Lowe lost the Reform whip, having been accused of threatening the party chair, Zia Yusuf.
Continue reading...Party chair and chief whip issue statement alleging female employees complained about Rupert Lowe
Reform UK has erupted into open civil war after the party said its MP Rupert Lowe had received complaints about bullying and had made threats against the party chair, a day after Lowe criticised Nigel Farage for being “messianic”.
Lowe responded with anger, saying there was no evidence to back up the bullying claims, and that it was “entirely untrue” that he had made threats. He again criticised Farage, saying Reform was “our party as much as it is Nigel’s”.
Continue reading...Nigel Farage calls Rupert Lowe ‘utterly completely wrong’ after Reform MP criticised his leadership style
Reform UK is facing a split at the top after Nigel Farage called one of his most prominent MPs “utterly completely wrong” for calling him the “messianic” leader of a protest party.
Farage hit out at Rupert Lowe after the Great Yarmouth MP and former Southampton FC chair criticised his leadership publicly in an interview.
Continue reading...Interventions follow US vice president’s comments about ‘20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war in 40 years’. This live blog is closed
In response to a question about intelligence cooperation with the US, Sir David Manning, a former ambassador to Washington, said he thought this would become “more difficult” because there was a problem of trust. He explained:
If you have some of Trump’s appointees in these key jobs who have very strange track records, and have said very strange things about Nato allies, the Nato alliance and so on, and you have people in the administration who seem to be, let’s say, looking for ways of appeasing Russia, then you have a problem on the intelligence front, because these are not the values that we have.
Continue reading...Prime minister says UK must strengthen relationship with US for security
As Jakub Krupa and Martin Belam report on our Europe live blog, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, is floating proposals for a month-long ceasefire in Ukraine covering air, sea and attacks on critical infrastructure.
In interviews this morning, Luke Pollard, the defence minister, played down reports that this is a plan that Britain is formally backing. Asked about French government claims to this effect, he replied:
No agreement has been made on what a truce looks like, and so I don’t recognise the precise part you mentioned there. But we are working together with France and our European allies to look at what is the path to how … we create a lasting and durable peace in Ukraine.
You wouldn’t expect me to get into the details of what that plan looks like, because at the moment, the only person that would benefit from those details being put in the public domain before any plan is agreed would be President Putin.
Continue reading...Reform leader accused of ‘equivocating over Russia’s illegal war’ after criticising Volodymyr Zelenskyy
The Conservatives have compared Nigel Farage to Jeremy Corbyn after the Reform UK leader said Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been “rude” to Donald Trump, as well as criticising the Ukrainian president for not wearing a suit to the Oval Office.
The Liberal Democrats accused Farage of parroting White House talking points after Farage denied that Elon Musk and Steve Bannon had given Nazi salutes, saying their gestures were “out to the side and not in front”.
Continue reading...Peer argues that national ‘trickledown’ approach will fail to benefit those in most need
Keir Starmer’s government must strictly target the delivery of its core “missions” at areas of maximum deprivation or lose huge numbers of votes to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, an independent commission led by a former Labour cabinet minister will suggest this week.
The Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods (ICON), chaired by Labour peer Hilary Armstrong, a former party chief whip and housing minister, will say the government risks “wasting billions of pounds in higher public spending while failing to transform the places that need it most” unless it adopts the targeted approach.
Continue reading...PM fields questions on his announcement that the UK will raise defence spending and cut the foreign aid budget
PMQs is about to start.
Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.
The threat from the far right is real, but that leaves me all the more convinced that working together is not only the right choice, but the only choice …
More unites us than divides us. Now is the moment to make that real by uniting behind shared values, shared standards of behaviour and shared political norms, and unite against the rise of the far right.
I want us to work together to agree a common approach to asserting the values of our country, to bringing people together and creating a cohesive society where everyone feels at home …
It is time to come together, to draw a line in the sand, to set out who we are and what we believe in, because a politics of fear is a politics of despair …
I want to work with other political parties to set out clearly and boldly to the public what we can agree on as the norms and the values of our society and how we can protect those because I think they are under threat, I think they’re under very, very vigorous threat, from the politics of Farage.
Farage has been for years leading the argument which has been hostile to migration. And I think it’s based on a fundamentally racist view of the world. I reject that. I think migration is an advantage for Scotland.
There is a very live and active threat to our security from the aggression of Russia, and I think Farage is an accomplice to the Russian agenda and an apologist for the Russian agenda.
So to anybody in this country who thinks that Farage represents a means of protecting this country from the external threats that we face, I would say, have a good close look at what Farage has been connected with and what his MPs are saying about the Russian threat and their trivialisation of the Russian threat.
I’m simply making the point today that it’s important that those of us who are repulsed by the politics of Farage and the far right come together to … stress the importance of the values that we hold dear.
Continue reading...Cottrell, who served eight months for fraud, paid £15,000 for Reform party leader’s flight to US in December
Nigel Farage’s trip to Florida where he met Elon Musk was part-funded by his friend and former fraudster George Cottrell, who paid for his £15,000 flight.
The Reform leader accepted the flight for his visit in December last year, when he was pictured smiling with Musk and the Reform party treasurer, Nick Candy.
Continue reading...Reform leader tells ARC conference the UK needs ‘some sense of optimism’ and praises ‘Judeo-Christian culture’
Nigel Farage has called for the “reindustrialisation” of Britain and “180-degree shift” to reverse the declining birthrate, as he praised the “Judeo-Christian culture” that he claimed underpinned western civilisation.
Addressing a global gathering of rightwing activists in London, the Reform leader said the UK should rebuild its heavy industry, including through the domestic production of steel, oil and gas.
Continue reading...Event co-founded by Jordan Peterson will bring together global rightwing figures including senior US Republicans
Influential rightwingers from around the world are to gather in London from Monday at a major conference to network and build connections with senior US Republicans linked to the Trump administration.
The UK opposition leader, the Conservatives’ Kemi Badenoch, and Nigel Farage of the Reform UK party, her hard-right anti-immigration rival, will compete to present themselves as the torchbearer of British conservatism.
Continue reading...With a new HQ and digital-savvy staff, Reform UK is trying to tighten its operation – but there are tensions over fringe views and trouble brewing at the grassroots
Nigel Farage seems to be everywhere again: striding into rallies to the beat of Eminem, popping up at Maga parties in Washington, hosting a champagne-soaked fundraiser in Mayfair and grinning on the ITV breakfast sofa taunted by a Chinese dragon.
Since July, Reform UK has soared in the polls, threatening the Conservatives and Labour and leaving many backers daring to dream that one day Farage could enter government.
Continue reading...Opposition leader says PM was wrong when he said that the decision was taken under the last government
After PMQs there will be an urgent question in the Commons, tabled by the Lib Dem MP Christine Jardine, on “the potential security implications of the involvement of Chinese companies including Mingyang in energy infrastructure projects”. After that Dan Jarvis, the security minister, will make a statement to mark the publication of the report into Prevent’s dealings with Ali Harbi Ali, the man who killed the Conservative MP David Amess.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, has blamed Home Office foot-dragging for a failure to change the rules to allow forces to sack officers who fail vetting procedures, Matthew Weaver reports.
Continue reading...