We already saw a saving of £0 following Reform’s attempt to sack all zero DEI workers in Lincolnshire’s council. There were of course no such workers in the first place, but hey, why check reality when the soundbite is attractive to some of your base.
As Reform continue the threat to implement Nigel Farage’s policy that anyone in the council working on climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion should “go look for another job”, Staffordshire Council have been collating the figures of how many of their staff actually work in those jobs in their administration.
The answer, inevitably, is: not many.
Once again, a total of zero workers work in DEI. The effort to count them has presumably cost more than the savings there.
Even if there were some, the Equality Act puts a legal requirement on councils to be mindful of these topics. As Dr Phil Catney says:
…the Equality Act puts a requirement on councils to be mindful of these things. You could choose to de-prioritise them, but you could end up losing money if you get sued for discriminatory practices.
They do have some staff who work in the field of ‘climate change’ though. You know, protecting the environment for their residents and the rest of us. Per Dr Catney, this would include such topics as energy efficiency – encouraging policies that might actually save money.
In any case the total saved by firing them would be £153,000.
That’s 0.02% of the council’s budget, and it isn’t even clear that it would be that high.
For context, last year the council overspent its special educational needs and disabilities budget by £27 million.
When they produce their first council budget, Reform might talk up things like climate change, but it won’t even make a tiny bit of the savings they need to make.
The losses keep coming. Mark Broadhurst lasted a single month in his job, representing the people of Doncaster as a councillor. As a Reform representative at least.
It turns out his history of social media posting was too grim, which is saying a lot when it comes to the Reform party.
A Facebook page belonging to Broadhurst shared a post comparing black Islamic dress to “bin bags”, and a now-deleted image which suggested Adolf Hitler would have been a “legend” if he had targeted Muslims.
As it stands, he’s still there, as an independent. When asked if he’d do the obviously correct thing and resign entirely he didn’t respond.
Reform, the party that claims to be obsessed with saving public money and supporting the every-day working person, is pursuing an environmental policy that in one county alone will cost more than 12,000 jobs and risk almost £1 billion in local investment.
But that doesn’t seem to stop Tice claiming Reform councils are going to block building what he calls “net stupid zero” infrastructure, whilst deliberately making any efforts by central government to continue the policies cost the tax-payer who knows how many millions of extra public money:
Says Tice:
We will attack, we will hinder, we will delay, we will obstruct, we will put every hurdle in your way. It’s going to cost you a fortune, and you’re not going to win. So give up and go away.
This is in Lincolnshire, the county that includes the area most at risk of floods. That council has already shut down a committee that actually deals with flood risk – an action that was described as “reckless, foolhardy and wrong”.
The sheer environmental lunacy of banning green projects aside, a sometimes little appreciated fact is that green policies can create lots of jobs and bring in a ton of investment. As well as help save us from already-deadly environmental catastrophes of course.
It’s not like Reform voters are even all that opposed to pro-environmental policies.
The majority support new wind and solar farms and policies to tackle the climate crisis, according to polling this month by the ECIU.
As you’d expect, many organisations are appalled at Reform’s plans, pointing out the external costs of this pursuing this misguided ideology:
RenewableUK’s executive director of policy, Ana Musat:
Any blanket ban on renewables would be costly for bill payers – the ban on onshore wind cost £5.1bn in the financial year before it was lifted – that’s £182 for every UK household.
Shaun Spiers, the executive director of Green Alliance:
.What is really odd is Richard Tice’s apparent determination to drive up energy costs and increase our dependence on imported fossil fuels. That might please Reform UK’s funders, but it’s unlikely to please its voters.
Melanie Onn, a Labour MP near the areas involved:
Reform’s war on the green economy is actually a war on jobs and investment and flies in the face of what hard-working businesses and families need. Reform’s dangerous plan is a threat to British jobs and British workers.
Now Reform have a platform in Greater Lincolnshire, they must come clean on whether they’re prepared to risk damaging the local economy and risk making thousands of workers unemployed.
