Reform a ‘racist and far-right’ party, says teaching union after Farage attack – as it happened (2025)

• The UK’s largest teaching union has called Reform UK “far-right and racist”, and its leader has dismissed Nigel Farage as “a poundshop Donald Trump,” as the union pledged funds to oppose the party’s candidates in elections. Delegates to the National Education Union’s annual conference backed a motion stating that “far-right and racist organisations, including Reform, seek to build on the despair, poverty and alienation in our society by scapegoating refugees, asylum seekers, Muslims, Jews and others who do not fit their beliefs”.

• Nigel Farage has said Reform UK’s are “parking their tanks on the lawns of the ‘red wall’” in a speech ahead of May’s local elections in England. He claimed that Labour had become a middle-class party and abandoned the roots it was founded for, saying “our support is coming directly from people who have been, in many cases, lifelong Labour voters. “Reform are parking their tanks on the lawns of the ‘red wall’”, he said. “Today’s the first day I’ve said that but I absolutely mean it, and we’re here, and we’re here to stay. And the evidence is that people who are switching to us, this is not a short term protest. They actually believe in us.”

• The business secretary has refused to rule out redundancies at the Scunthorpe steelworks, despite calls from trade unions to end the programme of job losses started by its former owners. Jonathan Reynolds said on Tuesday the plant might need to have a “different employment footprint” after the government’s takeover, even as he promised to try to save the plant’s two blast furnaces.

• Foreign secretary David Lammy has said it is “morally wrong” to give up and turn away from the violence in Sudan, and committed the UK government to £120m worth of additional support. Opening a conference on the topic at the Foriegn Office in London, he said he personally had “refused to turn away”, saying it was wrong for people to “conclude that further conflict is effectively inevitable” because of “the country’s fraught history.”

• Business and trade minister Sarah Jones has insisted that funds to rescue the British Steel plant in Scunthorpe has already been budgeted for, and is “within the existing fiscal envelope”. Speaking on Tuesday morning on Times Radio, the Labour MP for Croydon West said: “We have been really clear on steel that securing the future of the site in Scunthorpe is not just important for the 2,700 people who work there, but also because we know that demand for steel in the UK is growing. We know there’s a market there.”

• Ed Davey has called on China to release the tapes of the interrogation of a Liberal Democrat MP who was denied entry to Hong Kong to visit her family. The party leader also urged foreign secretary David Lammy to summon the country’s ambassador to Britain to demand an explanation for Wera Hobhouse’s deportation, saying the UK should not be “kowtowing” to Beijing.

• Ministers have announced an overhaul of the way carer’s allowance overpayments are checked in an attempt to fix the failing system which has left thousands with life-changing debts,fines and criminal records. In a significant policy change, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been ordered to hire extra staff to investigate 100% of the carer’s allowance earnings breach alerts it receives and swiftly notify carers if they are at risk of falling into debt.

• Keir Starmer’s Labour party faces a very difficult electoral test in the bellwether Scottish parliament seat of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse in June, after Reform UK confirmed Nigel Farage will make a rare campaigning visit to Scotland. It emerged today a byelection will be held there on 5 June after the unexpected death last month of its widely respected MSP, Christina McKelvie, who had held the seat for the Scottish National party for 14 years. McKelvie, who had been fighting secondary breast cancer, had already announced she would stand down before the Holyrood elections next year.

The business secretary has refused to rule out redundancies at the Scunthorpe steelworks, despite calls from trade unions to end the programme of job losses started by its former owners.

Jonathan Reynolds said on Tuesday the plant might need to have a “different employment footprint” after the government’s takeover, even as he promised to try to save the plant’s two blast furnaces.

Reynolds was speaking during a visit to Immingham docks to oversee coal and iron ore being unloaded on its way to the Scunthorpe plant. The government took control of the plant after finding out its Chinese owner, Jingye, was attempting to sell the supplies and hasten the closure of the furnaces.

“What we need for the long-term future of British Steel is that private sector partner to work with us as a government on a transformation programme,” Reynolds said.

The UK’s largest teaching union has called Reform UK “far-right and racist”, and its leader has dismissed Nigel Farage as “a poundshop Donald Trump,” as the union pledged funds to oppose the party’s candidates in elections.

Delegates to the National Education Union’s annual conference backed a motion stating that “far-right and racist organisations, including Reform, seek to build on the despair, poverty and alienation in our society by scapegoating refugees, asylum seekers, Muslims, Jews and others who do not fit their beliefs”.

