Nigel Farage has milkshake thrown over him after election campaign launch in Clacton
Nigel Farage has had a milkshake thrown over him after launching his election campaign in Essex.
The new leader of Reform UK was leaving the Wetherspoons Moon and Starfish pub in Clacton-on-Sea, where he is standing to be an MP, when a young woman in a grey hooded jumper threw a drink in his face before throwing the cup at him then walking off.
It appeared to be a McDonald’s milkshake.
He was seen wincing as the liquid hit his face, then wiping it away as he was ushered out of the way by his team.
Nigel Farage appeared to not be too happy after having the milkshake thrown in his face. Pic: PA
Essex Police said they had arrested a 25-year-old woman from Clacton after responding to a report of a drink being thrown at a man in Marine Parade East at around 2.10pm.
As officers were arresting the woman, a second person, a man, was arrested on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker.
“Both individuals remain in custody for questioning,” a police spokesman said.
Nearly two hours after the incident, Mr Farage appeared in front of the Reform UK bus with a McDonald’s banana milkshake and said: “My milkshake brings all the people to the rally.”
Pic: PA
Just a few hours before the milkshake was thrown at him, Mr Farage had launched his election campaign surrounded by hundreds of supporters after announcing he would be standing as a Reform UK candidate on Monday.
Last week, he said he had ruled out standing as an MP. He has unsuccessfully attempted to become an MP seven times previously.
Mr Farage told supporters at his launch that the Conservatives had breached the British people’s trust, claiming they had “opened up the borders to mass immigration like we’ve never seen before”.
He told them that meant “they are finished, they are done” and argued he should be in Westminster to push for change from a Labour government.
A new YouGov poll for Sky News has Labour winning the election with 42.9% of the vote, while Reform is set to take 10.1% – an increase of 8.1% on 2019.
Richard Tice, who Mr Farage took over from as leader of Reform on Monday, stood up for his successor.
“The juvenile moron who threw a drink over Nigel has just gained us hundreds of thousands more votes,” he wrote on social media.
“We will not be bullied or threatened off the campaign trail.”
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Giles Watling, the Conservative candidate in Clacton, said he was sorry his rival had a drink thrown at him.
“We may disagree, but every candidate has the right to campaign without fear of violence or intimidation!” he added.
Former Conservative minister and lawyer Robert Jenrick said it was “clearly a criminal offence” and said there “can be no place for this kind of behaviour towards any candidate from any political party on the campaign trail”.
Yvette Cooper, Labour’s shadow home secretary, said it was a “disgraceful assault” on Mr Farage.
She added: “Completely unacceptable and wrong. No one should face intimidation or assault in an election campaign. Thank you to the police for responding.”
Read more:
All you need to know about Nigel Farage
The 12 big Tory names at risk of losing their seats
Nigel Farage after he was doused with a milkshake during a campaign walkabout in Newcastle in 2019. Pic: PA
Mr Farage is no stranger to being pelted with food or drink, and it is not even the first time he has had a milkshake thrown at him.
In May 2019, Paul Crowther, from Newcastle, doused the then-Brexit Party leader with a £5.25 banana and salted caramel milkshake from burger chain Five Guys during a Newcastle city centre walkabout ahead of the European elections.
He was arrested at the scene and pleaded guilty to common assault and criminal damage, and was ordered to pay Mr Farage £350 in compensation to have his suit cleaned after the “politically motivated attack”.
In 2014, Mr Farage, then leader of UKIP, had an egg thrown at him by a protester during a campaign visit to Nottingham.
Read more on the election:
General Election poll tracker
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The other candidates vying to become MP for Clacton are:
- Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, Labour;
- Giles Watling, Conservatives;
- Natasha Osben, Greens;
- Matthew Bensilum, Lib Dems.
Politics
Specialist teams and online investigators deployed across England and Wales to tackle ‘national emergency’ of violence against women and girls
Specialist investigation teams for rape and sexual offences are to be created across England and Wales as the home secretary declares violence against women and girls a “national emergency”.
