Reform UK's Nigel Farage proposes sending prisoners overseas
Asked after his speech how the policies would be funded, Farage said tax rises would not be needed and that Reform was "advocating cutting huge amounts of public spending," including the HS2 rail project and net-zero policies.He said crime costed the British economy £170bn, adding: "It isn't really a question of can we afford to do this - it is really a question of can we afford not to do this?"Reform UK estimates its proposals would cost £17.4bn over five years, with an annual cost of £3.48bn. Plans to hire more police officers make up £10.5bn of the overall bill.
In order to create more prison spaces, Farage said his party would use the Army to build five new low-security 'Nightingale' prisons on Ministry of Defence land, creating 12,400 spaces for "lower category offenders".The Nightingale label is a reference to the network of emergency temporary hospitals set up during the Covid pandemic.Farage said he would be willing to force Reform-run councils to accept new prisons in their area, adding that it would bring well paid jobs to local communities. Reform is also proposing to create 10,400 places by transferring foreign prisoners to their country of origin. In exchange, the UK would be prepared to accept British offenders serving sentences abroad, he said.A further 10,000 prison places could be found by sending serious offenders to serve their sentences abroad, the party says.Farage said his party would consider multiple locations and pointed to Kosovo, Estonia and El Salvador as possibilities, although when pressed on the central American country's human rights record, he said it was an "extreme example". Earlier this year, the El Salvadorian President offered to take prisoners in the US - including those with American citizenship - and house them in El Salvador's mega-jail. Other countries have pursued similar arrangements - in 2021 Denmark agreed to pay Kosovo an annual fee of £12.8m for an initial five-year period to rent 300 of their prison spaces. Successive UK governments have reportedly explored the idea of sending prisoners to Estonia.The BBC has been told that both former Conservative ministers and current Labour ones came to the view that such a plan would be very expensive.In September of last year, the government said it was "making no such plans or announcements in relation to Estonian prison places".A growing prison population, coupled with a lack of new prisons, has put pressure on the system. Last year, the Prison Governors' Association warned that prisons in England and Wales were days away from running out of space, leading to the government letting some inmates out of prison early.
Responding to the speech, Labour Party chair Ellie Reeves said Reform was "more interested in headline-chasing than serious policy-making in the interests of the British people."She added that Labour was "backing up its word with action," pointing to the party's plan to hire 13,000 more police officers and community support officers by the time of the next election in 2029.A Conservative Party spokesperson said Farage was "offering tough talk without the faintest idea how to deliver it" adding that he had not explained how he would fund the additional prisons places. They said the Tories would pass a law making it easier to deport foreign criminals.
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NCIS actor choked and raped me... and I feared he would kill me if I didn't escape, accuser tells court
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The 53-year-old is charged with multiple counts of rape, sodomy and committing other graphic sex crimes on five women between 2014 and 2023 before his arrest in August last year. He has pleaded not guilty. JD2, who had her blonde hair parted in the middle and tied back in plaids, told prosecutor Jeffrey Megee that she had met the accused in March 2013 during a two-day work conference in Universal City in Los Angeles for Yale graduates and entertainment industry workers. She recalled how the 'charming' actor had pursued her on both days of the conference in a flirtatious manner. 'He appeared normal,' she told the court. 'He appeared like any other middle aged person in the industry in Los Angeles.' She did, though, have a concern. 'There was something strange which hasn't happened to me before or since,' she told the court. 'Every time he spoke to me I had a little voice in my head that questioned his motives - his motives behind what he was saying, which was so strange.' 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After finishing her food, 'Everything changed and the world flipped upside down and I was no longer a person, I was an object. Olds shown acting in an episode of NCIS 'I suddenly was no longer a human being sitting there. That was so horrific and impossible and unexplainable that I went into a void.' She described how Olds picked her up by her arms and moved her approximately six feet onto the bed. 'When I came back to my body and had awareness again I was naked lying on my back on his bed and he was in the process of raping me and choking me,' she told the court. 'I never consented to have any sexual relations,' she added. 'I am a woman in society and I have been harassed and assaulted multiple times. I have experienced male violence before - but I had never experienced anything like this.' She called out 'No!' to Olds to make him stop. He 'understood,' she recalled, and he took his hand away from her throat. 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The Guardian
19 minutes ago
