Discover Top Posts Tagged with #deform uk

Reform leader changed his mind about standing as MP after gift from Thai-based crypto tycoon Christopher Harborne

Nigel Farage was given £5m by the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before announcing he would stand in the 2024 British general election, the Guardian can reveal. Farage had stated he did not intend to stand as a prospective MP but U-turned in June 2024, within weeks of receiving the personal gift from the Thailand-based businessman. In July 2024, Farage became an MP for the first time and has since stated he now expects to become prime minister at the next general election. After being approached by the Guardian about the gift, neither he nor Harborne provided a comment – instead lawyers for Reform UK and Harborne pleaded for more time. Farage then confirmed to the Daily Telegraph that he had received the gift, saying it was to pay for his personal security. Until that point neither Harborne nor Farage had spoken publicly about the £5m gift. At the time of the gift, Farage had not announced that he would run for the seat of Clacton. MPs said that Farage should have declared it. Parliamentary rules state that any benefits should be declared for the 12 months before taking up office as an MP, depending on whether it was for political or personal purposes. The rules state: “If there is any doubt, the benefit should be registered.” Asked on Monday by the Guardian about the gift, Reform sent a legal letter asking for more time to respond. The deadline was extended until Wednesday morning. The Telegraph then published its interview with Farage before the deadline. The money underlines what a pivotal figure Harborne has become in British politics – bankrolling Farage personally and the parties he has led over the past seven years. Last year, he donated £9m to Reform UK – the largest ever single donation by a living person to a British political party.

#uk #uk politics #deform uk #crypto billionaire #undeclared donations #party funding

Exclusive: Senior party figures conclude outsiders or existing senior staff deemed more suitable should take over from current permanent sec

...take over from current permanent secretaries. A Reform UK government would expect to dismiss the top civil servant in every government department and replace them with people seen as more likely to implement the party’s priorities, the Guardian has learned. Senior Reform figures have concluded that the current crop of permanent secretaries, the lead civil servant in each department, are not up to the necessary standard. Some would be replaced by outsiders, and others by existing officials viewed as more suitable. The plan has prompted warnings that a shift towards a less stable and more politicised civil service could result in the loss of significant expertise and of institutional memory, and would make government less effective. Nigel Farage’s party has promised it will enact a radical programme. One senior member said this would be modelled on the second Trump administration, with a focus on making change via executive orders rather than legislation, where possible. Reform has already said it would look at appointing outside experts to become ministers. It is understood that as well as making some into peers, so they could sit in the House of Lords, others considered for ministerial jobs would be lined up for winnable Commons seats. While the party has received a series of big donations in recent months, including £12m from the crypto investor Christopher Harborne, it is expected that donors would be ruled out for ministerial roles.

If you want to know what Deform UK will do should it get into power you need only look at what Trump has done in the US.

#uk #uk politics #deform uk #trump playbook

The Reform hopefuls were quick to condemn scandals supposedly overseen by Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat councils, without realis

..., without realising they were actually condemning the actions of their own party. Nigel Farage vowed to field candidates in every contested ward in next week’s local elections, but this was easier said than done. The party was forced to resort to increasingly desperate tactics to put Reform names on polling cards: full page adverts in the national press, sending pleading emails to members, and even cold calling journalists (including one Byline Times freelancer) asking them to stand. Given the national polling, this begs the question of who will soon be running local councils up and down the country, responsible for billions of pounds of public spending. And do these new candidates know what they’ve signed up to? This last year has seen a string of misconduct scandals at Reform led councils, resulting in over 74 councillors sacked or resigning in 12 months. Is this new crop of recruits aware of their party’s questionable track record? Finding out wasn’t going to be easy. While Reform has positioned itself as the party of free speech, with Nigel Farage swinging behind X and Elon Musk in the row over AI nudification of women and girls, the party itself is often averse to rigorous scrutiny. Reform recently withdrew from a BBC documentary filming behind the scenes at Kent council, the Reform leader of Nottinghamshire council banned local journalists from asking questions in 2025, and a candidate has admitted to us that “coming up to the local elections HQ have insisted that all media communications are approved by Reform press office.” To peer through the cracks, I engaged in some mild subterfuge to see how informed Reform’s new hopefuls are about their new party. I set up a fictional right-wing news channel, Patriot News UK, and filled it with pictures of flags and polemics about the “woke liberal bias” at the BBC. I got dressed up as a budding reporter in a cheap suit and a £10 tie from Oxfam, and filmed a few hammy news reports with my trademark signoff “Your country, your news!”. I set up a fake X profile and followed a bunch of enthusiastic Reform supporters.

#uk #uk politics #deform uk #hypocrites #no surprise there

SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: A channel constantly breaking the rules has effectively become Reform TV, while our useless state regulator does noth

...useless state regulator does nothing It has happened almost by stealth. One political party in Britain has effectively ended up with its own television station. GB News has essentially become Reform TV. The broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, has more or less given up the ghost. And Nigel Farage is laughing all the way to the bank. These are the only conclusions one can reasonably draw from the first-ever exercise in commissioning experienced professional journalists to watch multiple hours of output from GB News. The regulator, by contrast, relies on complaints from the public. And, by and large, GB News viewers have no complaints. Most of our 20 reviewers had never watched GB News before. Most of them came away appalled – not by the political views that dominate the station’s output, but by the way the channel is driving a coach and horses through the laws that were put in place to define broadcasting in the UK. The UK news ecosystem is both special and unique. Newspapers have, for 200 years, often been wildly opinionated in their approach to journalism. But parliament decided that broadcasting would be different: in return for a licence, there’s an obligation to be accurate and impartial. Broadcasters are required to offer appropriate challenge and context, and are supposed to promote a range of viewpoints. GB News routinely – you might almost say systematically – disregards these requirements. Asked to score the programmes on a scale of 0-5 (0 being not at all compliant with Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code and 5 being wholly compliant), the overall score from our reviewers was just 1.5. Each reviewer came up with detailed reasoning. Ofcom’s log of complaints, by contrast, shows a tiny trickle of concern. Of the 15 programmes we reviewed, nine had triggered no complaints, two sparked two complaints, while a kid-glove interview with Donald Trump led to 32. Two more programmes are “under assessment”.