Shabana Mahmood said the dedicated units will be in place across every force by 2029 as part of Labour’s violence against women and girls (VAWG) strategy due to be launched later this week.
The use of Domestic Abuse Protection Orders (DAPOs), which had been trialled in several areas, will also be rolled out across England and Wales. They are designed to target abusers by imposing curfews, electronic tags and exclusion zones.
The orders cover all forms of domestic abuse, including economic abuse, coercive and controlling behaviour, stalking and ‘honour’-based abuse. Breaching the terms can carry a prison term of up to five years.
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Govt ‘thinking again’ on abuse strategy
Nearly £2m will also be spent funding a network of officers to target offenders operating within the online space.
Teams will use covert and intelligence techniques to tackle violence against women and girls via apps and websites.
A similar undercover network funded by the Home Office to examine child sexual abuse has arrested over 1,700 perpetrators.
Abuse is ‘national emergency’
Ms Mahmood said in a statement: “This government has declared violence against women and girls a national emergency.
“For too long, these crimes have been considered a fact of life. That’s not good enough. We will halve it in a decade.
“Today, we announce a range of measures to bear down on abusers, stopping them in their tracks. Rapists, sex offenders and abusers will have nowhere to hide.”
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Angiolini Inquiry: Recommendations are ‘not difficult’
The target to halve violence against women and girls in a decade is a Labour manifesto pledge.
The government said the measures build on existing policy, including facial recognition technology to identify offenders, improving protections for stalking victims, making strangulation a criminal offence and establishing domestic abuse specialists in 999 control rooms.
Read more from Sky News:
Demands for violence and abuse reforms
Women still feel unsafe on streets
Minister ‘clarifies’ violence strategy
Labour has ‘failed women’
But the Conservatives said Labour had “failed women” and “broken its promises” by delaying the publication of the violence against women and girls strategy.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said that Labour “shrinks from uncomfortable truths, voting against tougher sentences and presiding over falling sex-offender convictions. At every turn, Labour has failed women”.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will be on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News this morning from 8.30am.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published a crypto wallet and custody guide investor bulletin on Friday, outlining best practices and common risks of different forms of crypto storage for the investing public.
The SEC’s bulletin lists the benefits and risks of different methods of crypto custody, including self-custody versus allowing a third-party to hold digital assets on behalf of the investor.
If investors choose third-party custody, they should understand the custodian’s policies, including whether it “rehypothecates” the assets held in custody by lending them out or if the service provider is commingling client assets in a single pool instead of holding the crypto in segregated customer accounts.
Crypto wallet types were also outlined in the SEC guide, which broke down the pros and cons of hot wallets, which are connected to the internet, and offline storage in cold wallets.
Hot wallets carry the risk of hacking and other cybersecurity threats, according to the SEC, while cold wallets carry the risk of permanent loss if the offline storage fails, a storage device is stolen, or the private keys are compromised.
The SEC’s crypto custody guide highlights the sweeping regulatory change at the agency, which was hostile to digital assets and the crypto industry under former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s leadership.
Related: SEC sends warning letters to ETF issuers targeting untamed leverage
The crypto community celebrates the SEC guide as a transformational change in the agency
“The same agency that spent years trying to kill the industry is now teaching people how to use it,” Truth For the Commoner (TFTC) said in response to the SEC’s crypto custody guide.
The SEC is providing “huge value” to crypto investors by educating prospective crypto holders about custody and best practices, according to Jake Claver, the CEO of Digital Ascension Group, a company that provides services to family offices.
SEC regulators published the guide one day after SEC Chair Paul Atkins said that the legacy financial system is moving onchain.
On Thursday, the SEC gave the green light to the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a clearing and settlement company, to begin tokenizing financial assets, including equities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and government debt securities.
