Labour has put a label on Nigel Farage that few party leaders ever get from a sitting minister: threat to national security. Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office and EU relations minister, used the tenth anniversary of the vote to leave the EU to say that the Reform UK leader’s worldview is “sympathetic” to Vladimir Putin.
The charge rests on Farage’s record of comments about Ukraine. Writing in the Telegraph before a speech to the UK in a Changing Europe think tank, Thomas-Symonds quoted Farage’s 2014 claim that the EU “does have blood on its hands in the Ukraine.” He also cited a 2024 suggestion that NATO and EU “eastward expansion” gave Putin a reason to “go to war.”
“His rationale for doing so, it seems, has been to ultimately undermine the favourability of the European Union,” Thomas-Symonds wrote. The minister accused Farage of having “consistently supported Russia” and of pretending that British interests could align with “a dictator’s.”
His conclusion was blunt. “Allowing a worldview sympathetic to Putin to hold the balance of power would be an unprecedented threat to national security.”
In the speech itself he was due to argue that a hard-headed relationship with Europe is needed to protect British homes in a turbulent world.
Farage turns on Westminster
Farage, the MP for Clacton, accused the Government of failing to deliver the “freedom” Brexit offered a decade ago. In a Substack post timed for 10am, he said leaving the EU was “a necessary step towards saving the country,” but “on its own, it’s nowhere near sufficient.”
“It needs a government that will deliver on the freedom it gave us to drag our heads back above the water,” he wrote. “It needs a government that will listen.”
He blamed the Westminster class for ignoring what voters asked for in 2016: control of borders and laws, and the growth they needed. Neither the Tories nor Labour were “up to the challenge,” he said. Boris Johnson, Kemi Badenoch and Keir Starmer, he argued, had all failed to grasp the concerns of the “forgotten places” that wanted a “fairer deal.”
A government in transition
The timing is awkward for Labour. Starmer, who is on his way out, made closer ties with Brussels a pillar of his “reset” after the party’s electoral drubbing in May. Andy Burnham, who many see as the next prime minister after winning the Makerfield by-election, has pledged not to “re-run” old Brexit arguments. He has played down reversing the 2016 result, though he has said he would like the UK back in the EU within his lifetime.
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey pressed Burnham to take Britain into the single market. Starmer’s three red lines from the 2024 election rule out the customs union, the single market and free movement.
A UK-EU summit planned for July 22 is now uncertain after Starmer announced on Monday that he would stand down. The European Commission said it was “reassessing” the meeting. Davey called that uncertainty “the cost of chaos for Britain.”
