Keir Starmer has condemned Nigel Farage and Reform UK for talking the language of workers’ rights online but wanting to charge people to use the NHS and for “fawning over Putin”.
The prime minister said Labour must be ready for the test Farage’s party presents, saying there had been a rise in “dangerous rightwing politics” and those who claim to be seeking to “tilt politics towards the interests of working people”.
Speaking to the Scottish Labour conference in Glasgow, Starmer announced a £200m investment for the Grangemouth oil refinery, which is expected to go towards creating a new industrial purpose for the site. It is scheduled to close in the summer with a loss of more than 400 jobs.
However, the prime minister also used his address on Sunday to attack Reform UK’s politics, hours after the US president, Donald Trump, had praised Farage as a “great guy” when addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference at the National Harbor in Maryland.
Starmer told the conference: “You want to know what Farage and Reform are doing on their rare visits to parliament? They’re voting against our employments right bill. They talk the language of workers’ rights online and on the doorstep … but they voted against banning fire-and-rehire, conference. They voted against scrapping exploitative zero-hours contracts. They voted against sick leave and maternity pay. And what about the NHS? They want to charge people to use our NHS.
“They claim to be the party of patriotism but they’re fawning over Putin. No – they are not the answer for working people in Britain … and they are not the answer for Scotland.”
Starmer also said his first-hand experience of seeing Ukraine has made him “more determined to stand up for [its people]”.
“Nobody wants the bloodshed to continue, least of all the Ukrainians,” Starmer said in Glasgow.
“But after everything that they have suffered, after everything they have fought for, there can be no discussion about Ukraine without Ukraine, and the people of Ukraine must have a long-term, secure future.”
The prime minister made the comments after Roz Foyer, the general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress called on the entire Labour movement to “wake up” and challenge the “hatred and division of the right”.
Reform UK won five seats in the Commons at the last election, and opinion polls in Scotland say the party is on track to win seats there for the first time in next May’s Holyrood elections.
Farage had told CPAC that the “political thunderbolt” of Brexit in 2016 had sent “a wave across the Atlantic” that contributed to Trump’s first presidential victory in 2016.
The Reform UK leader said Trump’s return to the White House in November means “that wave is coming back” and will “blow back and help us … and we are going to win the next general election”.
After Starmer’s conference speech, Farage said: “How dare Starmer talk to us about jobs? Scotland has lost more than 70,000 jobs linked to the North Sea as a result of government net zero policies over the past decade. The remaining 30,000 workers directly employed in the North Sea and 90,000 jobs supported by the spending of oil and gas workers will be the cost of his net zero push.
“Starmer’s disastrous budget kicks in on 1 April and will cost even more jobs in Scotland because of his national insurance contribution rises imposed on businesses.
“His comments on the NHS are completely untrue. The prime minister must be getting desperate. Under Reform UK, the NHS will always be free at the point of use.”