The motion also committed the NEU to use its political fund for campaigns against Reform election candidates and to support the union’s branches in local activity.

Speakers in favour of the motion argued that some Reform UK candidates and activists “have been former members of fascist organisations or espoused their views” as justification.

Daniel Kebede, the NEU’s general secretary, told journalists: “I’m sure Reform claim that they are not a racist organisation. However, they seem to be attracting an awful lot of former BNP activists, which would make me question that.

“But fundamentally I have great concerns about what a Reform government would do to education.”

Ed Davey has called on China to release the tapes of the interrogation of a Liberal Democrat MP who was denied entry to Hong Kong to visit her family.

The party leader also urged foreign secretary David Lammy to summon the country’s ambassador to Britain to demand an explanation for Wera Hobhouse’s deportation, saying the UK should not be “kowtowing” to Beijing.

Hobhouse, the MP for Bath who is a member of the Inter-parliamentary Alliance on China (Ipac) which has been critical of Beijing’s human rights record, has said she believes the action was taken to silence her.

She had flown to Hong Kong to see her son and newborn grandson but was held at the airport, questioned and sent back to the UK.

Asked whether he agreed that she had been detained to “shut her up”, Davey told the PA news agency: “I think it’s very likely the case.

“Liberal Democrats have stood up for the people of Hong Kong against oppression from Beijing, stood up for human rights, and I don’t think the Chinese government likes that.

“And this may be a part of retaliation, even though Wera was only on a family visit, but I think that shows you that they behaved in a shocking way – they need to back down.”

He added: “I very much hope the British Government, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, will call in the Chinese ambassador and demand an explanation. We shouldn’t be kowtow(ing), I’m afraid, to Beijing.”

Keir Starmer’s Labour party faces a very difficult electoral test in the bellwether Scottish parliament seat of Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse in June, after Reform UK confirmed Nigel Farage will make a rare campaigning visit to Scotland.

It emerged today a byelection will be held there on 5 June after the unexpected death last month of its widely respected MSP, Christina McKelvie, who had held the seat for the Scottish National party for 14 years.

McKelvie, who had been fighting secondary breast cancer, had already announced she would stand down before the Holyrood elections next year.

In normal circumstances this contest would be a straight head to head between the SNP and Scottish Labour, which had hoped to finally regain power at Holyrood after nearly 20 years in opposition.

Labour trounced the SNP in a byelection for the adjacent Westminster seat of Rutherglen and Hamilton West in late 2023, but its popularity has plummeted since the general election.

Although it has primarily cut into Scottish Conservative support in Scotland, Reform UK is also making inroads into Labour’s vote, adding to its difficulties. This byelection could become a classic protest vote against Starmer’s government: Scottish Labour’s support has slumped in parallel with the fall in Labour’s UK-wide popularity.

The SNP, which has seen its support flatline under current leader John Swinney, will focus heavily on Labour’s decision not to compensate the Waspi pensioners; its continuing two child benefits cap and the cuts to winter fuel payments.

A Reform UK spokesperson told the Herald it had already started canvassing:

Nigel is definitely coming. The team will be up here … I’m sure if there is an opportunity for Nigel to campaign in Hamilton Nigel will be looking to do that.

Jackie Baillie, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader, said the byelection was “a chance to vote for a new direction with Scottish Labour. People in this community and right across Scotland are being let down by this tired and out-of-touch SNP government.”

The SNP has already selected Katy Loudon, who lost to Labour in the Rutherglen byelection. She said:

Households across the constituency are benefiting from SNP decisions – including free prescriptions and social care, free university tuition or help for older people with heating bills.

In stark contrast, the UK Labour government is making life harder for ordinary people across Scotland.

Ministers have announced an overhaul of the way carer’s allowance overpayments are checked in an attempt to fix the failing system which has left thousands with life-changing debts,fines and criminal records.

In a significant policy change, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been ordered to hire extra staff to investigate 100% of the carer’s allowance earnings breach alerts it receives and swiftly notify carers if they are at risk of falling into debt.

Last year, the Guardian revealed that for the last six years, the DWP has chosen to investigate just 50% of alerts on cost grounds – even though this has led to huge numbers of carers unknowingly accruing massive overpayments.

