Farage admits that the undercover report on donations ‘looks bad’
In an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Nigel Farage acknowledged that the comments by James Orr and Dan Jukes were “injudicious at best” and admitted that the optics of the undercover filming don’t look good for his party.
“This looks bad, as does the sale of peerages, as does government contracts for donations. We are not the first people to be involved in a row over donations,” he said.
The BBC aired the full interview during its politics show on Sunday, having released an excerpt of it on Saturday.
Key events
In an earlier post, we mentioned that thousands of jobs are to be cut at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) as the British carmaker slashes costs after a slump in sales. My colleague Angus Thomson has more details about the expected job cuts in this story. Here is an extract from the report:
JLR informed workers and their union on Saturday that the company would be opening a voluntary redundancy programme for salaried and management team members, the BBC and Sunday Times reported.
As many as 4,000 jobs would be cut over two years, the Times reported. JLR told the BBC it was yet to confirm the number but the company, which is owned by the Indian conglomerate Tata Motors, needed to save about £1.7bn over the next two years.
Unite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, told the BBC she and the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, would meet JLR’s chief executive, PB Balaji, next week, after a weekend of intensive talks to mitigate job losses.
About 30,000 of the company’s 44,000 employees are based in the UK. Most of them work at 14 plants across the West Midlands, where the company is one of the region’s largest employers.
Josh Halliday
Sagal Abdi-Wali arrived in Camden as a child refugee from Somalia. She has worked for more than a decade as a volunteer and trustee for local charities and is a governor of two schools in the borough, according to Labour.
She was first elected as a councillor in 2022 and became the leader of the council in May, when she said: “Camden has been my home for 35 years. It is the place that gave my family sanctuary, that welcomed us, and that has shaped so much of who I am, what I stand for and what inspired my commitment to public service and to working for the community that welcomed us.”
Labour is expected to announce its candidate for the Holborn and St Pancras byelection by Wednesday. It faces a battle against the Green party to retain the seat as Zack Polanski, its leader in England and Wales, is expected to be confirmed as its candidate.
Zia Yusuf’s post about Camden council leader is ‘straightforward racism’, minister says
Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson, has been accused of “pretty straightforward racism” by a Cabinet minister over comments about a potential Labour byelection candidate who was born in Somalia.
Yusuf has been criticised for a tweet about Sagal Abdi-Wali, a former child refugee and the leader of Camden council, who has been tipped as a favourite to stand for Labour in the Holborn and St Pancras contest triggered by former prime minister Keir Starmer’s resignation as an MP.
Yusuf wrote on X last week: “The front runner being foisted on the people of Holborn by Labour to replace the former Prime Minister Keir Starmer in our Parliament was born in Somalia. Do you understand what’s happening?”
The business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, was asked what he thought of Yusuf’s tweet during an interview with Jon Sopel on Sky News this morning.
“Pretty straightforward racism, isn’t it?” Reynolds said, adding that the potential Labour candidate had “spent decades in this country” and made a “huge contribution to her local community”.
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Robert Jenrick, Reform’s economic spokesperson, later denied his colleague’s comments were racist and suggested it was legitimate to question the loyalties of foreign-born candidates.
“I don’t know this person, so I’m not here to cast aspersions upon her, but I do want people to sit in our parliament who are entirely committed to our country,” Jenrick said.
Falklands row shows urgent need to commit to 3% target, says Labour defence committee chair
Kiran Stacey
Javier Milei’s threats to the Falkland Islands make it even more important that Andy Burnham increase defence spending immediately, according to the Labour chair of the defence committee.
Tan Dhesi said the comments by the Argentinian president this week show why the government should raise military spending to 3% of GDP by 2030.
But he said Burnham’s plans remain mired in confusion after the prime minister appeared to reassure him that the 2030 target would be hit, only for Downing Street to later retreat.
“It’s important the prime minister and the chancellor don’t defer those decisions to next year,” Dhesi told the Guardian.
“We’ve seen Germany publicly expose Russia for the drone incident [in Leipzig]. Now we’ve got a threat from Argentina saying they are looking to take over the Falklands. We owe it to the Falklands – they say it’s their right to self-determination. It’s important that we also defend them from this threat.”
You can read the full story here:
Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick also condemned the disruption of the Port of Dover by masked demonstrators – but said he understood the frustration with small boats crossing the Channel. Speaking to Sky News’ Sunday Morning programme, Reform’s economic spokesperson said:
I absolutely do. I’ve always hated people obstructing other people doing their daily life, whether it’s Just Stop Oil or whatever.
And I don’t like people going around in balaclavas, which is obviously very intimidating. In fact, our party’s policy is to ban face coverings like that.
But do I understand why people are extremely frustrated? Yes, absolutely. This needs to end. This farce of the small boats has been going on for far too long.
And in fact you saw at our conference Nigel Farage and (National Rally president) Jordan Bardella, the likely next prime minister of France, signing an agreement which has the prospect of ending this once and for all.
Channel crossings are down about 40% compared to last year, with the number of crossings this summer at their lowest level since 2019. Home Office data shows people in small boats overwhelmingly come from war and conflict zones.
