North East pensioners told Nigel Farage that "life isn’t fair" during his visit to the region. The Reform UK leader sat down for tea and cakes with local residents in an upstairs room at the O’Grady’s Hotel pub in Redcar, as part of his ‘100 Days to Save Britain’ tour.
Topics under discussion included a threat to the so-called ‘triple lock’ which protects state pension growth, cost of living, energy prices and Net Zero policy, small boat landings, crime and the state of the high street.
Round table and walkabout
The ‘round table’ event saw Mr Farage and Robert Jenrick, the party’s shadow chancellor, chat to a group of selected, mostly elderly, invitees. It was kept relatively under wraps with journalists, who were given interview time with the leader afterwards, only told of the location the evening before.
However the pair also undertook a brief walkabout in the town centre flanked by security staff before moving onto the Esplanade in Redcar where they chatted with members of the public.
Mr Farage - who is famously often pictured in pubs with a pint in his hand - did not get to sample the beer in the Queen Street boozer, although he did later try one of Redcar’s famous lemon-top ice-creams.
'Fairness' and pension concerns
He said: “One word has come through today and that is fair. A lot of people feel the world is not treating them fairly, they see two-tier justice and many other things going on in this country that frankly they find hard to believe.
“The boats thing…they are worried about national security. Somebody said to me they treat us like they are scum, it’s a strong way of putting it, but it's a feeling that they are somehow ignored and Westminster doesn’t listen to them, and doesn’t care about them.
“We have got to get back to being on the right track and fairness - if you think about it - is a very English and very British word.”
One of the oldest people in the room was 77-year-old Dorothy Brunger, from Redcar. She said: “We have lost our country and we want it back how it used to be. The public treats elderly people with no respect, it’s all gone.”
She added: “Nigel is one of us, he speaks for us. He is genuine, whereas the other parties are fake.”
Triple lock and local elections
Planned Government reform to the state pension triple lock mechanism from 2030 will remove the automatic link to average wage growth with a view to substantial savings being made in order to finance a new free at the point of use national care service.
Mr Farage claimed this would be an “attack on the elderly”, and said: “As somebody said to me even if the triple lock gives me an extra fiver or tenner a week, how far does that go? There are other things we can cut before we cut pensions, for example the foreign aid budget.”
He claimed pensioners were “fearful”, adding: “Talking to people today, they say council tax is going up, they are terrified of what the energy bills are going to be in January. The fact is our pension is only a fraction above that in Latvia which has a much cheaper cost of living.”
The Reform UK leader also separately criticised the drive towards Net Zero, describing it as a “cult” with a “few green jobs” being created. He said renewable energy was “endlessly subsidised” and there needed to be a reassessment of the way forward.
Turning to local politics, Mr Farage was asked by the Local Democracy Reporting Service if the party had set a target for the number of seats it was aiming to win in Redcar and Cleveland in next May’s local elections, currently only having one Reform UK councillor.
He said: “I’ll tell you that when I come back in February and March. We are going to give it a serious go. We’ve won councils all over the country and had a few personnel shifts. All I would say is that council tax rises in Reform areas have been lower than the other parties, and I think that is a reasonable start.”
The LDRS asked Mr Farage if his party had enough suitable candidates to stand for election. In January Reform dropped support for one of its candidates in Zetland ward, Redcar, after alleged racist Facebook comments came to light.
Mr Farage said: “There are many thousands of councillors of various types all over the UK and every year every party has to get rid of some. There’s more focus on us than there is on the others. The fact we got rid of that particular election candidate was the right thing to do.”
He denied his party was racist, stating: “Of course not, we are the opposite.”
Mr Farage said, on a national level, “one or two people had been elected who didn’t turn out to be great”. He said: “We have gone from nothing to a huge number of people, not all of them have been suitable, I get that I understand it.
“If I form a new company, not everybody is going to be there in a year’s time.”
In another comment, Mr Farage also criticised crime figures in Cleveland saying they were “unbelievable” and pinpointing burglaries as an issue residents were upset about.
Mr Farage and Mr Jenrick were joined by former Cleveland police and crime commissioner Steve Turner and his wife Andrea, both ex-Redcar and Cleveland councillors who are members of the Redcar branch of Reform UK.
Mr Farage was presented with an eight day old baby by new Redcar mum Deanna Vasey, who allowed him to hold her newborn after they bumped into one another on the High Street, and also met RNLI volunteer Tony Wheater at the town’s lifeboat museum.