Campaigners are optimistic the move could, over time, significantly reduce the numbers of carers falling foul of the system – but warned thousands more will be unfairly hit by overpayments as huge backlogs of alerts are processed over the next few months.

Carers in England and Wales who breach carer’s allowance earnings limits of £196 a week must return the full £83.30 a week benefit payment, a “cliff edge” penalty that means going £1 a week over the limit for one year would result in the claimant being hit with a repayment demand not of £52, but £4,330.

Ed Davey said Donald Trump was “acting like a bully” and the government should respond with “strength”.

Speaking to the PA news agency from manufacturing business LJA Miers & Co in St Neots, the Liberal Democrats leader said:

We [should] say to president Trump, if you’re not going to play fair, we’re going to keep trading with each other.

We’re going to grow elsewhere, but also come together to oppose what president Trump is doing to the world economy at the moment.

At the moment he’s picking us off, he’s dividing and ruling, he’s acting like a bully.

The only way you respond to a bully is by strength and by people coming together to oppose that.

We briefly mentioned in an earlier post that the National Education Union (NEU) indicated that it would launch a formal ballot on strike action if the government’s final pay offer for teachers “remains unacceptable”. We now have some more details from their annual conference, held in Harrogate in North Yorkshire this year.

A motion passed at the conference said the government’s recommended 2.8% pay rise for September was “inadequate and unfunded” and it would prevent the government achieving its target of recruiting 6,500 more teachers.

In its evidence to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) in December, the department for education (DfE) said a 2.8% pay rise for teachers in 2025/26 would be “appropriate” and would “maintain the competitiveness” of teachers’ pay despite the “challenging financial backdrop” the government is facing.

The government has yet to publish the recommendations of the teachers’ pay review body, or its decision on whether to accept them. Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has said “any move towards industrial action by teaching unions would be indefensible”.

An urgent motion, carried by conference delegates on Tuesday, called for a formal industrial action ballot to be launched if the final outcome of the STRB process “remains unacceptable” – or if the government does not announce real-terms funding increases in the spending review in June.

NEU members staged eight days of strike action in state schools in England in 2023 in a long-running pay dispute. In July 2023, the government agreed to implement the STRB’s recommendation of a 6.5% increase for teachers in England, and co-ordinated strike action by four unions was called off.

Teachers in England received a fully funded 5.5% pay rise in September last year.

The largest education union in the country, the National Education Union (NEU), has called Reform UK a “racist and far-right” political party.

Reform – led by Nigel Farage - has been neck and neck with Labour and ahead of the Tories in some recent polls and will contest nearly all the 1,600 council seats up for re-election on 1 May.

Delegates at the annual NEU conference called for the union’s political fund to be used to help campaign against Reform UK election candidates whose policies and campaigns were described as “racist”, according to the PA news agency.

A motion, which was passed by delegates at the conference on Tuesday, said it believes Reform UK is racist because of its hardline policies on immigration and its “campaigns against migrants”.

It added that organisations like Reform UK “seek to build on the despair, poverty and alienation in our society by scapegoating refugees, asylum seekers, Muslims, Jews and others who do not fit their beliefs”.

Speaking to the media at the union’s annual conference in Harrogate in North Yorkshire, Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU, said: “I think there’s an awful lot of racists who are getting involved in Reform. I think Nigel Farage is a right-wing populist.”

Speaking about Farage specifically, Kebede added:

I’m surprised that our union seems to be living rent free in his head, to be honest.

But this is just lifted directly from the Donald Trump playbook. Both Elon Musk and Donald Trump have been directly attacking the AFT and the NEA, the American teachers’ unions, and this is what Nigel Farage is. He’s a pound shop Donald Trump.

When asked about the union’s stance on Reform UK at a press conference in County Durham on Tuesday afternoon, Farage accused the NEU leader of being a “self-declared Marxist” who he claimed was determined that “children should be poisoned at school” about everything to do with the country.

Ed Davey has been campaigning in Cambridgeshire today, where he has been planting flowers, and also posing with a baby, which makes for a guaranteed inclusion in the politics live blog while I am at the helm. This is my last post for the day however, as I am now handing you over to the good care of my colleague Yohannes Lowe. I will see you again tomorrow.

Nigel Farage has said Reform UK’s are “parking their tanks on the lawns of the ‘red wall’” in a speech ahead of May’s local elections in England.

He claimed that Labour had become a middle-class party and abandoned the roots it was founded for, saying “our support is coming directly from people who have been, in many cases, lifelong Labour voters.

