Reform UK leader Nigel Farage poses outside The Waterford Lodge, Morpeth, in Northumberland, whilst on the local election campaign trail, April 15, 2025
National Education Union vows to fight Reform UK’s election candidates and racist policies
REFORM UK is a racist and far-right political party led by a “pound shop Donald Trump,” thundered National Education Union (NEU) general secretary Daniel Kebede today at the annual conference of Britain’s largest teaching union.
Delegates donning “Stop Racist Reform UK” T-shirts voted to use the union’s political fund to campaign against Reform election candidates with racist policies and campaigns.
Passed weeks before next month’s local elections, the motion highlighted Reform’s campaigns against migrants, denouncing it as among the organisations seeking to build “on the despair, poverty and alienation in our society by scapegoating refugees, asylum-seekers, Muslims, Jews and others who do not fit their beliefs.”
Speaking after the debate, Mr Kebede said that Reform is a right-wing populist organisation whose denials of racism don’t ring true with how they “seem to be attracting an awful lot of former BNP activists.”
“Nigel Farage has clearly said that he would like to see private healthcare,” the union leader said, before raising concerns over what a party that has “declared war on the teaching profession” would do to education.
“He is friends with [US President] Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” Mr Kebede continued. “Musk wants to ‘gamify’ education and Trump has just abolished the US Department for Education,” he said.
“We will absolutely be using our political fund to campaign against candidates as appropriate.”
Asked what he thought was behind Mr Farage recently vowing to “wage war” on the NEU, he added: “It’s just nonsense straight out of the Trump playbook.
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Green Party co-leaders Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, October 2022. Image: Bristol Green Party, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Green Party Co-Leaders, Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer released a joint statement ahead of President Trump’s inauguration saying:
“We must stand up for peace and democracy in what will be a dangerous turn toward right-wing populism in the wake of Donald Trump taking office.
“The antidote to Trump in the US, and the likes of Reform in the UK, is to offer people a real hope for real positive change that will transform their lives.
“That means a new offer to people beaten down by decades of low wages, insecure work, decimated public services and a realisation that the impact of the climate crisis is all around us in the form of floods, wildfires and a devastating loss of nature.
“We need the green investment to deliver the jobs of the future – well-paid, meaningful and secure – and we need the UK government to invest properly in schools and the NHS, and stand up for international law and human rights.
“A greener future is a more just and fairer future.
“The Green Party is clear – President Trump is a misogynist, a racist, a convicted criminal and, we believe, a fascist.
“We will be pressing the Labour government to recognise that to defeat fascism, political parties that believe in democratic values must work together to keep the flame of democracy alive and show people that democratic politics can deliver real change.”
A protester wearing a giant Donald Trump head, outside Holyrood, Edinburgh, ahead of a debate in the Scottish Parliament to decide if the government should investigate the former president’s financing of Scottish golf courses, February 3, 2021
SCOTTISH ministers have been urged not to meet with US President-elect Donald Trump if he visits Scotland this year.
Mr Trump plans to visit Scotland in 2025 for the opening of a new golf course at his club in Aberdeenshire — one of the two he owns in the country.
The Scottish Greens have urged the government to have nothing to do with the visit.
Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie made the call on the fourth anniversary of riots in Washington after Mr Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.
Mr Harvie said: “Four years ago Donald Trump was inciting rioters to storm the Capitol and block the democratic process.
“In the time since, he has doubled-down on right-wing conspiracy theories and refused to show even the slightest shred of contrition or regret.
“The prospect of four more years of a racist, climate-wrecking and misogynistic Donald Trump in the White House is one that should concern us all.
“He is a friend of despots, demagogues and dictators, and a threat to migrant communities, LGBTQ+ people and reproductive rights.
“We cannot stand aside or condone the divisive and hateful politics that he represents.
People demonstrate outside the U.S. Consulate in Tel Aviv, Israel, on November 20, 2024, ahead of a vote by the U.S. Senate on legislation to block offensive U.S. weapons sales to Israel. Photo by Saeed Qaq/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Multiple human rights organizations and international bodies have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza
The administration of US President Joe Biden announced on Saturday an arms sale to Israel valued at $8 billion, just ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Biden has repeatedly rejected calls to suspend military backing for Israel because of the number of civilians killed during the war in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 45,000 people in Gaza, primarily women and children.
The sale includes medium-range air-to-air missiles, 155mm projectile artillery shells for long-range targeting, Hellfire AGM-114 missiles, 500-pound bombs, and more.
Human rights groups, former State Department officials, and Democratic lawmakers have urged the Biden administration to halt arms sales to Israel, citing violations of US laws, including the Leahy Law, as well as international laws and human rights.
The Leahy Law, named after former Sen. Patrick Leahy, requires the US to withhold military assistance from foreign military or law enforcement units if there is credible evidence of human rights violations.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s most significant Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today called Biden’s new $8 billion arms deal “racist” and “sociopathic.”
Multiple human rights organizations and international bodies have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for committing war crimes.
The US is, by far, the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, having helped it build one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.
CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said on Saturday:
“We strongly condemn the Biden administration for its unbelievable and criminal decision to send another $8 billion worth of American weapons to the government of indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu instead of using American leverage to force an end to the genocide in Gaza.
“Only racists who do not view people of color as equally human, and sociopaths who delight in funding mass slaughter, could send Netanyahu even more bombs while his government openly kidnaps doctors, destroys hospitals, and exterminates the last survivors in northern Gaza.
“If President Biden is actually the person who approved this new $8 billion arms sale, then he is a war criminal who belongs in a cell at The Hague alongside Netanyahu. But if Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk, Jake Sullivan, and other aides are making these unconscionable decisions as shadow presidents, then anyone with a conscience in the administration should speak up now about their abuses of power.”
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the US accounted for 69% of Israel’s imports of major conventional arms between 2019 and 2023.
On the other hand, incoming President-elect Donald Trump has also pledged unwavering support for Israel and has never committed to supporting an independent Palestinian state.
Then prime minister Rishi Sunak (left) and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX in-conversation in central London, November 2, 2023
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They [the UK Conservative Party or ‘Tories’] disregard the evidence of the inquiry they set up, which noted that child abuse was endemic in England and Wales (a separate inquiry is ongoing for Scotland); was enabled, covered up or ignored in multiple contexts from churches to schools, council-run care homes and when organised by criminal gangs; and is on the increase because of the rise in online pornography, grooming and pimping.
They instead frame the question in racist terms. Shadow home secretary Chris Philps asks for an inquiry to ask why grooming gangs are “overwhelmingly of south Asian background.” Shadow safeguarding minister Alicia Kearns calls on Phillips to release the “ethnicity data.”
They hype up a far-right trope about Asian, and specifically Muslim, grooming gangs that their own government reports disproved. Musk seizes on this too, retweeting claims Phillips is refusing to open an inquiry into “Muslim grooming gangs.”
Musk’s role is novel and dangerous. The richest man on Earth is incendiary, attacking Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” and demanding that the King dissolve Parliament to protect children from the Labour government.
So far so Musk, but the Conservatives seem happy to take attack lines from the toxic tech tycoon and turn his transient fixations into British political weather.
Musk is soon to be a high-ranking member of the US government, which Keir Starmer is as ready to fawn on as his predecessors. Labour should stand up to this abuse or it will be humiliated, to the benefit — as Musk intends — of the British far right he openly supports.
That means rejecting the racist weaponisation of the issue.
