Latest news with #ReformParty
The Sun
8 hours ago
- Business
- The Sun
You can tell PM is scared of Farage…he took jacket off and was in serious mode when he launched latest salvo against him
YOU can always tell when a politician wants us to take them seriously. They take off their jacket and tie, roll up their shirt sleeves and stand in front of an impressively big bit of factory machinery, in the desperate hope that, as they read an autocue in front of cameras, they look more down-to-earth and honest. 6 6 It's a gimmick that rarely convinces voters, but we absolutely KNOW that Sir Keir Starmer was in 'serious mode' when he did just that to launch his latest salvo against Nigel Farage. The Prime Minister, despite having a whopping great majority of 165 MPs and four more years in office before the next general election, appears to be remarkably agitated by the potential threat posed by a man who leads a party with just five MPs. Smell desperation Indeed, barely a speech, or an interview or a PMQs now passes without Keir talking about Nigel. But while the PM pretends to laugh at the Reform leader, often treating him with undisguised contempt, it is obvious to everyone that Starmer is now a VERY worried man. It's not just Reform's first place in the opinion polls that scares Keir, or even the party's victory in the recent local elections and seizing one of Labour's safest seats. It's also the prospect that Farage is seeking advice from proven campaigners including Dominic Cummings. The Vote Leave chief, who led the Brexit vote and the architect of Boris Johnson's 2019 victory, claimed this week that Farage could 'definitely' become Prime Minister at the next election if he follows his advice, saying: 'Reform has been a one-man band, it's been Nigel and an iPhone,' but now it's time to make a proper plan for government. Not surprisingly, Labour are throwing everything they can at Farage but, so far, nothing is sticking. They've tried calling him a far-right bigot, and that didn't work. They dismissed him as a posh public schoolboy and ex-City trader, who doesn't care about ordinary Brits. But that didn't work either. So the latest tactic is to tell us that Reform's numbers don't add up. Starmer dismissed Farage's economic plans — announced to much fanfare on Tuesday — as 'fantasy' policies and 'a mad experiment' that will result in a Liz Truss -style economic meltdown. You can almost smell the desperation coming from Labour as they seek to head off Farage's turquoise army at the pass. 6 Certainly, Farage's pledge to bring back Winter Fuel Payments for all pensioners will be a very popular policy across the political spectrum. And more generous tax breaks for married couples would appeal to many families with young children. But his plan to scrap the two-child benefit cap is a sop too far to the left for many Reform supporters — and probably wouldn't help a single child in poverty. His 'ambition' to raise the personal tax allowance from £12,571 up to £20,000 a year, pulling millions of people on low wages out of tax altogether, is laughably unaffordable at upwards of £50billion a year. All that said, voters know it's a bit rich for Starmer to criticise Reform for uncosted policies when he himself happily backed Jeremy Corbyn's free-spending manifestos in the 2017 and 2019 elections — and indeed his own manifesto costings in 2024 were a fairytale fiction. Not to mention the small matter of Labour's Net Zero target for 2050 coming with an unaffordable price tag of seemingly more than £1trillion. Fraught with problems Meanwhile, on the other side of the political aisle, the Conservatives are getting openly jittery at how Farage, not the Tory's Kemi Badenoch, is increasingly viewed as the official Leader of the Opposition. The local elections proved that Reform is now appealing to both Labour and Tory voters. 6 That presents its own difficulties for Farage because trying to be 'all things to all men' is fraught with problems. Every policy that will appeal to one set of voters may also put off the other side. Yet when the Prime Minister is worried enough about Farage to go on the telly to attack Reform's policies, instead of announcing his own, it shows the upstart party's main man is leading the political agenda, not Keir. The next general election may still be four long years away, but the political rivals' shirt sleeves are well and truly rolled up ready for the fight for No 10. Khan is wrong SADIQ KHAN has called for cannabis possession to be decriminalised, insisting that the current law, which classifies it as a Class B drug, 'cannot be justified'. The Mayor of London claims the law is damaging 'community' relations because black people are more likely than whites to face police stop-and-search for suspected cannabis use. As per usual, Khan is wrong. There's plenty of evidence about the harms caused by regular cannabis use. Decriminalising possession for personal use will simply create even more demand for the organised criminals supplying the drug. We're told that the 'war on drugs' hasn't worked so we may as well give up fighting. Given that people walk freely on the streets smoking weed these days, it has not really been a hard-fought battle. If we are going to decriminalise cannabis because the law isn't being enforced, then why not decriminalise shoplifting or carrying a knife while we are at it? Maybe if we bothered to ENFORCE the law, fewer people would risk breaking it. Luvvies should blame Hamas GARY LINEKER and his celebrity chums Dua Lipa and Benedict Cumberbatch have joined 300 other luvvies to signal their virtue in a letter to the Prime Minister calling on him to 'end the UK's complicity' in Gaza. They demanded that Sir Keir Starmer ban arms sales to Israel and push for humanitarian aid and a ceasefire to save 'the children of Gaza'. 