Nigel Farage reacts:
“Yes, it’s a victory for sectarian voting. It’s a victory for cheating in elections… last night at the close of play, a very reputable organisation called Democracy Volunteers said in 12% of voting cases, they had witnessed family voting. That means a husband and wife or more going into the privacy of the polling station and effectively watching how the other member of the family votes. This is illegal under the law and yet it appears that the council didn’t do anything about it. So now there’s a debate about fraud in voting. That’s a very good thing.
…It’s postal voting that is being abused massively in this country. We need to get rid of the list. The only people that should ever vote by post are those who are elderly, infirm, or living or working abroad.
…Well, our vote was good. I’m very pleased we doubled our vote. The implications of our vote are that right across the north of England on the 7th of May and elsewhere in those elections we are going to do phenomenally well. Starmer has a massive problem. He’s on the way out.
…The Tory party is completely finished. There’s a resurgent hard left working now with sectarian politics, and emboldened off the back of it the Churchill statue in London has been vandalised overnight calling him a ‘Zionist’ and saying ‘globalise the intifada.’ We are in very big trouble. And the only party that will fight this, that will turn this around, will clean up the voting system, is Reform.”
All eyes now move to May…
Speaking at an IPPR think tank event in London, the Health Secretary compared striking junior doctors to mutinous sailors.
“I feel like we’ve turned the ship, the boat’s going in the right direction, except some of the crew are trying to row in one direction while the rest of us are going in the other. You can’t make progress that way. We are seeing an improving NHS, and we’ve seen improvement despite resident doctors’ strikes, but the fact is, performance would have been better and there would have been more money to invest in staff and services if the BMA hadn’t been undertaking the strike action.”