Magazine: Unstablecoins: Depegging, bank runs and other risks loom
Greens leader Zack Polanski has rejected claims his party would push for open borders on immigration, telling Sky News it is “not a pragmatic” solution for a world in “turmoil”.
Mr Polanski distanced himself from his party’s “long-range vision” for open borders, saying it was not in his party’s manifesto and was an “attack line used by opponents” to question his credibility.
It came as Mr Polanski, who has overseen a spike in support in the polls to double figures, refused to apologise over controversial comments he made about care workers on BBC Question Time that were criticised across the political spectrum.
Mr Polanski was speaking to Sky News earlier this week while in Calais, where he joined volunteers and charities to witness how French police handle the arrival of migrants in the town that is used as a departure point for those wanting to make the journey to the UK.
He told Sky News he had made the journey to the French town – once home to the “Jungle” refugee camp before it was demolished in 2016 – to tackle “misinformation” about migration and to make the case for a “compassionate, fair and managed response” to the small boats crisis.
He said that “no manifesto ever said anything about open borders” and that the Greens had never stood at a general election advocating for them.
“Clearly when the world is in political turmoil and we have deep inequality, that is not a situation we can move to right now,” he said.
“That would also involve massive international agreements and cooperation. That clearly is not a pragmatic conversation to have right now. And very often the government try to push that attack line to make us look not pragmatic.”
The party’s manifesto last year did not mention open borders, but it did call for an end to the “hostile environment”, more safe and legal routes and for the Home Office to be abolished and replaced with a department of migration.
Asked why the policy of minimal restrictions on migration had been attributed to his party, Mr Polanski said open borders was part of a “long-range vision of what society could look like if there was a Green government and if we’d had a long time to fix some of the systemic problems”.
‘We should recognise the contribution migrants make’
Mr Polanski, who was elected Green Party leader in September and has been compared to Nigel Farage over his populist economic policies, said his position was one of a “fair and managed” migration system – although he did not specify whether that included a cap on numbers.
He acknowledged that there needed to be a “separate conversation” about economic migration but that he did not believe any person who boarded a small boat was in a “good situation”.
While Mr Polanski stressed that he believed asylum seekers should be able to work in Britain and pay taxes, he also said he believed in the need to train British workers in sectors such as care, where one in five are foreign nationals.
Asked what his proposals for a fair and managed migration system looked like, and whether he supported a cap on numbers, Mr Polanski said: “We have 100,000 vacancies in the National Health Service. One in five care workers in the care sector are foreign nationals.
Zack Polanski speaks to Sky News from a warehouse in Calais where charities and organisations provide migrants with essentials.
“Now, of course, that is both British workers and we should be training British workers, but we should recognise the contribution that migrants and people who come over here make.”
I’m not going to apologise’
Mr Polanski also responded to the criticism he attracted over his comments about care workers on Question Time last week, where he told the audience: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum” – before adding: “I’m very grateful for the people who do this work.”
His comments have been criticised by a number of Labour MPs, including Wes Streeting, the health secretary, who said: “Social care isn’t just ‘wiping someone’s bum’. It is a hard, rewarding, skilled professional job.
“This is immigration as exploitation.”
Read more:
The Greens leader who wants to be the Farage of the left
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Asked whether he could understand why some care workers might feel he had talked down to them, the Greens leader replied: “I care deeply about care workers. When I made those comments, it’s important to give a full context. I said ‘I’m very grateful to people who do this important work’ and absolutely repeat that it’s vital work.”
“Of course, it is not part of the whole job, and I never pretended it was part of the whole job.”
Mr Polanski said he “totally” rejected the suggestion that he had denigrated the role of care workers in the eyes of the public and said his remarks were made in the context of a “hostile Question Time” where he had “three right-wing panellists shouting at me”.
Pressed on whether he wanted to apologise, he replied: “I’m not going to apologise for being really clear that I’m really grateful to the people who do this really vital work. And yes, we should be paying them properly, too.”
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