Angela Eagle says data is not there to support Robert Jenrick’s assertions as Nigel Farage prepares to also address issue in press conference
Kemi Badenoch, is not telling the truth about the “real failures of 14 years of Conservative government”, the former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss has said. Kevin Rawlinson has the story.
Good morning. During August, when parliament is not sitting and the tap of domestic news is running dry, opposition parties often like to run campaigns. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is following this model with gusto and today, for the third week in a row, he is holding a press conference on the subject of crime. Reform’s success in the polls is almost entirely down to the fact it advocates hardline policies to cut immigration and small boat crossings and Farage is trying explicitly to link this issue to crime, arguing that asylum seekers are disproportionately likely to be criminal.
The Conservative party don’t have a single theme for their summer campaigning. (Yesterday Kemi Badenoch was campaigning about the uselessness of the Liz Truss mini-budget, a topic where the nation largely agrees.) But in response to an overnight announcement from the government about new measures to crack down on small boat crossings, they have also been depicting these migrants (whose numbers, of course, increased dramatically while they were in office) as a threat to public safety. In a statement released overnight Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “This weak Labour government has lost control of our borders, and we now see rapes and sexual assaults by illegal immigrants reported on a near daily basis.” And, in an interview on the Today programme this morning, Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, doubled down on this claim. He said:
