Three more Reform UK councillors expelled from party over ‘dishonest’ behaviour
Three more members of Reform’s “flagship” council have been expelled for “dishonest and deceptive behaviour” following a leaked video meeting, PA Media reports. PA says:
Reform UK took control of Kent county council (KCC) after winning 57 of the 81 seats at the local elections in May, overturning a 30-year Tory majority.
Due to the number of suspensions and removals since May, there are now less than 50 Reform councillors sitting at KCC.
After footage of an online meeting where KCC leader Linden Kemkaran was seen shouting and swearing at her members was revealed by the Guardian, four councillors were suspended.
Three of those councillors: Bill Barrett, Oliver Bradshaw and Paul Thomas, along with another councillor, Brian Black, have now been kicked out of Reform UK following investigations.
A Reform spokesperson said: “At the request of the leader of Kent County Council, Cllr Black and Cllr Thomas were invited to meet with officials from Reform HQ in order to find a way forward for all involved.
“Following this meeting, a decision has been made to expel Cllr Black, Cllr Thomas and Cllr Bradshaw from the party after they displayed a lack of integrity.
“These individuals have shown a pattern of dishonest and deceptive behaviour which the party will not tolerate from its elected officials.”
Last week, Barrett and another councillor, Robert Ford, were kicked out by email from Reform HQ which said they had “undermined” the interests of the party and brought it into “disrepute”.
Key events
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Theresa May condemns Tories over Climate Change Act, ‘villianisation of judiciary’, ECHR and populism
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Zia Yusuf rejects claims Reform UK more shambolic than Labour or Tories at council level, as Kent turmoil goes on
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‘It’s gone up hugely since …’ – Danny Kruger comes close to admitting civil servants numbers soared after Brexit
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Government won’t commission enough offshore wind to meet clean energy pledge, analysis suggests
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Labour at 17%, its lowest level ever in YouGov poll, level with Tories, with Greens on 16%, Lib Dems 15% – and Reform on 27%
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Badenoch declines to say whether or not she thinks Sarah Pochin’s black people on TV complaint was racist
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Three more Reform UK councillors expelled from party over ‘dishonest’ behaviour
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OBR productivity downgrade to create £20bn hole in budget, more than expected, reports say
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Minister defends plan to house asylum seekers in military sites even if it costs more
Theresa May condemns Tories over Climate Change Act, ‘villianisation of judiciary’, ECHR and populism
Theresa May, the former Conservative PM, gave a lecture in the House of Lords last night which she used to criticise several – perhaps even most – of Kemi Badenoch’s flagship policies. Here are some highlights, from the PA Media report.
On getting rid of the Climate Change Act
May said Badenoch plan to repeal the Climate Change Act (updated when she was PM) was an “extreme and unnecessary measure” that would “fatally undermine” Britain’s global leadership on climate issues.
This announcement only reinforces climate policy as a dividing line in our politics, rather than being the unifying issue it once was.
And, for the Conservative party, it risks chasing votes from Reform at the expense of the wider electorate.
On attacking judges (which was the main theme of shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick’s party conference speech)
Without mentioning Jenrick, May condemned the “villainisation of the judiciary”.
By undermining the judiciary we further erode public trust in the institutions of our democracy and therefore in democracy itself.
So I say to those seeking to villainise a judiciary that cannot easily answer back, who wilfully discredit our legal system for their own expediency – it’s time to show responsible leadership.
On leaving the European convention on human rights
May said that, while it had been “frustrating” for her to “come up against the courts” as a minister, the Tories should “tread carefully”.
This is not just about short-term decisions to make it easier to deal with public concerns about immigration.
Our support for human rights has its origin in Magna Carta. How we deal with issues of human rights is fundamental to our ability to deal with autocracies and dictatorships.
Every step we take to reduce our support for human rights merely emboldens our rivals and weakens our position in the world.
On using populism
Badenoch has enthusiastically embraced populist causes. May said she was not in favour.
In the world of power where the club of strong men want to carve the world up in their own interests, populism and polarisation are enablers.
And those politicians in the Western world who use populism and polarisation for their own short-term political ends risk handing a victory to our enemies.
We must not risk walking into that trap.
Zia Yusuf rejects claims Reform UK more shambolic than Labour or Tories at council level, as Kent turmoil goes on
At the Reform UK press conference, Danny Kruger has delivered his speech (see 11.09am) and he is now taking questions with Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy.
Asked about the turmoil at Kent (see 9.52am), Yusuf claimed that Reform UK’s record in local government was no worse than other parties’.
He claimed that Reform councils were being subject to “a level of scrutiny” he had never seen anywhere else in his lifetime.