6 6 It is a tragedy that innocent people die in wars but, for some reason, the children killed in Yemen, Syria or Ukraine don't hold as much interest for righteous celebs as those in Gaza. The people complicit in the deaths of innocent children in Gaza are the Hamas terrorist leaders, who have publicly stated that they want Palestinian kids to be martyred and paraded on camera for their cause. That's why their fighters use them as human shields. If Lineker and his grand-standing mates really want to save those kids, they should publicly back Israel's military efforts to defeat Hamas and free ordinary Palestinians from their evil clutches. So don't applaud the likes of Lineker for their moral stance on Gaza. They aren't helping Gazan children, they're just fighting Hamas's propaganda war for them.
New Straits Times
12 hours ago
- Politics
- New Straits Times
Widening Gen Z gender gap in global politics
SOUTH Korea's young women are expected to lead a broad political backlash against the main conservative party at presidential elections next Tuesday, punishing it for months of chaos. Multitudes of young men, though, are unlikely to join them. In democracies worldwide, a political gender divide is intensifying among Gen Z voters, with young men voting for right-wing parties and young women leaning left, a break from pre-pandemic years when both tended to vote for progressives. Recent elections spanning North America, Europe and Asia show this trend is either consolidating or accelerating, with angry, frustrated men in their 20s breaking to the right. First-time South Korean voter Lee Jeong-min is one of them. He says he will vote for the right-wing Reform Party's candidate, Lee Jun-seok. Lee, the candidate, vows to shut down the ministry of gender equality, speaking to an issue that resonates with men like Jeong-min, who resents that only men have to do military service. "As a young man, I find this to be one of the most unfair realities of living in Korea. "At the prime of their youth — at 21 or 22 years old — young men, unlike their female peers, are unable to fully engage in various activities in society because they have to serve 18 months in the military." In South Korea, almost 30 per cent of men aged 18-29 plan to back the Reform Party compared with just three per cent of young women, according to a Gallup Korea poll this month. Overall, more than half of the men back right-wing parties while almost half the women want the left-wing Democratic Party candidate to win. The divergence shrinks for older age groups. Political economist Soohyun Lee, of King's College London, said many young South Korean men felt unable to meet society's expectations: find a good job, get married, buy a home and start a family. And they blame feminism, many believing that women are preferred for jobs. In South Korea and other democracies, Gen Z men are seeing an erosion of their relative advantage, especially since the pandemic — to the point where in a few countries the gender pay gap among 20-somethings favours young women. European Union data show one of them is France, where men aged 18-34 voted in larger numbers for Marine le Pen's far-right party than women in last year's legislative elections. In Britain, where more young men than women vote conservative, males aged 16-24 are more likely to be neither employed, nor in education than female counterparts, official data shows. In the West, young men blame immigration as well as diversity programmes for competition for jobs. In Germany's general election in February, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) won a record 20.8 per cent of the vote, tugged along by an undercurrent of support from young men — though the leader of the party is a woman. Men aged 18-24 voted 27 per cent for the AfD while young women ran to the other end of the political spectrum, voting 35 per cent for the far-left Linke party. The gender divide is not restricted to Gen Z, voters born since the mid-to-late 1990s. Millennials, aged in their 30s and early 40s, have felt the winds of change for longer. In Canada last month, men aged 35-54 voted 50 per cent for opposition conservatives in an election turned upside down by United States President Donald Trump's tariffs. The Liberals, which were bracing for defeat, rode an anti-Trump wave back to power, thanks in large part to female voters. Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, which promised a manufacturing renaissance and attacked diversity, resonated with young white and Hispanic men, but turned off young women. So how does the Gen Z war end? Pollsters said it could drag on unless governments addressed core issues, such as home affordability and precarious employment. "If the future generation is ever so divided along the lines of gender and refuses to engage with each other to build social consensus, I do not think we can successfully tackle these huge issues," Lee, of King's College, said.