Do I think that [the carbon dioxide that humans are putting into the atmosphere] will definitely change the climate? No. There is no evidence that it is.”
No evidence! Institutions of science and beyond, of course, virulently disagree.
Bob Ward, policy director at LSE University’s Grantham Research Institute and Geological Society fellow, called the comments "pure misinformation".
"There is not a single credible scientific organisation in the UK or the world that agrees with him about the causes or consequences of climate change," said Mr Ward.
Dr Andrew Jarvis from Lancaster University called the comments "categorically wrong", while Dr Philipp Breul from Imperial College London said Mr Tice was "missing the point".
Dr George Adamson from King’s College London said the idea that Richard Tice had "discovered something that climate scientists don’t know about is of course preposterous".
We conclude with high statistical confidence that the scientific consensus on human-caused contemporary climate change—expressed as a proportion of the total publications—exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature.
The Reform UK deputy leader suggested Nasa and the UN were wrong to report that the leading cause of climate change is human activities, arguing he could name thousands of scientists who agree with him but won’t come forward because they are “terrified to speak because they won’t get any research funding if they tell it how it is.
But there’s more:
There is so much money and vested interests who are trying to push this agenda on us. It has to stop and only Reform UK is going to stop it
says a party that had 92% of its funding come from "oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers" in the years leading up to 2024.
Learning centres such as the Eco Centre in Wirksworth, and centres in Alfreton, Ashbourne, Matlock, Shirebrook, Long Eaton and the Toolbox in Glossop will cease to offer adult education courses at the end of July, Derbyshire County Council said.
Says Alan Squires, who is in the middle of such a class:
It’s very sudden – it’s not the end of the next financial year, it’s next month and we’re out on our ear. There’s a lot of people that rely upon the centre for mental wellbeing. People will be lost. It performs a crucial role in all sorts of aspects and other centres do things like teaching basic English and maths and essential skills for life.
One of Reform’s many “bold” promises is that if elected they will bring NHS waiting lists down to zero within two years.
That’d be wonderful. But it’s also up there with their dangerous plans for tax cuts in terms of being utterly implausible to anyone who looks into it.
The waiting list for NHS have never, ever been zero. Not once. The day it started it already had a waiting list of almost half a million in-patients from the hospitals that joined the service.
Here’s a chart from the Nuffield Trust to show how it’s built up over the years. As you can see, the way it has been measured and the definition of “waiting list” has changed over time, so you can’t really compare this year’s figure to 1949s. But it has never, under any government or definition, got close to zero.
The previous Labour government made huge investments into the NHS, almost tripling its budget between 1997 and 2009 – and even that was only enough to halve the waiting list, as impressive an accomplishment as that was.
The NHS – staff, buildings, equipment and more – is in a rough state, so any attempt to restore to it the funding it desperately needs to fix that after years of decline is very welcome. But the idea that Reform will eliminate waiting lists, and so quickly as well, is absolutely laughable – “absolute nonsense; completely unachievable”, as Dr Patterson puts it. They must know it’s a lie.
Except, of course, if the way they want to eliminate the waiting list is to eliminate the NHS as we know it. That of course isn’t in their manifesto; but their leader certainly seems to think it should not exist in its current state, and is “open to anything” when it comes to replacing the current universal state provision with an insurance based system.
Simon French, Chief Economist and Head of Research at Panmure Liberum and former economic adviser with the UK Civil Service, warns the Telegraph that Reform UK’s ridiculous economic plan – particularly the massive tax cuts that no-one outside of themselves believes they could possibly pay for – will likely trigger a run on the pound.
Those plans that we think would create an immediate fiscal gap of £70bn-£80bn per year – would in our view create the high probability of an immediate and violent sterling crisis.
The fact that the result of their plan would increase the deficit “two-to-three times” larger than even the damaging plan that led to Liz Truss’ quick ousting as Prime Minister would cause at least the same issues, but magnified.