But Labour and Tory leadere were “never asked about the any number of utterly shambolic councils, that they presided over”. He mentioned Thurrock, Slough and Croydon as examples. He went on:
If senior party representatives from the Labour party and the Tory party had questions about every single councillor that did something that they didn’t like, these [press conferences] would go on all day.
‘It’s gone up hugely since …’ – Danny Kruger comes close to admitting civil servants numbers soared after Brexit
Danny Kruger, who defected from the Conservatives to Reform UK and who has been put in charge of getting the party ready for government, is giving a speech this morning about proposals to cut the cost of the civil service.
In an interview on the Today programme this morning, he said that Reform would “close down many of the sprawling offices that Whitehall currently occupies across the whole district of Westminster”.
He claimed that moving the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department of Health and Social Care out of their offices would save £22m a year, moving the Home Office could save £30m, and moving the Department for Education could save £12m.
Reform would like to move some of these offices out of London, he said.
And he said that he wanted to cut the number of people working in the civil service.
At one point in his interview, he said:
We now have over half a million civil servants working for central government. It’s gone up hugely since – I’m afraid to say, in the last 10 years.
At this point it sounded as if Kruger was correcting himself mid-sentence; he was about to say “since Brexit”, because Whitehall has had to hire thousands officials to do jobs that were previously done in Brussels, but he seemed to hold back because it is awkward for him to admit that he is trying to solve a problem created by a policy his party supported in the first place.
Government won’t commission enough offshore wind to meet clean energy pledge, analysis suggests
Helena Horton
Helena Horton is a Guardian environment reporter.
Ed Miliband has not been given enough of a budget to secure enough offshore wind to meet his clean energy promise, new analysis shows.
The energy secretary has promised to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030, and to do so he needs to commission between 7-8 GW of offshore wind power a year until 2030.
However, he has only budgeted for around 4 GW, according to analysis by Carbon Brief.
This confirms a story broken by the Guardian last week, which revealed Keir Starmer was getting ready to drop the 2030 target if it proved too expensive to do so. There are fears that commissioning too much wind at a high price will hike consumer bills. Miliband previously promised to drive bills down by £300 by the end of this parliament.
The budget works by promising a certain amount of money to the wind companies per megawatt hour of electricity they produce. This means if the wholesale electricity price is above what is called the “strike price”, consumers do not pay it. However, if the wholesale price is below the “strike price”, we top this up with our bills, so the energy companies are paid a guaranteed amount.
The maximum strike price for this year’s auction round is £113/MW h, and these contracts will run for 20 years. For reference, today’s wholesale price is around £76/MW h.
If the government manages to negotiate a lower price, they still will not commission enough wind with their current budget. If they get down to £90, they will commission 4 GW, 5 if they drive it to £80, and 6 if they drive it to £70. This is unlikely, and industry figures predict the price will settle at £105.
Ana Musat, executive director of policy and engagement at RenewableUK. said:
The budget announced today will not maximise investment in new offshore wind farms. We have a record amount of offshore wind capacity eligible for this auction – more than 20 gigawatts – and the current budget would only procure about a quarter of that. Given the amount of competition in this year’s auction, we expect to see competitively-priced bids, so the government should adjust the budget to maximise procurement, which could attract up to £53bn in private investment in the UK economy.
Labour at 17%, its lowest level ever in YouGov poll, level with Tories, with Greens on 16%, Lib Dems 15% – and Reform on 27%
YouGov has published the latest results from the weekly polling it carries out for the Times and Sky News. The results are startling, showing Labour on just 17% (the party’s lowest ever score in a YouGov poll), the Green party just one point behind, and four parties clustered within two points of each other.
One fairly reliable rule about polling is that any poll that makes headlines is likely to be wrong. That is because things become news when they are unusual, but in polling ‘unusual’ is likely to mean outlier (which means wrong). Polling is most useful when it illuminates trends.
But four of the main parties – Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens – are clustering, or at least have been over the past few months. This chart from Politico’s poll of polls (which aggregates all polling results) illustrates this. The YouGov numbers may be ‘wrong’, but the overall story is probably ‘right’.
Commenting on these results, Mothin Ali, the Green party’s co-deputy leader.
When we said we were here to replace Labour and take the fight to Reform we meant it. People are flocking to the Greens because they see we are the party pushing for bold change and are making hope normal again.
We have now surged beyond 150,000 members – a more than 100% increase in just over a month. In the same period our poll ratings have shot up to their highest ever YouGov showing and the Green Party is now within touching distance of Labour.
Badenoch declines to say whether or not she thinks Sarah Pochin’s black people on TV complaint was racist
Keir Starmer (here) and the Lib Dem leader Ed Davey (here) have both said that the Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin was being racist when she said “it drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people”.
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has said that, though the comment was “ugly”, his colleague was not being racist.
