Marco Longhi

🚨 Holding the BBC to account: Green Party activists and candidates made horrific comments, calling Jewish people “abominations”. God forbid had this been Reform activists it would have led the news cycle behind only the war in Iran. Yet because it’s the Greens? The BBC did not even cover it.

🚨 WATCH: Nigel Farage is repeatedly heckled at the launch of Reform UK's London local election campaign

Genuinely can’t believe my ears hearing Tories announce Britain should drill much more in the North Sea. Less than 4 years ago it was THEM that slapped a 75% tax on it! Never forget.

There is a longstanding policy on Question Time not to invite MPs on in their local constituencies unless it’s for a single-issue special programme. This is why Mike Tapp MP appeared on the panel in his constituency for the immigration special in Dover.

This notion that Reform Councils are badly run is total BS. These Councillors have been thrown in the deep end, often with minimal political experience, and with unprecedented levels of scrutiny and people digging for any grain of dirt they can find. They've risen to the challenge in a million different ways. They've delivered the lowest Council tax position of any party (almost all are in the lowest 10% in the country) alongside hundreds of millions in savings, in just 9 months. Lancashire are an examplar in digital innovation, North Northants has been nominated for 'Most Improved Council', Durham has the lowest Council Tax rises of any equivalent Council in the country... And on and on. Yes in one case tax has gone up by more, in a Council that was already insolvent and in receipt of emergency funding when we took it over, and where we don't actually have a majority - the opposition refused to agree to millions of additional savings that could have reduced the tax! - but this idea that Reform are generally doing a poor job is 100% concocted by people who want to see us fail! Yes there are sometimes issues. Yes everyone is on a steep learning curve. No we're not perfect. Nor is any other party or any other Council. If the same scrutiny was applied to others you'd find the same. But huge credit is due (and never given) to people who have taken on this challenge, coming in to Councils for the first time in many cases, wanting to do good for their communities and who have not only kept the show on the road but in many cases made significant steps forward compared to what came before!

This looks pretty much the same as the battles within the Conservative Party when it was in government. Something needs to change. Vote Reform UK.

Hysterical left wing activists, including the Home Secretary, have been claiming a Reform government will create an agency with the sole mission of tracking down, detaining and deporting all illegal migrants in Britain. I'd like to confirm that's precisely what we'll do.

The US/Israeli attack on Iran and the widening hostilities in the region are exposing the growing scandal that is Britain’s military capabilities, or lack thereof. We are still in the world’s top 5/6 on defence spending yet: We don’t have a single warship in the whole of the Mediterranean, despite the eastern Mediterranean becoming part of the theatre of war. We don’t have a single warship in the Gulf. We have a naval base in Bahrain. But a base with no ships. We don’t have any subs to deploy. The one active Astute Class sub is in Oz. We have a handful of fighter jets in Cyprus. And a smaller handful in Qatar (attached to Qatari airforce). That’s it. Most of what’s left of the Navy — not even in the top 30 in the world in terms of warships these days — seems to be in repair/maintenance/renovation. Brilliant MoD planning. Labour/Tories/LibDems who all had a shot at government these past 16 years need to be held to account. When Ed Davey says Brit expats in the Gulf should pay for UK protection, exactly what protection does he have in mind that would be worth paying for?

Britain imports around 60% of the gas we use, and since there is no world price for gas as there is for oil (so we pay roughly three times as much as Americans pay for gas) rising gas prices are bad news for the nation and its government. Now imagine a counterfactual world in which ten years ago we had made it easier to invest in the North Sea and gave a green light to onshore shale gas, overriding hysterical nonsense about the risks of “fracking” promulgated by Friends of the Earth and their allies. England has vast amounts of gas-rich shale, mostly under Lancashire, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire. How much difference would it have made? According to an estimate made in 2019 by UK Onshore Oil and Gas, based on the results of actual drilling in northern England, 100 drilling pads could realistically be producing 40 billion cubic metres (bcm) of shale gas a year by the mid 2030s. Britain’s natural gas consumption is around 60 bcm per year and we already produce around 25 bcm each year, mainly from the North Sea. So if we had got a move on ten years ago we could by now be heading towards being self sufficient in gas and exporting the surplus to other countries. That would improve the balance of payments by around £8 billion a year, save 80 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2035, compared with imports of liquefied natural gas, and generate £600 million in community benefits and £1.2 billion in business rates by 2035. Think how smug we would be! Paying lower prices - to ourselves - for our own gas, and trousering a fortune from exports.

Labour created the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes and yesterday that monster came back to bite them. As I've said many times before, we are a multiracial country, not a multicultural country. If you stir up grievance politics between groups based on religion or race, as Labour have done for decades, as Reform are seeking to do, and as the Greens have done successfully in this by-election, you are pitting neighbours against each other and you start to unravel the culture of tolerance that makes Britain great. Our country is not broken, but this by-election showed that Labour, Reform and the Greens are trying very hard to break it. Labour trying to buy people off with more and more benefits spending. Reform telling people you can't be British if you aren't white. The Greens running a nasty, sectarian campaign while simultaneously wanting to legalise crack-cocaine. Clearly this election was not about who would be the best MP. But there was only one sensible candidate standing in Gorton and Denton, and it was Charlotte Cadden - a former chief inspector of police, a mother, a woman who fought for single sex spaces and dignity for women and girls. While the other parties race to the bottom, Charlotte embodies the new Conservative Party. This result shows Keir Starmer’s premiership is finished. He lost authority a long time ago, a mere hostage at the mercy of a divided Labour Party that cannot decide who to replace him with. He has lost the support of his voters, his MPs and the country. He is in office but not in power. If he had any integrity he would go.

Hubris. It wasn’t even close. Matt Goodwin lost by 4,000, take the L with dignity. He doesn’t even thank those who did vote for him or helped campaign, just criticism of the Muslim community he supposedly wanted to represent. If Nigel believed he could win he wouldn’t have given the Education brief to Suella last week. Will Matt be moving out of the constituency?

👀The Electoral Commission give Democracy Volunteers access to polling stations at election time. Only they and the police can go inside. They’ve just issued this report about “family voting” in Gorton and Denton: Democracy Volunteers deployed four accredited election observers across the Gorton and Denton Westminster Parliamentary By-election today. The team attended 22 of the 45 polling stations in the constituency, spending between 30 and 45 minutes in each. The observers worked in pairs using the international standard for election observation - the four eyes principle. Each team assessed several aspects of the polling process, from accessibility to issues around the integrity of the vote. Staff were welcoming to the team and we would like to thank them for their time in accommodating our work. The team assessed two significant aspects of electoral integrity - family voting (where two voters either confer, collude or direct each other on voting) which breaches the secret ballot. The team also assessed the impact of the requirement for voters to show ID before they are issued with a ballot paper. 2023 saw the enactment of the Ballot Secrecy Act, which made the practice of family voting more clearly a breach of the secret ballot, making it more enforceable by staff in polling stations. Signage is now available to discourage the practice. Signage was only seen in 45% of the polling stations observed. The observer team saw family voting in 15 of the 22 polling stations observed, some 32 cases in total, nine cases in one polling station alone. The team observed a sample of 545 voters casting their votes - meaning 12% of those voters observed either caused or were affected by family voting. Commenting John Ault, Director of Democracy Volunteers said; ‘Today we have seen concerningly high levels of family voting in Gorton and Denton. Based on our assessment of today’s observations, we have seen the highest levels of family voting at any election in our 10 year history of observing elections in the UK.’ ‘We rarely issue a report on the night of an election, but the data we have collected today on family voting, when compared to other recent by-elections, is extremely high.’ ‘In the other recent Westminster parliamentary by-election in Runcorn and Helsby we saw family voting in 12% of polling stations, affecting 1% of voters. In Gorton and Denton, we observed family voting in 68% of polling stations, affecting 12% of those voters observed.’ The team also observed cases of voters being turned away, however, in each case this was due to them not being a registered voter for Westminster elections, such as having EU citizenship, and only being allowed to vote in local elections. The team also saw a number of voters taking photographs of their ballot papers and one voter being authorised to vote despite them already having been marked as voted earlier in the day. Democracy Volunteers has informed elections staff at Manchester City Council about our findings today. This Statement is now available on the Democracy Volunteers website HERE. --

That 2025 article was all about energy costs, Suella, which I agree with you on. As you know, these are driven by renewables subsidies. Is this you in 2016 arguing for more subsidies? The Levy Control Framework added around £9bn to bills in 2021, a significant % of it paid by businesses PS I did the research. I’ve checked again and I still can’t find a single time you mentioned steel in the House of Commons. Correct me if I’m wrong.