Reform UK’s Nigel Farage has agreed a deal with France’s hard-right National Rally party on returning migrants who try to cross the Channel in small boats, if both parties achieve power. A Labour party spokesperson said the proposal “is a meaningless document packed with daft and dangerous ideas, signed by an increasingly disgraced Reform leader and an opposition politician. It is nothing more than pointless posturing.”
The business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, went on to condemn the hundreds of masked protesters who prevented traffic from coming in and out of the port of Dover yesterday. In the interview with the BBC, he praised the police for effectively dealing with the “intimidatory behaviour” and said he had sympathy for the “people around Dover” and those disrupted by the delays.
A group called Patriot Platform, which styles itself as having “a fierce love for our homeland”, claimed responsibility for the blockade, as my colleagues note in this story.
The far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, reposted videos of the blockade, highlighting a live stream of the protest that directed viewers towards Patriot Platform.
Minister says no bailout for Jaguar Land Rover amid job cut reports
Thousands of workers at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) will be offered redundancies with job losses reported to be spread over two years. The job cuts will be unwelcome news for Andy Burnham, who has vowed to “safeguard sovereign manufacturing” and reindustrialise Britain.
When asked if the government would be willing to protect the jobs, the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said it is not for him to “intervene” as he isn’t responsible for running JLR’s business.
“They need to know what the right footprint for them going forward is. I want to talk to them about the numbers,” Reynolds told the BBC, adding there could be financial support for long-term investment but not for a taxpayer-funded bailout.
Farage claims that he faces a disproportionate level of scrutiny compared to the other parties. When Laura Kuenssberg gave the Reform leader a series of examples of investigations faced by other party leaders, Farage responded:
I don’t think the others have been de-banked. I don’t think the others have been kicked out by their pension provider. I don’t think the others have literally had an attempt to wipe them out of society, oh and their families as well.
There is no doubt there is huge political prejudice against Reform right across the corporate world and right across the establishment. And that is a simple fact of life – and why? Because we are the disrupters and that’s the way it works.
Farage told the Daily T podcast last month that he had received about 400 death threats in the last seven weeks, and as a high-profile, extremely divisive politician, it is argued that he needs a high level of security.
The claim that Reform is fighting the establishment is undermined by the fact that many of his senior figures, including treasury spokesperson Robert Jenrick and the MP for Fareham and Waterlooville, Suella Braverman, are former Conservative cabinet ministers who were at the heart of the same political establishment Farage is railing against.
Farage admits that the undercover report on donations ‘looks bad’
In an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Nigel Farage acknowledged that the comments by James Orr and Dan Jukes were “injudicious at best” and admitted that the optics of the undercover filming don’t look good for his party.
“This looks bad, as does the sale of peerages, as does government contracts for donations. We are not the first people to be involved in a row over donations,” he said.
The BBC aired the full interview during its politics show on Sunday, having released an excerpt of it on Saturday.
The Guardian’s city editor, Anna Isaac, is sitting on the panel on Laura Kuenssberg’s show alongside broadcaster Jeremy Vine and political scientist Francis Fukuyama.
Her revelation that Nigel Farage received a £5m gift from the Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before announcing he would stand in the 2024 British general election has dogged the Reform leader ever since she broke the story in April.
Farage, who has given different explanations as to why he accepted the gift, has argued he did not need to declare the money because he received it before he was elected as Clacton MP and it “wasn’t political in any sense at all”.
The parliamentary standards commissioner is investigating whether he broke the rules.
Isaac’s report came before a series of other stories raising questions about Reform’s finances, some of which you can read here. Isaac was among the journalists who have reported critically on Reform who were banned from the party’s annual conference this year.
Nigel Farage to be questioned as he battles to contain growing donations scandal
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of UK politics. The Reform UK party leader, Nigel Farage, is scheduled to appear in an interview on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday politics programme at 9am, where he will likely be asked more about an undercover investigation broadcast by Channel 4 News which showed two of his senior aides appearing to plot to get around electoral laws on foreign donations.
Accepting donations from a foreign company, including donations in kind such as polling, could constitute a criminal offence and the party has been reported to the police.
Senior aide Dan Jukes and Reform’s head of policy James Orr have both stood down pending the outcome of an internal party investigation.
As my colleagues note in the story, Farage himself remains under pressure over a separate clip in which he was heard saying “it’s all above board” after one of the reporters who was posing as the UK-based son of a wealthy US backer told the Reform leader he had been in discussions with Jukes and Orr for some time.
“I’ll be the registered donor,” the son says. “But then dad will send the money to me, and then as soon as that’s done and all those conversations are had the money is available.”
On Saturday, during the party’s conference in Birmingham, Farage continued to bat away suggestions of impropriety. “I’m not a compliance officer,” he told the BBC. “I frankly wasn’t even listening,” he said in reference to the meeting with the undercover reporters in Clacton.
Farage has framed the investigation, carried out by Verbatim Investigations, which was founded by journalists from the Centre for Climate Reporting, as another example of an establishment stitch up, and has denied any wrongdoing, as have Orr and Jukes.