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Those who misled the country over Brexit are usually quieter these days. They do not hang their heads in shame, but change the subject whenever they can. They deflect with their new war-cry that Britain must also leave the European convention on human rights. As the effects of their wicked Brexit folly worsen by the month, they rarely get a chance to whoop: 'We were right!' So their glee was unrestrained when the great US global bully gave Britain a less hard beating with a 10% tariff on its goods, compared with the EU, which was walloped with 15%. Their joy overflowed when the business and trade secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, conceded: 'I'm absolutely clear, this is a benefit of being out of the European Union, having our independent trade policy, absolutely no doubt about that.' But what else can a trade secretary, speaking through gritted teeth, actually say? In his attempts to attract foreign investment, he can hardly tell the truth about the damage done by leaving the EU. These advocates of Brexit should gloat while they can. When the French prime minister called the EU's deal with Donald Trump a 'soumission' (submission), Kwasi Kwarteng seized on the word in a piece for the Telegraph, writing: 'For the French, with their memories of capitulation to the Nazis in 1940, the word is even more associated with abject humiliation than it is in English.' Yes, that's the same Kwarteng who hurled the British economy over a cliff only three years ago. 'This trade deal is the EU's greatest humiliation since Britain voted to leave', read the headline on his column. But he would never confess that the difference between a 10% and 15% tariff with the US is minimal, since we trade twice as much with the EU as the US. It barely equates to the regular variation in exchange rates: in other words, it's 'a rounding error', the Centre for European Reform's trade expert, John Springford, told me, when compared with the hammer blow Britain gave itself with Brexit. The UK-India trade deal signed with the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, last week was greeted with another Brexiter whoop from the Conservative peer Daniel Hannan. Also writing in the Telegraph, he said: 'My party, and Brexiteers more widely, should be taking credit for having done what all the clever Europhiles have spent six years telling us was impossible. Instead of moaning, we should welcome Starmer's belated understanding that world's biggest and fastest-growing markets are outside the EU.' But the Tory leader took another view: 'Keir Starmer called this 'historic.' It's not historic, we've just been shafted!' Kemi Badenoch said, dismissing the India agreement as a bad deal that would increase immigration. I don't know whether clever men like Kwarteng and Hannan are blinded by Brexit monomania or paralysed by the awful knowledge of the damage they have inflicted on their country, unable to confess an act of treachery and delusion hardly matched in British history. But as ever, facts are too inconvenient for them to deal with. Yes, the India deal is the biggest and most substantial trade deal since leaving the EU. Yes, it's a deal that would have been impossible to do from inside the union. But how big is it? It will add 0.13% to our economy. That's better than the Australia agreement, worth just 0.08%, the New Zealand deal, worth 0.03%, or the proposed US agreement, worth 0.16%, according to Department for Business and Trade analysis. But our fragile economy needs all the help it can get, so hurrah for Brexit and our new trade deals! But the gloaters ignore the context: our great Brexit losses. Here's the Office for Budget Responsibility's assessment: 'Our forecasts have assumed that the volume of UK imports and exports will both be 15% lower than if we had remained in the EU.' That 15% loss in trade 'will lead to a 4% reduction in the potential productivity of the UK economy'. In other words, as Jonty Bloom of the New World calculates, we need 50 India trade deals to make up for Brexit, because Britain does more than 40% of its trade with the EU – more if you include the European Economic Area and Switzerland. India has just 2% of our trade. Brexiters bleat that Labour is sneaking us into the EU by the back door, with deals on Horizon, the EU's research and innovation funding programme; soon, hopefully, Erasmus; and maybe a youth experience scheme. We hope for agricultural products and energy deals. But even these, say the trade experts, are still small potatoes. Major attempts to rescue Britain's 4% loss in productivity since 2020 hit the concrete walls of Boris Johnson's monumentally bad trade and cooperation agreement. Brexit zealots protest against agreements to keep a dynamic alignment with EU standards that would make trade easier. But it doesn't apply to our internal environmental standards: outside EU rules, we have let our water quality fall behind the EU. More than 85% of bathing waters in the EU are rated excellent compared with just 64% in the UK, with the gap rising every year, reports the European Movement. Public opinion has shifted rapidly: we are now a 'Bregretful' country, where only 31% still think it was right to leave and 61% say Brexit has been more of a failure than a success. Who do they blame? The Conservatives and Boris Johnson are top of the list, with 88% and 84% respectively holding them responsible. More than two-thirds (67%) blame Nigel Farage. A majority of Britons (56%) want to rejoin the EU as the grim reaper carries off old Brexiters, replacing them with young, pro-European voters. Don't expect bolder moves from the Labour government in its current frame of mind. Though defence and security draw us towards ever closer union, public opinion is not to be trusted. If people were confronted now with actual re-entry terms – paying in, free movement, joining the euro, no special deals – their answers might change. The mood might also be different if the far right continues its gains in EU countries, dividing the union's values. What might it take to throw off the economic, political and psychological darkness of Brexit? A clever – or Cleverly? – new Tory leader daring to break with the past, confessing the error of Brexit and taking us back into the EU, once and for all. It may take another generation to recover. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
