an interview with the Telegraph in May, external<\/a>, Farage said he would tear up the UK’s Brexit treaties if he became prime minister.<\/p>\nHe said Reform UK – which is leading in national opinion polls – would “undo all of this with legislation” if it won the next general election.<\/p>\n
“We’d tell the EU that any agreements are no longer legally binding on the UK, because a general election has said so,” Farage told the paper.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, a Reform spokesman added: “Cosying up to the EU and leaving us entangled in reams of retained EU law which Kemi Badenoch failed to scrap will not resuscitate Britain’s struggling economy.”<\/p>\n
Taking aim at Farage in his speech, Thomas-Symonds said: “Nigel Farage wants Britain to fail. His model of politics feeds on it.<\/p>\n
“He offers the easy answers, dividing communities, stoking anger. We reject that. Emphatically.”<\/p>\n
Labour has been stepping up its political attacks on Reform UK, which only has four MPs but did well in May’s local elections.<\/p>\n
In May, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said Reform UK’s policies would “crash the economy”, comparing Farage to former Tory PM Liz Truss.<\/p>\n
In a BBC interview ahead of his speech on Wednesday, Thomas-Symonds was asked if Labour viewed Reform UK as the real opposition, rather than the Conservatives.<\/p>\n
In reply, the Cabinet Office minister said: “At the moment that is the case.”<\/p>\n
The Conservatives, he added, had “nothing to say”.<\/p>\n
“They’re not on the pitch. So this is the position that there is in British politics at the moment.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his speech, Thomas-Symonds said Brexit bureaucracy was weighing down businesses and reiterated the government’s ambition to agree…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378643,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-378642","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115102888115649197","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}