“Reform are parking their tanks on the lawns of the ‘red wall’”, he said. “Today’s the first day I’ve said that but I absolutely mean it, and we’re here, and we’re here to stay. And the evidence is that people who are switching to us, this is not a short term protest. They actually believe in us.”

Listing recent council byelection gains, the MP for Clacton, speaking in County Durham, claimed the party is giving Labour “one hell of a run for their money” and is now “the opposition to the Labour party, with the Conservatives trailing some way behind”.

He attacked the Conservatives as a spent force and wasted vote in large areas of England, saying “The sheer level of betrayal of what people who voted for Boris Johnson in 2019 got, they didn’t get the Brexit they voted for, and they got mass immigration on a scale never seen before in the history of these islands, those people are not ever going to trust the Conservative party again.”

In a lengthy speech covering regular Reform UK talking points, Farage claimed there had been a cover-up over the Southport stabbings, that it was a conspiracy theory to suggest he held favourable views of Vladimir Putin, and said Reform was against “DEI and that madness”.

At one point during the speech, made on the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, Farage posed with a front page of today’s the Sun newspaper which declared Britain was broken. The Reform UK leader wrote an op-ed for the paper today.

Farage appeared to try to claim credit for the government’s rescue of British Steel, telling supporters at the event “I don’t believe there would have been a Saturday sitting in parliament if Richard Tice and I had not been up to Scunthorpe and been greeted the way we were by those workers, especially in the local ‘Spoons afterwards, they actually felt there was someone speaking up for them.”

Farage said it was Reform’s policy to “re-industrialise” Britain, and claimed that investments in oil and gas would provide tens of thousands of well paid jobs. He accused Ed Miliband of wanting to “despoil” the British coastline with windfarms, and suggested that the removal of inheritance tax perks from farms was partly because Miliband wanted to replace agricultural land with “Chinese slave-labour made solar farms.”

Farage also angrily attacked Daniel Kebede, president of the National Education Union (NEU) as someone he said was “poisoning the minds of our kids”, and said that if Reform won the next general election it would “go to war with the National Education union and all the left wing teaching unions.”

The Reform UK leader ended his speech by saying it was the party’s “historic mission” to change Britain’s culture. He said “It’s about understanding that Britain is broken, and that without the right leadership, without the right change of mentality, and I think most of us feel, within a decade, it frankly, won’t be a place worth living in. And we are damn determined to turn this round.”

The business secretary has said that he might accept offers of involvement with British Steel from Chinese companies, but would “look at a Chinese firm in a different way” from other bidders. He also said he would not rule out job losses, saying there might be a “different employment footprint” at Scunthorpe.

Speaking as raw materials were being delivered to the keep the blast furnaces running, Jonathan Reynolds said:

What we need for the long-term future of British Steel is that private sector partner to work with us as a government on a transformation programme.

That might be new technology, new facilities, that might have a different employment footprint. The staff here absolutely know that, they know they need a long-term future.

These blast furnaces have given this country nearly a century of service in one case, so they know they need the future and that might be a different model, different technology. What they didn’t want was the unplanned, uncontrolled shutdown of the blast furnaces with thousands of job losses and no plan in place for the future.

And by what we’ve been able to do, working with the brilliant team here at British Steel, is secure the possibility of that better future – and I for one am confident that we’ve made the right decision to support the people here.

Reynolds said he believed the government “can improve on the financial performance that we have seen” but that the support that has been put in place is “better value for the taxpayer” than if jobs had been lost.

On the issue of potential future partners, Reynolds told broadcasters “I think we’ve got to recognise that steel is a sensitive sector. It’s a sensitive sector around the world, and a lot of the issues in the global economy with steel come from over-production and dumping of steel products, and that does come from China.

“So I think you would look at a Chinese firm in a different way but I’m really keen to stress the action we’ve taken here was to step in, because it was one specific company that I thought wasn’t acting in the UK’s national interest, and we had to take the action we did.”

The Liberal Democrats have urged the government to rule out any involvement from Chinese firms in the future domestic production of steel. Foreign affairs spokesperson Calum Miller said that would put national security at risk and be “completely unacceptable.”

Earlier Reform UK leader Nigel Farage appeared to try to take credit for the rescue operation, claiming Labour had only moved the way it did because of the warm reception Farage and Richard Tice received when they visited the plant last week.