Is Reform happy for its supporters to assault people?

0:00Bite into a stack sandwich made with Hero Bread, and the only thing you'll think is delicious. You won't think it has up to 19 grams of protein, 11 to 32 grams of fiber, or just 0 to 5 grams net carbs. But it does. Hero Bread. No compromises. Just loaves, buns, tortillas, bagels, and noodles packed with flavor. Right now, get 10 % off at Hero.co with code iHeart. That's H-E-R-O dot C-O, code iHeart. All figures per serving of Hero Bread. See nutrition facts on Hero.co. This is a global production. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot be the party that says I've had death threats more than any other politician, any other leader in the UK.

0:46And then turns round and allows your own supporters to crack on and assault whoever they want around them. There are still a huge number of questions swirling about reformed finances. Physical, visual, hard to deny confirmation that this had gone right to the top of the party. These are the benefits of a university education, folks.

1:14Yeah. I bet she's studying. Tell us, love, is it sociology, is it? Yeah, I bet it is. That poor young girl, she looked like she was going to do herself an injury, didn't she? Well, there's a saying I've got for that. You know what it is, don't you? Boring, boring, boring. That is Nigel Farage at the Reform Conference dealing with a heckler. Fine. The trouble is that Reform activists in the hall were giving this woman a real going over, hitting her over the head, pulling her hair and pushing her to the ground. And this is how Robert Jenrick reacted this weekend. There was some very disturbing video that came out of your conference about a woman being dragged out by her hair and being hit over the head.

2:00Oh, boo-hoo. I am not... Come on, if you try and wreck someone's speech at a party conference... Political history is full of hell. A woman is getting lamped with a crutch and the man who would be reforms chancellor says boo-hoo. Why are they so relaxed about their own supporters assaulting people. Welcome to The News Agents.

2:31The News Agents. It's John. It's me, Liz. And obviously the reason you're tuning in today is to find out more about Emily Maitlis' trip to Venice and dinner with George Clooney. That will come later in the podcast, but there are other issues we need to deal with first. And I was kind of filling in on Sky yesterday, after the reform conference, when there are still a huge number of questions swirling about reformed finances, principally, but also about the way kind of those hecklers were dealt with. And I was really struck by what Robert Jenrick said, because it seemed like, more or less, you are condoning an acceptable level of political violence.

3:14Oh, come on, And if you heckle, you can expect to get a good kicking. And that seemed to be a viewpoint that I found strange when reform have made such a big deal about the dangers of political violence and the risks that reform leading figures face. Well, as we are talking, another video from my TV has just surfaced. And this shows one of their reporters who was filming that incident of the protester having her essentially jaw pushed. He himself ends up getting punched. Just have a listen here to the sequence of events that he filmed.

4:00The reporter is standing behind filming on his mobile phone when one of the people, we can't really tell if it's part of the security team or another supporter of reform, comes over and essentially socks him in the mouth. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot decide to be the party that has to take a£5 million donation because you're so concerned about your insecurity. You cannot be the party that says I've had death threats more than any other politician, any other leader in the UK. You cannot be the party that invokes the horrific death, murder of Anne Whittacombe, one of those reform spokeswomen, and then turns around and allows your own supporters to crack on and assault whoever they want around them and end up with the words boohoo.

4:55There is something that is just not right about trying to claim the moral high ground in this whole question of political violence and then just turning round when it happens to people that you don't particularly agree with. And there's something else that happened over the weekend that I thought was really fascinating. And we're going to talk about that quite a bit later on. But it was about the protests that took place in Dover when a group, a few hundred strong, all in black, wearing balaclavas and masks, catching everyone by surprise and laying siege to the port of Dover and stopping people going on holiday and stopping the people of Dover from going about their business, all in the name of, you know, stop the boats.

5:41And Robert Jenrick, to that, of course, condemned the people wearing masks and condemned the behaviour. But kind of, I understand their anger. I understood their anger, which was something else he said to me when we spoke yesterday. I assume you condemn the scenes of what unfolded in Dover yesterday with these kind of gangs of masked men and women marauding the port and stopping people going on their holidays. I do, absolutely. Look, 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.