Experimentation with an immediately higher fiscal deficit profile – of an additive scale set to be two-to-three times larger than anything attempted by the 2022 mini-Budget or 2024 October Budget – would create sharp rises in UK sovereign, commercial
and household interest rates in our view.
This of course would be even more damaging to the already-precarious financial situation of the average British household.
Nigel Farage’s comments are ill-judged, prejudiced and dangerous. HIV can affect anyone regardless of sex, race & class. #idiot #unhelpful
For what it’s worth, he’s also condemned Donald Trump as being a “fool”, “dangerous” and a “source of hate”. Whereas party leader Farage still seems to be a (wannabe?) close friend of Trump’s calling him the “single most resilient and bravest person I have ever met in my life”. Well, less so recently, perhaps. Whereas Bull seems to have moved in the other direction, becoming a big fan of Trump, as we’ll see later.
Bull has also been condemned in the past for trying to exploit National HIV Testing Week to try and profiteer by selling “discounted HIV testing kits”. In the UK there is no need to give money to any greedy charlatan for these kits. They are available for free from the National Health Service.
“Abhorrent,” said one Twitter user. “UK testing is free, fast and comes with professional support. It’s also rather standard in most diagnostics. There is no room for profit here.”
You could also win a lifetime’s supply of condoms if you “followed the brand” and “shared the post”. Real social media grifter stuff.
He was also perhaps most famous for his presenter role on the show “Most Haunted Live!”. This is a paranormal ghost-hunting show. Unfortunately it has since been exposed as being fake by one of the parapsychologists involved.
He accuses the show’s medium Derek Acorah of hoodwinking viewers by pretending to communicate with spirits and obtaining information about locations prior to filming.
The Mirror has also obtained unedited footage which appears to show presenter Yvette Fielding and her husband faking ‘paranormal’ occurrences such as ghostly bumps and knocks.
HOPE not hate can reveal that two Brexit Party MEPs and a prospective parliamentary candidate (PPC) have appeared on the Richie Allen Show, a David Icke-affiliated radio broadcast that serves as an online platform for antisemitic conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers.
But oddly, he now seems to be strangely pro-immigration for being the chair of such a party whose primary gambit is really being rabidly anti-immigrant. Soon after his appointment he claimed that “immigration is the lifeblood of this country”.
The comment immediately sparked fierce debate among viewers, with many expressing outrage that Reform UK’s new chairman appeared to be endorsing immigration just hours into his new role.
Perhaps most bizarrely, especially given his past comments on Trump, last year he appeared on TalkTV wearing an ear bandage in “solidarity” with President Trump after Trump’s first assassination attempt.
Eight female councillors have signed and circulated a letter to the residents of Wickford, which is soon to see a byelection, that claims that recently elected Reform MP for Basildon, James McMurdock, lied about his past.
This is in relation to the an instance of him assaulting his partner when he was younger. It’s impossible to deny entirely because he’s been convicted of it. But the councillors believe that he’s been misleading the public as to the severity of the attack.
In the letter, the councillors refer to Mr McMurdock’s election result for Basildon where he won his seat by 98 votes. The councillors claim that he “tried to downplay the attack – saying it was just a push,” but that court documents obtained by The Times indicate a different version of events. According to court documents obtained by the paper, McMurdock reportedly ‘kicked his girlfriend multiple times while she was on the ground and two bouncers intervened at the time.’
In their letter, it read: “This is about a man in public office who lied, covered up his past” later adding “we will not stand for this.”
This is not the first time he has shown reticence to be up front with the electorate about what his past actions. He neglected to even disclose his conviction before his 2024 election as an MP. Court documents showed that he received a sentence of 28 days, “not suspended in light of serious nature of the offence” – and when it came out he, once again, downplayed it as being a youthful “indiscretion”, telling a story that did not at all match the court’s findings.