The Guardian
12 hours ago
- Business
- The Guardian
‘The brand is broken': is there any way back from abyss for Tories?
At a carefully staged factory visit rich in pre-written lines, one part of Keir Starmer's delivery felt entirely unscripted: his insistence that Reform is now his main electoral challenger, rather than a Conservative party 'sliding into the abyss'. This was, one No 10 source said afterwards, 'not posturing', simply an acknowledgement that under Kemi Badenoch there appeared to be no way back for a party slumping in the polls and that followed up a disastrous general election with almost equally bad local results at the start of this month. It has almost become a political truism to speculate whether the Conservatives' sequence of crises are now becoming existential, but there are good arguments against writing a definitive obituary for a party that has repeatedly proved itself able to adapt, reinvent and come back. There are, however, several very compelling reasons for wondering whether this time might be different. For starters, in Reform the Tories face a challenge from the right, one that, unlike Nigel Farage's previous parties, is – at least for now – well organised, heavily funded and able to win elections. Even more importantly, the sense of a party spiralling around the political plughole is shared by increasing numbers of people from a constituency Badenoch should care about – her own party. 'A lot of people are spitting feathers about how the party is being run,' said one senior local Conservative activist in a very traditionally Tory area where the party fared terribly in the local elections. 'We've been effectively wiped out over the last two years – we've lost control of every part of local government and have lost almost all our MPs,' they said. 'What is so scary is that people don't really see a route out of this. It's not even about Kemi or [Robert] Jenrick or whatever. The brand is broken on the doorstep. 'If we can't win places that are so traditionally Conservative, because there's another rightwing party that doesn't have our baggage, then we're in real trouble.' Such sentiment is understandable even from the raw numbers. After a general election in which its 2019 contingent of 317 seats was slashed to 121, in this month's local elections the party lost nearly two-thirds of its 1,000 or so council seats, shedding control of 16 councils. And the losses have continued. Analysis by the BBC this week showed that since the local elections the Conservatives had lost another 47 councillors, some of them to Reform, with others quitting to become independents. As party activists of all persuasions know very well, such attrition is only sustainable for so long. As they also understand, political hopefuls generally enjoy winning elections and are drawn towards parties that look like they can do this. 'We are very quickly reaching that point where it all pivots towards Reform,' the senior Tory activist said. 'I know a lot of people, really senior people, some on the parliamentary candidates list, who are considering defecting to Reform. It is not good.' Badenoch has begun restructuring her increasingly cash-strapped party, with a series of local officials asked to reapply for their jobs – in some cases just before the local elections. 'Fantastic people who have been in the party for 20 or 30 years, and who have been brilliant and loyal, were basically sacked,' the senior activist said. 'And what amazed us all is that they were doing this during the final two or three months of the local election campaign, when stability is really important.' How can the Conservatives fight back? The response to Starmer's comments from Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, was to present the Tories as the only remaining beacon of fiscal credibility, contrasting this with what he called 'Jeremy Corbyn's uniparty' in Labour and Reform. Aside from the slight mental stretch required to see either Starmer or Farage as Corbynistas, the challenge for the Conservatives is that many traditional Tories who prize sober fiscal policies were scarred by the brief Liz Truss experiment, and often dislike Badenoch's shift towards the culture war, Reform-mimicking harder right. Increasingly, the grassroots disquiet is directed at the top. Badenoch is safe for now, mainly because party rules forbid a challenge in the first year, and she was only elected last November. But what then? The general acceptance had been that nothing would happen before another set of local elections next year. For at least some Tories, matters are now accelerating. It is not only Starmer who can see the abyss ahead.