6:17In 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 Jordan Bardella, the likely next Prime Minister of France, signing an agreement which has the prospect of ending this once and for all. But you don't go about it in this way. I suppose you look, of course, people understand the frustration, but you either condemn it or you don't condemn it. And I think that the condemnation is sort of then.

6:52Yeah, but I understand why these people are angry, which is a sort of a nod to those people who are doing it saying, look, you know, yeah, you shouldn't be doing it. But we're kind of we're kind of with you on the frustration levels of it. I thought he actually made sense in that. I mean, which is if you don't like people disrupting your conference, then you should be condemning the people on the street. If you don't like people in burkas, then you should equally condemn the balaclava. So I do think that there is an intellectual coherence to what he's saying there. But this is a complicated question, because in the politics of our age, you don't yet know whether these groups of balaclavid protesters are people, because they've all got balaclavid protesters, are people who are actual reform supporters, or whether they are rival restore supporters of the Rupert Lowe variety.

7:46Or whether they're another group altogether. Or another sort of Tommy Robinson adjacent group altogether. And so what I think is funny is that from where we're sitting, yeah, you broadly lump them all together, which is you don't really like what's going on. And this is what you think is an acceptable way to protest. If you're generic, you kind of go, I don't know whether I'm condemning people that actually vote for us. So I have to be careful. Or I don't know whether I should be kind of more condemnatory because I don't like them going to the rival group who might be cutting down our position in the polls by eating into some of our vote share.

8:20So we are now at this slightly ludicrous position where, you know, if you have 400 people in balaclavas and we literally don't know, in the olden days, you would have assumed that they were fringe. Right now, they might actually be supporting one of the parties of a future government. I mean, that's mental, isn't it? And I think that is the absolute tension that we get to at the end of the reform conference. and it's highlighted as well by the rule breaking and, you know, the kind of what was going on in that concealed video that Channel 4 recorded, which is, is reform a mainstream political party playing by the rules in the same way that the Labour Party and the Conservative Party is?

9:02Or does it think it is a party that is an insurgency and that it can do what it like and act almost like a guerrilla army? Because it can't be both. And I think that that tension is being played out where you see Robert Jenrick on the one hand thinking, OK, I need to keep that far right because those are our supporters. They're my boys. They're my boys. And if we don't have them, then Restore will have them or Tommy Robinson will have them and we need them on our side. And then you have those in reform who are also, and I think Jenrick is part of that as well, which is the sort of, you know, the split personality, if you like, of this, which is I need to get disaffected conservatives who are mainstream.

9:42Interesting. Disaffected Conservatives will have seen those scenes of people marauding around that port in black masks and been absolutely horrified by it. And I think that so the party doesn't know which way to go, whether it needs to broaden its appeal and bring in disaffected Tories and, you know, the people in the commuter belts of Surrey and Hampshire and wherever else, or whether it needs to be going towards the hard right of Restore and the Tommy Robinson Brigade because they think there may be votes there. Well, let's dwell a little bit more on that breaking story from Channel 4 from verbatim.

10:19Because actually, I was sitting on my easy jet flight to Venice. Easy jet? Easy jet to Venice. Only flight left. When I got the press release, I got the first indication this story was breaking. and what I subsequently learned was actually how watertight Channel 4 had to make what they were going to report. I mean, they were, I think, locked in an edit suite for about a month prior to the story being on air on Friday, locking down every single bit to make sure that the story stood up. And what was interesting about that was we have had, let's say, a summer of reform donation confusion, right? Farage trying to explain why it's okay to take five million, why he might be able to spend it on Ferraris if he wants, why it might be about Securus if he wants.

