Reform’s Welsh hopes damaged after Senedd member suspended for ‘vile’ racial slur

Reform UK’s only member of the Welsh parliament has been suspended for two weeks over a racial slur she posted in an office WhatsApp group.Laura Anne Jones used an offensive Chinese slur in a discussion about the threat of the Chinese government utilising TikTok for espionage.On Wednesday evening, the Welsh parliament voted for Jones, who defected from the Tories to Reform in the summer, to be suspended for a fortnight without pay.Jones’s suspension is a blow for Reform, which has high hopes of making dramatic gains in next year’s Senedd elections.When Jones joined Reform, its leader, Nigel Farage, said the party was confident the allegations against her would “all go away”

No 10 calls on Farage to urgently address ‘disturbing allegations’ of past racist behaviour

Keir Starmer has called on Nigel Farage to urgently address multiple and detailed allegations of racist behaviour during his teenage years, as the Reform leader attempted to dismiss the claims as “one person’s word against another”.Pressure was put on Farage by the prime minister over what Downing Street said were “disturbing allegations” after the Guardian reported the testimony of more than a dozen school contemporaries, including an award-winning director who claimed to have been targeted with antisemitic abuse.In the face of concerns raised by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and an extremism adviser to the last Conservative government, Farage’s spokesperson on Wednesday appeared to question whether it would be possible to remember events from the 1970s and early 1980s.“If things like this happened a very, very long time ago, you can’t necessarily recollect what happened,” the spokesperson claimed.Speaking in the Commons after a question from the Reform MP Lee Anderson at prime minister’s questions, Starmer said Farage needed to personally explain himself in the light of the Guardian’s reporting

China’s power play: MI5 warns of relentless espionage attempts in Britain

An unexpected connection on LinkedIn. An offer of work from a headhunter, most likely a young woman, based in China. The chance to earn perhaps £20,000 part-time writing a handful of geopolitical reports for a Chinese company peppered with “non-public” or “insider” insights. Payment in cryptocurrency or cash preferred.It may seem obvious, on this telling, that something about this approach would be amiss

A guttural groan in an energy-free zone: sullen resignation haunts PMQs

It’s like watching dead men walking. Or, to be accurate, a dead man and a dead woman walking. Ghosts of Christmas parties past, haunting the dispatch box. Cast your mind forward to a year from now. It’s more than likely that prime minister’s questions will look very different

‘He used to say things like ‘Hitler was right’’: Farage faces more allegations of racist behaviour at school

It had been a fun sleepover at Nigel Farage’s house and Jean-Pierre Lihou, a teenager with an appetite, was delighted with his schoolfriend’s mother’s hospitality. “I remember the fantastic cooked English breakfast, as opposed to what you get at a boarding house on a morning,” Lihou recalled. “I was a boarder and he was a day boy,” he said of their education at Dulwich college in south-east London.Farage was a great mimic, and funny with it, Lihou said. But over time he found there was a darker side to his 14-year-old friend

Uk politics: Streeting defends asylum policy, but says he’s not ‘comfortable’ with forced removal of children – as it happened

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has defended the government’s new asylum policy – while admitting that he would not be “comfortable” about seeing families with small children deported.One feature of the plan is to increase the number of removals involving children. The Home Office says there has been too much “hesitancy” in this regard in the past.In an interview with LBC, asked if he would be happy to see families with young children forcibly removed from the country, Streeting said that the plan also involved encouraging people to leave voluntarily, and so the number of forced removals should be “low”.Streeting said that he supported forced removals because there was no point having a policy that was not enforced