The Independent
13 hours ago
- Business
- The Independent
Keir Starmer has found Nigel Farage's weak spot – and it is Trussonomics
Is Keir Starmer rattled? Labour's high command has been openly saying for some time now that they see Nigel Farage as their main enemy. The prime minister's speech in St Helens today was only the latest salvo in what he sees as a presidential contest between him and the leader of Reform. I have argued before that there are dangers for Starmer in being quite so explicit about the strategy. It makes it look as if he is 'running scared', as Farage says. It looks as if Farage is dictating the agenda. But worse than that, it makes it look as if some of Starmer's policies are not sincere. It looks as if his tough talk on immigration is simply designed to position himself against the Farage onslaught. Feeding the perception among Labour MPs and party members that Starmer is moving to the right in order to fend off the threat from a politician they despise does nothing to quell the rebelliousness. Most of Starmer's policy decisions may be right in their own terms, but because the prime minister has travelled all the way to north-west England to make a speech responding to Farage's news conference on Tuesday, it looks as if Labour is being pushed around by a party that has only five MPs. Starmer may be right to want to reduce immigration from the 739,000 a year he inherited from Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. He may be right to want to restore the winter fuel payment to some hard-pressed pensioners. He may even be right to consider lifting the two-child benefit cap – although today all that he would say was that he was 'determined that we are going to drive down child poverty '. But in each case, he risks looking as if he is trying to appease Farage. Still, if you are going to take on Farage, you might as well do it effectively. Labour's initial response to the Reform leader's news conference calling for the lifting of the two-child limit struck the wrong note. It called him a privately educated stockbroker, as if either aspect of his personal history should automatically disqualify him from seeking working-class votes. Starmer repeated that mistake in his speech today, saying that, 'unlike Nigel Farage, I know what it is like' to not know if the bills can be paid. The prime minister said that his father went to work in a factory every day of his life. None of that matters. The voters think that Sir Keir KC is posh and that Farage, who goes shooting and owns a fishing boat, is a man of the people. But Starmer devoted most of his speech to the correct attack on Farage: one that will make the voters stop and think. He pointed out that Farage's policies are a more extreme form of Liz Truss 's mini-Budget. Raising the income tax threshold to £20,000 a year is a huge unfunded tax cut. 'Liz Truss's fantasy economics crashed the economy. My government was elected to fix the mess,' he said. This is not true: Truss herself appointed Jeremy Hunt as chancellor to fix the mess, which he did. The Labour government was elected on impossible promises to make life better without raising taxes. But everyone knows what he means. 'Now Nigel Farage wants to repeat her mistake. You can't trust him with your job, your mortgage, your pension, your bills, or your future.' He is right about that, and if he is going to take Farage head-on, that is the way to do it. Many voters rate Farage higher than Starmer on many qualities, but they do not think that Farage is prime ministerial. His appearance at a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas today will not help him in that respect. His ally Donald Trump might get away with his crypto scam in America, but that is not the kind of thing that goes down well in working men's clubs in the North and Midlands. Starmer is on to something with the Truss comparison. Farage praised the mini-Budget as the 'best Conservative Budget since 1986' (he may have meant Nigel Lawson's 1988 Budget, which cut taxes for the rich), and Truss has clearly explored the possibility of defecting to Reform, even if Farage would not be foolish enough to accept her application. Everyone knows that Farage's numbers do not add up. On Tuesday he read out a list of measures that a Reform government would take to raise vast sums of money. The first and biggest was £45bn a year from abolishing the net zero target, a figure that he attributed to the Institute for Government, the earnest think tank devoted to better administration. This was nonsense. Climate change policies cost about £6bn a year, according to the Climate Change Committee, whose work has been quoted by the Institute for Government. Farage tried to say in his defence, 'At no point in the history of any form of government has anybody ever thought the numbers added up,' but his numbers are in a different league – the Truss premier league – of not adding up. And the country did receive a sharp reminder in September 2022 of what happens when the markets take fright. Is Starmer rattled? Undoubtedly. But is this the best way for him to fight back? Again the answer is yes.