11:11And I think the Sunday Times and the Times has been very instrumental in bringing us those breaking stories. But until this point, we never had the visuals. We had, And, you know, I'm going to say it again, the vertical content, easy to watch, sort of Instagrammable post, which said, this is what this guy said. Then you have this guy and then you have Farage coming in. And so what you had at the end of that report, essentially, was physical, visual, hard to deny confirmation that this had gone right to the top of the party, that Nigel Farage had known about it, that he had signed it off, that he had come and sat down and had his sort of oyster lunch with the guys who were essentially pretending to be the donor, the American donor and his son, who were offering not only to do the polls that reform had commissioned to make them look better than they were, but also to siphon money into Farage's reform party through a backdoor that was allowed.

12:18And what you had in that video was something that, I mean, let's be frank, even a diehard reform voter, reform supporter, couldn't deny in terms of what they had to see, what they saw, who they saw there. You couldn't kind of go, oh, well, you know, is it the mainstream media fudging this? Is it people making things up? Is it the establishment against us? No, it's your guy. He's sitting there. He's in a little cabin. He's had his oysters. That's Nigel Farage. Do you recognise him? It's not a deep fake. That is what happens, right? Honestly, them saying it's an establishment stitch up. What is more establishment than a couple of posh boys meeting in Mayfair gentlemen's clubs to try and arrange half a million pound deals, which will then be sealed over champagne and oysters with a helicopter to collect you, to take you to Clacton.

13:14I mean, my God, please spare me the absolute bullshit that you are an anti-establishment party. It was all laid bare in that film, just how establishment you are and you're trying to cut corners. Now, in fairness to reform, they would say, no, no, no, we didn't commission the poll. We just suggested that that might be a poll you get done, which to my mind is sort of angels dancing on the head of a pin. I mean, you know, no, OK, just falling off the head of a pin. OK, fair enough. You didn't commission it. You just said to the Channel 4 undercover reporter or the verbatim person, this might be a good thing for you to do because that would help us.

13:53And no one comes out smelling sweetly of that from reform or from the pollsters over what they did, because it was terribly duplicitous and underhand. And the fact of the matter is, yeah, there was no five hundred thousand pound donation at the end. But are you telling me they wouldn't have taken it if a check had been written by the fake American? Of course they'd have taken it. They knew exactly what they were doing and they were trying to guide the two key people. I mean, I loved, loved that Nigel Farage called them contractors. Right. The Cambridge academic and theologian. Right. And the person who is de facto chief of staff and has been his right hand for absolutely years.

14:38These weren't contractors. They were at the heart of the Reform Party. So I guess the question that we're still left with and the one that Lewis and the team tried to answer at the Reform Conference on Friday was, are his supporters going to be at all moved by what they've just seen, by what they've witnessed with their own eyes now? This is clearly the party that tried to sell itself as different to all the others, right? We're not interested in big money. We're not interested in the establishment. We don't like the elites. well, what the hell are you doing with these putative five million pound donations, half a million pound donations?

15:14Is it going to change anyone's minds? Right. And what is fascinating is that you are getting still so much pushback from people who just don't want to see what's in front of them, who don't want to believe it, who I was watching that film, Begonia, Begonia at the weekend. You know, it's about the conspiracy theorists who are convinced that the CEO's an alien. And what you hear there is how impossible it is for two narratives to meet. If you're a conspiracy theorist and you're going down the rabbit hole, you will stay down the rabbit hole. And if you're the CEO and you speak kind of CEO jargon, you won't be able to meet these people.

15:52And actually, I sort of think that's where we've ended up, at least in terms of the hardcore supporters, because you are still getting people who say, I don't believe it. Well, what don't you believe? I don't think Nigel's done anything wrong. I don't think he's broken the law. I don't think there's any criminal activity. Well, do you not want to believe it? Do you not want to see it? Or have you just decided that whatever happens now, nothing can disturb the decision that you have come to in your own mind? I think that's absolutely right. I think that if you are one of those who was attending the reform conference in Birmingham, you are there all in with Nigel Farage and you're not going to believe.

16:31and you're going to think it's entrapment and you're going to think this is all fake. And, you know, the initial response from reform was that it was a hoax. A hoax. What a weird word to use. It's a hoax, but we're firing two of our top team anyway. Yeah. And also, I mean, look, it was just so perfect as an investigation, because as you say, Emily, it was made for the day that we live in, for the age that we live in, that it was all Instagrammable. The clips are there. You can see the guy trying to school the undercover reporter in how to get polls done so that it's off the books. And, you know, he's even introduced to Robert Jenrick at one stage as he's helping us with an important off the book project.

17:11Oh, really? It almost sounded like a class of membership in the Reform Party. You know that there are these people who are just doing the secret ops for us. And the other thing I would say is that my understanding is that Channel 4 have hours and hours and hours of recording. There's more. There's more. And you saw in the film where Dan Jukes is talking to the guy outside the pub and Channel 4 are bleeping out a whole series of names that Jukes reels off of people who have given money through circuitous means. Now, if those names come into the public domain and it becomes apparent that there are others, and I'm not saying this will happen, but it's possible that there are others who have given money where it has gone kind of been hidden and shielded in a way that gets around the law on foreign donations, then reform are going to have another whole pile of questions.

18:05And I suspect that part of the reason we're seeing such utter techiness from so many reform figures now is, I think, the fear that there may be worse to come. In a moment, we're going to be talking more about Patriot Platform, those men in masks. Who are they? Who funds them? We'll hear from Joe Mulhall.

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20:12So we've talked about what happened at Dover over the weekend and what happened in Portsmouth last night. And this was a new far-right group, or a new one to me, called Patriot Platform. And we're joined in the studio now by Joe Mulhall, who is the Director of Research at Hope Not Hate, who monitor quite closely these groupings on the far right. So, you know, we've kind of got used to dealing with Tommy Robinson. We've got used to dealing with Restore and other political groupings of the right. So who are Patriot Platform? so as you say that they're a really new organization they emerged mid-july mid-june sort of thing it's certainly in the middle of the summer very very small numbers and it's led by you mentioned tommy robinson it's it's led and organized by tommy robinson's right-hand man a guy called danny tomo who's been around for within far-right networks for for many years he was one of the figures that has organized lots of the big tommy robinson demonstrations that you'll remember and he became a much bigger figure through 2018, 2019.

21:13But in the last year or so, he started to radicalise a little bit more and he's been talking really openly about more vigilante-style activism. And then in the summer of this year, he started to put out calls for kind of a core group of small, a small number of core activists that were going to come together in a much more clandestine way than, say, the demonstrations we're used to, which would announce weeks in advance or months in advance we're meeting here on this date. This was much more closed, much more secret. They had some vetting. They pulled some people together for two events that were secret events in the summer.

21:45And then this is the first kind of big public display that we've seen from the group. I mean, you'd have to say, bloody impressive in a kind of weird kind of way, that they had managed to pull together four or five hundred people, all dressed identically, without apparently the authorities having the vaguest idea of what was about to unfold at Dover. Yeah, there's certainly a discipline to this, which I think makes it more scary. You know, I think we've all become used to, unfortunately, either the huge Tommy Robinson demonstrations or these every weekend we're monitoring dozens sometimes of kind of far right protests outside accommodation where asylum seekers are based.

22:22And I think we've become used to we know what that looks like, what that sounds like. This certainly feels new. It's much more clandestine. It's much more aggressive in form. And as you say, it's much more organised. And the big question is, as you say, no one seemed to know that this was going to happen, not least the police that were caught on the hop on this, where hundreds of these individuals came out the back of vans at 7.30 in the morning on Saturday in Dover and managed to block one of our biggest ports. And it seems that the authorities had no idea this was even coming. So this group sort of came together, you said, in sort of June, really, not long ago.

22:52I mean, they must be quite depressed that those small boat crossings have fallen by 40 percent in the last year. I mean, does this seem in any way connected to the reality of immigration in this country? Or do you think of it as just a vigilante group that is trying to sort of provoke? I don't think the decline in the numbers of boats will be affecting these guys at all, really. I mean, for them, this is a longstanding constant. They believe that Britain is being invaded. They're so inculcated with this worldview that there is this mass invasion happening. And there is complicity by the state and the police and the French and the British authorities.

