As Keir Starmer prepared to meet Donald Trump at his Scottish golf course this afternoon, Nigel Farage kept himself busy with another ‘Lawless Britain’ press conference in London. (‘I had dinner with Donald Trump Junior the other week,’ he said to reporters asking if he had been able to secure an audience with the US President.) Social media dominated. Reform’s new police and crime adviser, retired detective Colin Sutton, told attendees: ‘We need to refocus what police are doing onto homes and streets – not posts and tweets.’ The latest addition to the Reform outfit will stand as a candidate in the next general election and in the meantime use his experience to help shape the party’s crime policy.
Sutton made his name after leading high-profile investigations into serial killers and rapists – with the ITV series ‘Manhunt’ retelling his time in the force. Another ‘celebrity’ hire by the party, Sutton now wants to go into politics. ‘I [am] known as a detective,’ he told reporters. ‘I’d rather be known as a leader.’ What does he want to change? Sutton says that while Reform’s current ambition to increase police numbers by 30,000 is admirable, he also wants to open at least 300 ‘front counter police buildings’. Police need to ‘re-engage’, and become ‘more visible’. He wants to speak to those involved in public order policing, to learn more about how different protest groups behave.
A former Conservative member, Sutton was scathing of how the police force has operated in recent years: ‘It has been captured by a liberal ideology, and people are too scared of bucking against that ideology… Two-tier policing, two-tier criminal justice system is one phrase that’s been bandied about a lot. I don’t think it’s an unfair thing to say.’ As reported by the Daily Mail, Sutton is supportive of scrapping some hate crime laws – suggesting that online abuse could be ‘treated like a watered-down version of defamation’. He added: ‘Then you can sue in the civil court. Don’t give them legal aid and see how many feelings are hurt then.’
The unveiling of Sutton as the latest addition to the expanding Reform team comes as the Online Safety Act comes into force, with social media platforms now having a legal duty to protect children online. Zia Yusuf, former party chair and now head of its Doge unit, didn’t hold back when he attacked the new law – and promised to repeal it if Reform gets into government. ‘We think this is the greatest assault on freedom of speech in our lifetimes,’ he fumed. ‘Any student of history will know that the way countries slip into this sort of authoritarian regime is through legislation that cloaks tyranny inside the warm fuzzies of safety and security and hope nobody reads the small print.’
‘We think this is the greatest assault on freedom of speech in our lifetimes,’ Yusuf fumed
Republican pundit Ann Coulter enjoyed a front-row seat to the event, with a Reform official advising she was attending as a ‘friend of the party’. More Americans will arrive on British shores shortly, with Vice President JD Vance due to visit in early August. ‘It will be very interesting to see what his take on this legislation is,’ Farage said.
The law is on The Donald’s radar too, with the President in Scotland replying to a journalist: ‘Well, free speech is very important and I don’t know if you’re referring to any place in particular,’ before turning, as Freddy Gray writes, rather impishly to Starmer. The issue wasn’t pressed but the act, while broadly popular with the British public, will stir up discontent across the water – especially with free speech-loving Twitter CEO Elon Musk who, despite their differences, Farage described as a ‘hero’. Turning to Gaza, Farage insisted a Palestinian state should not be recognised but sent a warning to the Israeli prime minister: ‘I think you’ve got to say to Netanyahu, stop losing friends the way you are.’
There remain a number of unanswered questions regarding the details of Farage’s crime crackdown. Journalists have pointed out that, according to the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW), violent crime has plummeted since 2010. This survey is seen by the Office for National Statistics as the more accurate metric of long-term crime trends, yet Farage insisted at the start of today’s press conference that crime rates are increasing and ‘as far as we’re concerned, [the CSEW] is pretty much discredited as a means of measuring crime’. It is unclear exactly how Reform plans to pay its new promises, though Farage was keen to nod towards ‘big cuts to public spending’, portraying himself more as a Javier Milei devotee. And on the Online Safety Act, while both Yusuf and Farage agreed that Reform wanted to protect children, they do not currently have an alternative answer to the legislation. Yusuf talked earlier about how Reform read the small print – but the party could do with providing more too.
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