Daily Mail
17 hours ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Where's the cash coming from, Nige? Keir Starmer challenges Farage over Reform's £85bn spending plans - as party leader promotes Bitcoin in Vegas
Keir Starmer warned voters they cannot trust Nigel Farage with their 'future, mortgages or jobs' today as the Reform leader faced a major backlash against his party's economic plans. The Prime Minister joined the Tories in taking aim at Mr Farage's economic literacy today after he unveiled plans for an £85billion spending splurge if Reform wins power. Mr Farage has sought to woo working class Labour voters by leaning left with support for scrapping the two-child benefit cap and fully reinstating winter fuel payments. But he simultaneously backs a series of tax cuts, which left experts at the Institute for Fiscal Studies saying there could be an £85billion hole in the maths. That would dwarfs the £45billion of unfunded tax cuts announced by former Tory Prime Minister Liz Truss in her disastrous 2022 mini-Budget. Sir Keir further questioned his ability this morning, pointing out that Mr Farage, the Clacton MP, is currently in Las Vegas to speak at a conference promoting bitcoin. Speaking in Warrington Sir Keir said: Can you trust him? Can you trust him with your future? Can you trust him with your jobs? Can you trust him with your mortgages, your pensions, your bills? 'And he gave the answer on Tuesday. A resounding no.' He added: 'Apparently (Mr Farage) is in Las Vegas today at a casino, and it's not a surprise, because he said that the Liz Truss budget in his view was the best since 1986. That shows his judgment.' The Prime Minister joined the Tories in taking aim at Mr Farage's economic literacy today after he unveiled plans for an £85billion spending splurge if Reform wins power. And even Reform supporters raised eyebrows as the cost of the package announced by Mr Farage. Commentator Tim Montgomerie, founder of the Con Home political website, said: 'The sums don't add up.' Reform wants to raise the tax-free income allowance to £20,000 and pledged a transferable marriage tax allowance if his party wins the next election, aimed at incentivising marriage and encouraging people to have more children by making it more affordable. It would exempt one spouse from paying any tax on the first £25,000 of their income, as revealed by the Mail. Speaking at an event at a business in north-west England, the Prime Minister said Mr Farage would not have protected jobs in industries subject to tariffs from the US, and compared him to Ms Truss. Sir Keir said: 'We protected those jobs. Would Nigel Farage have done the same? Absolutely not.' Mr Farage insisted the pledges were 'credible' and could be paid for by scrapping the Net Zero agenda, which he claimed was costing £45billion a year. Mr Farage praised Liz Truss's mini-Budget in 2022 - which triggered a market meltdown. He said an extra £4billion annually could be saved from ditching accommodation for asylum seekers by deporting them and £7billion by ending the public sector's diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) drive. A further £65billion could be saved over five years by cutting quango bureaucracy by 5 per cent, he added, giving an average saving of £69billion annually overall. But experts said raising the basic rate of income tax threshold to £20,000 could alone cost up to £80billion. At present, workers pay the 20 per cent rate of income tax on everything between £12,570 and £50,270. Lifting the two-child benefit cap would cost an extra £3.5billion and reinstating the winter fuel allowance £1.5billion. The eagerly anticipated speech was the most policy-heavy since Reform won four million votes and five seats last July. Asked if he had a 'magic money tree', Mr Farage admitted his sums were 'slightly optimistic' but added: 'We can't afford Net Zero, it's destroying the country; we can't afford DEI, it's actually preventing many talented people from succeeding; and we certainly can't afford young undocumented males crossing the English Channel and living in five-star hotels. 'You can argue about numbers adding up. You can probably argue that at no point in the history of any form of government has anybody ever thought the numbers added up.' The Conservatives last night branded the package 'fantasy' economics and 'Corbynism in a different colour' because of the 'billions in unfunded commitments'.