23:28The fluctuations in the numbers or relatively dramatic declines in the numbers won't really affect their motivation here. I think that's really important, Joe, actually, because for everyone who's saying and generic at the weekend was one who said, oh, I do understand, you know, their worries. And, you know, I was talking to fairly senior conservatives over the weekend who said, well, you do have to understand their worries as if what they were talking about was whether the, you know, British immigration system was functioning at its most efficient or not. you're talking about something on a totally different level which is invasion in the way that Rupert Lowe talks about who should be allowed to live here and call themselves British.

24:09Is that where we are? Yeah, I think you're exactly right here. This isn't about, and I think some of the media coverage in the last few days has been unhelpful in that it's saying well, are we surprised that we've got here? People are angry, legitimate concerns, discussions. We're talking about a group of really hard and well organised and well-known far-right activists here. And if you listen... With convictions. With convictions. This guy, yeah. Danny Tommer himself pled guilty to kidnapped. And I hope not hate, in recent weeks, we've identified a number of other activists in patriotic platform that have convictions for domestic abuse, etc.

24:42Which always goes hand in hand. I mean, if you looked at the pattern of violence against women and domestic abuse, you'd probably get to these men a hell of a lot quicker. We saw that with the riots in 2024. We've seen that with the violence we've seen at protests in the last year or so. So a huge chunk of these men that constantly say that they're out defending women, of course, end up having domestic abuse convictions. But because these are hard and longstanding, well-known far right organizers, it's not about have the numbers gone down for them. One is too many. One migrant, one asylum seeker.

25:14These people believe that Britain has been conquered or invaded. So the numbers of boats arriving, if it goes up, might animate them. But it going down doesn't concern them in that sense that one person arriving is too many for them because they already believe there's too many people here as it stands. Joe, do you have a sense that, I mean, you know, go back decades and there was the National Front or there was the British National Party or whatever you want to find. There have always been far right, extreme, anti-immigration, anti-immigrant parties. Do you sense that they are the numbers have increased of people supporting those groups now?

25:51and are better organised than they were. Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably the scariest element of this. If you go back to the National Front or the British National Party, you know, I think the National Front peaked out at around 17 ,000 members or maybe less in the British National Party. You know, those parties were in the 10 ,000, 17 ,000 sort of numbers. If we look at Restore, you know, led by Rupert Lowe, which the evidence is pretty clear, this is a racial nationalist party who I would argue is politics are very comparable to the British National Party. their membership is around they're claiming 150 000 you know if we look at tommy robinson's last few demonstrations in central london the numbers were say maybe 150 200 000 for one of them maybe 70 000 for another the largest english defense league protest we saw back in 2011 was 5 000 so the numbers that we're seeing both within these political parties and that doesn't even include reform which is obviously a more moderate force than say the bmp was but as a membership up around 270, 280 ,000 members.

26:48So you put these groupings together, all of which sit within either the radical right or the far right, or now some of these groups on the extreme far right, we are talking about a number of activists, which is completely unprecedented in Britain, exponentially larger than the days of the BNP. So does that tell you, I mean, frankly, that as a country, we are feeling like this is an invasion, that more people are feeling that, I mean, what I'm trying to work out is have our politics manifestly changed over the last 40 years? Or is this just the speed at which you can mobilise people or the attractiveness with which you sort of sell your party story?

27:29I think it's a combination, right? I mean, one of the advantages, say, someone like Tommy Robinson, or let's take even Danny Tomo, what we've seen in the last few days, have over the BNP is the ease with which you can mobilise vast numbers. You know, Nick Griffin and the British National Party, it was hard for them to reach millions of people. They weren't on television. They wouldn't be put on the radio. Whereas Tommy Robinson has millions of followers on his social media platform. You know, last night in Portsmouth, where Danny Tomo, there was only a few of them arrived at first and then puts out a call on social media for more people to join him and dozens turn up within minutes.