Nigel Farage and Rob Kenyon address a major Makerfield by-election press conference
Reform UK by-election hopeful Rob Kenyon shared the podium with his leader Nigel Farage at a major Wigan press conference this afternoon (Wednesday June 10).
On a carpark at the back of Go Local on Bolton Road, Stubshaw Cross, the pair addressed a large media contingent and dozens of enthusiastic supporters, the latter of whom warmly applauded a party pledge to raise the VAT threshold from £90k to £150k in a bid to help small businesses such as those run by plumber Coun Kenyon.
Mr Farage said he was championing small businesspeople who had been put upon for too long by government legislation which treated sole traders the same as multi-nationals. This, he said, curbed their ambition, damaged their prospsects and so had a negative impact on the economy.
And to illustrate his point, he brought in a crowd of “white van men,” complete with a couple of vehicles, to pose for pictures.
Coun Kenyon, who was one of 24 Reform members elected onto Wigan Council last month and is now standing in the Makerfield by-election, said: “It has been an absolutely mad campaign. Who would have thought we would have had all this attention?”
He said that many people were tired of “career politicians” and instead wanted working people who knew what was going on locally.”
Mr Farage said: “It is a pleasure to work with Rob. He has grown, he is getting better. To think that one week he's fixing boilers and soon after appearing on Question Time...
"There’s not one member of the Labour cabinet who has set up their own business.”
A question and answer session ensued which touched on a number of subjects including Coun Kenyon’s much publicised social media history and offensive remarks made in the past.
Mr Farage dismissed them as “a few laddish things.”
He said: “These comments were posted a decade ago. They’ve been taken wildly out of context, but they’re the sort of comments that you won’t necessarily get if you’re an Oxford-educated career politician living in a nice postcode in London.
“But I tell you what, they are the kind of comments you’ll hear in every pub in the country every evening, and we should be unapologetic that Rob is an ordinary bloke who’s carved quite a career for himself, had the guts to set up a business, served as an army reservist, is a patriot, likes his rugby, likes the odd pint, and said a few laddish things on social media 10 years ago.
“Do you know what I’d say to that? I’d say, so what?”
To applause, he added: “At the same time as these comments were being made, others were covering up the crimes of grooming gangs. Which was more serious?”
On the Belfast disturbances following an attack on a man, allegedly by an asylum-seeker, he condemned the violence “perpetrated by a few bad actors,” but said that most of those demonstrating were not extremists but ordinary citizens angry that people are being let into the country whose backgrounds are unknown.
He added: “[Labour candidate] Andy Burnham has has supported open door immigration and has never been critical of it all. He has been unconcerned about the small boats, even though Makerfield is filling up with HMOs full of young men we don’t know anything about.”