Last night Kemi Badenoch was on ITV’s Peston. She said the Pochin comments were “quite shocking”. But, asked if they were racist, she said that as a black person she was “tired” of having to address questions like that, and she did not give an answer. She said she wanted to talk about Conservative plans to fix the country, not Reform UK and TV adverts.
Here is the clip.
“We’re talking about fixing the country, they’re talking about TV adverts. It’s not serious”
Asked if Sarah Pochin’s comments were racist, Conservative leader @KemiBadenoch calls them ‘shocking’ and says she’s tired of having to talk about Reform#Peston pic.twitter.com/EU8iYLmSly
— Peston (@itvpeston) October 27, 2025
Three more Reform UK councillors expelled from party over ‘dishonest’ behaviour
Three more members of Reform’s “flagship” council have been expelled for “dishonest and deceptive behaviour” following a leaked video meeting, PA Media reports. PA says:
Reform UK took control of Kent county council (KCC) after winning 57 of the 81 seats at the local elections in May, overturning a 30-year Tory majority.
Due to the number of suspensions and removals since May, there are now less than 50 Reform councillors sitting at KCC.
After footage of an online meeting where KCC leader Linden Kemkaran was seen shouting and swearing at her members was revealed by the Guardian, four councillors were suspended.
Three of those councillors: Bill Barrett, Oliver Bradshaw and Paul Thomas, along with another councillor, Brian Black, have now been kicked out of Reform UK following investigations.
A Reform spokesperson said: “At the request of the leader of Kent County Council, Cllr Black and Cllr Thomas were invited to meet with officials from Reform HQ in order to find a way forward for all involved.
“Following this meeting, a decision has been made to expel Cllr Black, Cllr Thomas and Cllr Bradshaw from the party after they displayed a lack of integrity.
“These individuals have shown a pattern of dishonest and deceptive behaviour which the party will not tolerate from its elected officials.”
Last week, Barrett and another councillor, Robert Ford, were kicked out by email from Reform HQ which said they had “undermined” the interests of the party and brought it into “disrepute”.
OBR productivity downgrade to create £20bn hole in budget, more than expected, reports say
The budget is just over four weeks away, and already the papers have been awash with speculation about what Rachel Reeves, but some stories are probably better sourced than others. When the BBC and the Financial Times start leading with the same scoop, it is wise to take it seriously.
That is why there is a lot of interest in the news that Reeves faces a bigger-than-expected hit to the public finances of around £20bn, because of poor productivity in the UK economy.
As Graeme Wearden reports,
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the government’s official forecaster, is expected to cut its trend productivity growth prediction by 0.3 percentage points, the Financial Times reported. It is expected to deliver its forecasts to Rachel Reeves on Friday, and they will be published on budget day on 26 November.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank has said that each 0.1 percentage point downgrade to productivity would increase public sector net borrowing by £7bn in 2029-30, so a 0.3 point reduction could create a £21bn hit.
Analysts have been expecting a smaller downgrade to productivity that would result in a £7bn to £14bn fiscal hit under the IFS calculation.
Graeme has more on his business live blog.
Minister defends plan to house asylum seekers in military sites even if it costs more
Good morning. The Home Office confirmed last night that it wants to use two barracks, in Scotland and southern England, to house around 900 male asylum seekers. The two sites are Cameron Barracks in Inverness and Crowborough Training Camp in East Sussex and ministers want the men to start moving in from the end of next month. Kevin Rawlinson has more details here.
In some respects, this announcement can be added to the list of government U-turns; only last summer the government was saying it wanted to end the use of military sites for asylum seekers.
This morning Luke Pollard, a defence minister, has been on the airwaves. He confirmed that Cameron Barracks in Inverness and Crowborough Training Camp were being lined up as accommodation for asylum seekers and he told the BBC that this was about seeing if this approach works.
Some bases are small, some bases are larger in terms of numbers, but I think the conversation around the bases that are in the news today is about proving this concept, is about seeing whether this works. We believe that these bases can provide adequate accommodation for asylum seekers.
Yesterday the Commons home affairs committee warned that housing asylum seekers in barracks, not hotels, could end up being more expensive. Pollard suggested that this would be worth it given the extent of public opposition to asylum seekers being housed in hotels.
We’re looking at what’s possible and, in some cases, those bases may be a different cost to hotels, but I think we need to reflect the public mood on this asylum hotels need to close.
We are likely to hear more on this from Keir Starmer, who is doing a visit this morning where he will be speaking to the media.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is still in Saudi Arabia, where she is speaking at an investment conference.
Morning: Keir Starmer is on a visit in the north-west of England, linked to the deal he signed yesterday to sell Typhoon jets to Turkey.
11am: The Reform MP Danny Kruger holds a press conference to announce plans to cut spending on the civil service.
11.30am: Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.45pm: Starmer chairs cabinet.
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