Nigel Farage introduced two veteran Labour politicians to his team on Wednesday, including a former London region mayor, stating their long experience on the local government “front line” would be invaluable to the party as Reform UK seeks to transform the country.
Brexit pioneer and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and his London Mayoral candidate Laila Cunningham unveiled two defections from the Labour party on Wednesday, the Former Labour mayor of Newham Sir Robin Wales and 21-year Labour councillor Clive Furness. Farage said Furness would stand as Reform’s candidate for the forthcoming Mayor of Newham election in May while Sir Robin will become Reform’s London director of local government.
Mr Farage has long been teasing Labour defections to Reform in the face of criticism that Reform has taken too many former Conservatives, and stated that the arrival of these experienced local government operatives, who he said had decades of service between them, would be a boon. The Reform leader said: “in some ways our weakness as a party is not having people who have been on the front line, managed budget, run government at all levels. And today makes a significant step forwards for us in that direction”.
Sir Robin Wales, who Farage hailed as an unusually successful former Labour Mayor, explained of their defection that endless failures including on the migrant boats, the state of the military, housing prices making family formation impossible for young people, the soaring cost of the NHS with no improvement in health outcomes, and “the rape gang coverup” had forced them to move. He said: “we came to the conclusion that the old parties can’t deliver services and the result of not delivering is cynicism in the electorate. We promise, promise, promise and nothing happens”.
On Reform, he said the party “has got a lot of rough edges”, but that there is an opportunity “to transform our society” at hand.
The former Labour man decried the attempts to paint Reform UK as extremist. He said: “they keep labelling and labelling and labelling. If Reform is racist I wouldn’t be in this room or even near this headquarters. It’s not.
“I can show you some other parties that are racist, some parties that are anti-Semitic but I don’t believe Reform is in any way racist. But what it is doing is standing against the illiberal values that people are trying to bring into our countries, it is discussing issues other people don’t want to discuss.”
He said he’d formerly represented an electoral area that was “one third Muslim” but he was concerned about the outcome of last week’s special election, where it is alleged that sectarian voting and unsound voting practices swayed the result. He remarked: “Gorton… exposed the transactional relationship between reactionary Muslims and those who want to get their votes.
The political establishment have “lost their moral compass”, he said, for their willingness to permit medical experiments on children. And as for the present debate on the value of university, Sir Robin added: “they’re scamming kids on the debt they’ve got… on pointless courses with fourth-rate lecturers”.
Read the full article here