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.
Key events
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.
George Finch, the Reform UK leader of Warwickshire county council, goes next. (Aged 19, he is the youngest council leader in the country.)
He claims the police have opposed his attempts to expose the immigration status of someone arrested in connection with an alleged crime.
Former prison governor joining Reform UK as adviser calls for US-style ‘supermax’ jails for most serious offenders
Colin Sutton, a former police officer who is now advising Reform UK on crime, introduces the next speaker – Vanessa Frake, a former prison governor and author of the memoir, The Governor.
Frake says when she went to Wormwood Scrubs, she was assigned the task of cleaning up D wing, where the lifers were based.
It was dirty, run down and had major drug issues. My attitude to the task was assertive and no nonsense. That’s the approach that I will take for my role within Reform UK [advising on crime].
She says the public have lost faith in how prisons are run. Assaults on staff are up, drug use is up, and thousands of offenders are being released early, she says.
She says the government has “appeased prisoners” who have been allowed to cook their own food. This has led to attacks on staff, she says.
She says she wants a “tougher prison regime for prisoners who will never be rehabilitated”, based on the supermax prisons in the US.
But, for prisoners who will be released, she wants more focus on rehabilition, she says.
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.
The Reform UK press conference is starting now. There is a live feed here.
Scotland’s deputy FM Kate Forbes to quit Holyrood next year, saying she wants to spend more time with her young family
Severin Carrell
Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.
Kate Forbes, Scotland’s deputy first minister and previous Scottish National party leadership contender, has announced she is quitting Holyrood at the next election.
The news will shock her party. Forbes has long been regarded by centrists in the party as a potential leader and was a favourite of many business leaders and SNP MSPs aligned with former leader Alex Salmond.
She said she had reflected over the recess about whether to stand again at next May’s Scottish parliamentary election, but had decided to put her young family first. In a statement she said:
I have grown up in the public eye, getting married, having a baby and raising a young family. I have consistently put the public’s needs ahead of my family’s during that time. I am grateful to them for accommodating the heavy demands of being a political figure. Looking ahead to the future, I do not want to miss any more of the precious early years of family life – which can never be rewound.
But her statement left open the possibility she may stand again at a later date, emphasising she did not wish “to seek re-election for another five-year term in the Scottish parliament”.
Her decision to quit now will also spare Forbes of the challenge of deciding whether or not to contest the leadership again if Swinney quits after the 2026 election; many see the housing secretary Màiri McAllan as the favourite to succeed him.
An MSP in the Highlands, Forbes came close to winning the leadership and becoming first minister after Nicola Sturgeon stood down in February 2023, following one of the most turbulent and combative campaigns of recent party history.
Forbes openly attacked many of Sturgeon’s landmark policies on social inclusion and accused her closest rival Humza Yousaf of incompetence, with the contest exposing significant strains with their pro-independence partners the Scottish Green party.
An active member of the socially conservative Free Church of Scotland, which does not admit women as church ministers, she was accused in turn of taking regressive stances on abortion rights, equal marriage and the climate crisis.
After Yousaf’s period as first minister and party leadership ended suddenly following his disastrous decision to abandon a coalition with the Greens, Forbes was brought back in to serve as deputy first minister by John Swinney as he sought to steady the ship.
Forbes said she enjoyed the privilege of becoming a minister for public finance, then as cabinet secretary for finance (a post she was given at extremely short notice after the then finance secretary quit on the eve of a budget) and most recently as deputy first minister and cabinet secretary for economy and Gaelic.
Angela Eagle, the Home Office minister, was giving interviews this morning to promote government plans to spend £100m hiring up to 300 extra National Crime Agency officers. Here is the Home Office press release, and Rajeev Syal has written the story up here.
As Rajeev says, this was the third Home Office announcement on this topic within 24 hours, following confirmation of plans plans to introduce a new offence for advertising irregular small boat crossings and plans to fast-track the processing of asylum applications.
Today the Times reports that, as part of the measures to limit asylum applications, the Home Office will penalise universities that accept foreign students who are primarily motivated by the desire to claim asylum in the UK. In their story Matt Dathan and Aubrey Allegretti report:
As part of a fresh government crackdown, universities will be penalised if fewer than 95 per cent of international students accepted on to a course start their studies, or fewer than 90 per cent continue to the end. Institutions that accept foreign students will face sanctions if more than 5 per cent of their visas are rejected.
The plans, which are expected to be announced next month, are designed to prevent the growing numbers of foreign nationals using study visas to enter the UK and then claim asylum.
Dathan and Allegretti also say Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is expected to sign the “one in, one out” returns deal with France, allowing around 50 small boat arrivals to be returned to France every week in exchange for the UK accepting an equal number of asylum applicants from France, on Wednesday.
According to Mahri Aurora from Sky News, Reform UK will announce a defection at their press conference.
NEW: Reform UK are holding a press conference at 11am today in which they will unveil a defection from the Tory party. They will also introduce former prison governor Vanessa Frake MBE as their new justice adviser.
The press conference will be held with them as well as Farage and the Reform Warwickshire County Council leader George Finch.
In her interviews this morning Angela Eagle, the minister for border security and asylum, was asked what her message was to people who have been protesting outside hotels used to house asylum seekers. She told Sky News:
Anger doesn’t get you anywhere.
What we have to do is recognise the values we have in this country, the rule of law we have in this country, the work we’re doing with the police to protect people.
We will close asylum hotels by the end of the parliament. We’ll do it faster if we can.
And she told Times Radio:
Those who are worried and demonstrating have an absolute right to do that, so long as they do it peacefully.
People don’t have a right to then have a pop at the police, which has been happening in some isolated cases outside hotels.
Truss accuses Badenoch of not telling truth about Tory failures
Kemi Badenoch, is not telling the truth about the “real failures of 14 years of Conservative government”, the former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss has said. Kevin Rawlinson has the story.
Angela Eagle pushes back at Tory claims linking small boat arrivals to sexual crime, saying robust data not available
Good morning. During August, when parliament is not sitting and the tap of domestic news is running dry, opposition parties often like to run campaigns. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is following this model with gusto and today, for the third week in a row, he is holding a press conference on the subject of crime. Reform’s success in the polls is almost entirely down to the fact it advocates hardline policies to cut immigration and small boat crossings and Farage is trying explicitly to link this issue to crime, arguing that asylum seekers are disproportionately likely to be criminal.
The Conservative party don’t have a single theme for their summer campaigning. (Yesterday Kemi Badenoch was campaigning about the uselessness of the Liz Truss mini-budget, a topic where the nation largely agrees.) But in response to an overnight announcement from the government about new measures to crack down on small boat crossings, they have also been depicting these migrants (whose numbers, of course, increased dramatically while they were in office) as a threat to public safety. In a statement released overnight Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “This weak Labour government has lost control of our borders, and we now see rapes and sexual assaults by illegal immigrants reported on a near daily basis.” And, in an interview on the Today programme this morning, Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, doubled down on this claim. He said:
I am afraid there is increasing evidence of a serious link between illegal migration, migration generally, and crime, particularly sexual crime against women and girls.
In London, 40% last year of all of the sexual crimes were committed by foreign nationals, despite the fact that they only make up 25% of the population.
And some of the data that – we’re seeing we don’t have good data at the moment – some of the data we’re seeing is very striking. Afghans and Eritrean nationals are 20 times more likely to be convicted of a sexual crime than a British national.
These are very shocking statistics.
Farage recently told the New Statesman, for an interesting, lengthy profile written by Harry Lambert, that he thought Jenrick would “almost certainly” end up to the right of him on migration by the next election. “I suspect he will probably go further – that’s just my instinct for someone who wants to make noise,” Farage said.
Angela Eagle, the minister for border security and asylum, has been giving interviews this morning, and on the Today programme she suggested that there was not firm data to back up the claims that Jenrick was making. She said:
[Jenrick] did actually say that we don’t have good data at the moment, and yet he’s asserting with great certainty data points, and I don’t know where he’s got them from. So it’s difficult for me to criticise from a data point of view. But he’s admitted in that interview that we don’t have good data.
Asked if she thought that the Tories were “playing with fire” by linking asylum seekers with sexual crime, Eagle replied:
I think that we need to deal with all crimes, all sexual crimes, regardless of who has perpetrated them in the same way. And we need to crack down on violence against women and girls, which is why we’ve actually got Jess Phillips, a minister, whose entire job is about doing that.
Asked if she was open to discussing possible links between immigration and crime, Eagle replied:
I don’t mind having debates about anything, but I think we haven’t got good data on this, and I think that we’ve got to look at the principle. And that is that we’ve got to deal with all sexual criminality, whoever perpetrates it, in an almost colour blind way.
If a girl has been abused by somebody or has been subjected to a vile sexual crime, it doesn’t really matter what the colour of the skin of the perpetrator is.
As Eagle said, it is hard to assess the truth about the link between immigration and crime because the data is complicated, and in some respects limited. But one person who has tried is the researcher and scientist Emma Monk. On her Substack blog she recently published an analysis of the claim that some people arriving in the UK on small boats are 20 times more likely than Britons to be criminal. This is a claim that Jenrick referenced, describing it as “shocking”. Monk argues that it is shockingly inaccurate – or “ludicrous on multiple fronts”, to use her words. Her whole post is worth reading, but here is her conclusion.
As you can see, the claim that migrants arriving on small boats are 24x more likely to end up in prison was an easy manipulation of available statistics. It wasn’t entirely fabricated – they can point to ‘official statistics’ to claim credibility – but it’s clearly misinformation all the same.
A Tory MP briefed it to a right-wing newspaper, which published it unquestioningly. That was picked up by the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem, and now the 24x figure is firmly in the minds of those who want to believe it, and is being repeated all over the internet, and across dinner tables and garden fences.
There are only two items in the diary for today.
11am: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, holds a press conference.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
(For readers who keep asking why we feature the Reform UK press conferences, but not the Lib Dem ones, or the Green party ones, the answer is simple; they are not holding any.)
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