#uk #uk politics #deform uk #gbnews #deformTV #far-right propaganda #masquerading as media #ofcom #uk broadcast

People want to feel like their disappointment is being heard.

Beyond the high drama surrounding the Makerfield by-election and the contest to be the UK prime minister lies a more fundamental battle. It is the struggle between the incremental pragmatism of mainstream politics and the magical thinking of populism. The great catchword of recent UK politics has been “change”. Brexit, it was said, would change the country’s declining position in the world. Boris Johnson said after his landslide electoral victory in 2019 that he was going to take on “the problems that no government has had the guts to tackle before”. Labour’s 2024 election manifesto, entitled “Change”, declared that a Starmer-led government would “stop the chaos, turn the page, and start to rebuild our country”. But people have different ideas of what change means and how fast it can happen. In a world full of entrenched, unequal social structures and complex, intractable global problems, change is inevitably a long-term project. But voters tend not to be in the business of long-term evaluation. Similarly, they are not impressed by graphs showing that the UK economy is currently the fastest-growing in the G7 or that waiting times for NHS treatment in England are at their lowest level in more than three years. There are undoubtedly better ways of communicating long-term change and identifying quick wins than the current government has adopted. However, the real battle is not between rival tellers of the mainstream narrative, but between two completely different conceptions of change. Remembering this will be crucial for Andy Burnham when he takes on Reform UK in the Makerfield by-election in his bid to return to Westminster to challenge Keir Starmer for the leadership of the Labour party and his job as prime minister.

#uk #uk politics #populism #deform uk #labour

Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson and Robert Jenrick, among others, have sung the praises of the JCB PotHole Pro

Reform UK’s leading figures have repeatedly promoted a new pothole-fixing machine by the construction company JCB, while the party received £200,000 from the British digger maker, the Guardian can reveal. Several Reform politicians including Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson, Robert Jenrick, Zia Yusuf and Richard Tice have sung the praises of the JCB PotHole Pro machine. At a rally last year in Birmingham, Farage entered the stage on one of the repair vehicles and suggested it would be used in Reform-run councils when the party had taken control at local elections. Describing JCB as “one of the most incredible companies in the world” in March 2025, he said: “This machine can mend potholes at half the cost that currently is being charged by other commercial operators, and aren’t potholes just the perfect symbol of broken Britain? “So I thought I’d come in on a JCB, with a machine that actually works, and that county council should use, if they weren’t tied in, to five and 10-year contracts with inferior providers. But we’ll fix that, won’t we, when we control those county councils?” After Farage lavished praise on the business, JCB gave a donation of £200,000 to Reform in November last year. The donation came after years of the family-owned company giving money to the Conservatives, with its chairman, Anthony Bamford, having sat as a Tory peer until 2024.

I'm shocked! The same company that supports the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages in the Israeli-occupied Palestine supports fascists in the UK. How unexpected!

#uk #uk politics #deform uk #J.C. Bamford Excavators Limited (JCB)#donation to deform

Nigel Farage has criticised polling company YouGov for showing less Reform UK support than other agencies.

Nigel Farage has accused YouGov of being “deceptive” after the polling company consistently showed Reform with less support than other surveys. He has claimed the company broke transparency rules set out by the British Polling Council over how it presents headline figures. As a result, YouGov has agreed to publish more data in future. The chart below compares Britain’s monthly voting intentions for Reform in a poll of polls derived from 14 different agencies, with voting intentions for the party from YouGov. The comparison runs from the start of 2025 to March 2026. At first glance, it appears that Farage is right – the YouGov data is below the poll of polls data for most of the time. However, if we calculate the difference between the two series, the poll of polls average for Reform over the last 15 months is about 28% in voting intentions – for YouGov it is about 26%. This 2% difference is well within the margin of error associated with polling; what statisticians describe as “not statistically significant”.

Next up: the MSM is fake news.

#uk #uk politics #deform uk #yougov polling #farage #not happy

Nigel Farage’s party plans to deport up to 288,000 people a year on five flights a day and expand stop and search

Reform UK would create an ICE-style agency dedicated to deporting hundreds of thousands of people, as well as terminating the status of those with indefinite leave to remain (ILR), the party will say. It would also ban the conversion of churches into mosques and fund a radical expansion of stop and search, the party’s new home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, will also say in a speech on Monday. The deradicalisation programme Prevent would also have its mandate redrawn to focus on Islamist extremism. Labour said the plans were divisive and showed that Reform was planning “to deport people who have followed the rules, worked hard and built their lives here – our friends, neighbours and colleagues”. The Labour party’s chair, Anna Turley, said the policies were “a direct attack on settled families and fundamentally un-British”. She added: “Britain is a proud, tolerant and diverse nation, which stands in opposition to the kind of divisive politics stoked by Reform.” Yusuf will say in a speech that Reform would leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and put a legal duty on the home secretary to remove illegal migrants. He will promise to create a new agency – UK Deportation Command – with the capacity to detain 24,000 migrants at a time and deport up to 288,000 annually on five flights a day. Experts have previously said the costs of such an expansion would be considerable – as of April 2024 there were approximately 2,500 detention spaces.

Ending indefinite leave to remain will invalidate the Brexit withdrawal agreement. Expanding stop and search will affect Black or brown people the most. More deportations will destroy the UK economy.