Reform UK’s foreign affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf has said that the party backs Ukraine in its efforts against Russia and described Vladimir Putin as a “marauding dictator”.
He told GB News: “Reform backs Ukraine. We back the Ukrainian people’s battle against Vladimir Putin. And it is in the British interest to do so. Clearly, Vladimir Putin is a marauding dictator.
“But if you actually look at what’s been happening within Ukraine, we have obviously given them a lot of our drone capacity, we haven’t talked about this part, but this is also really scary. Our drone inventory has largely been completely diminished as a result of that, and we haven’t been manufacturing and building the manufacturing base to allow us to build those drones.
“So yes, we need to continue to support Ukraine, and Reform supports that, but we also need to think about how we support our homeland, here at home.
“Again, I want to make a really important point here, because we can talk about drones, we can talk about navy vessels, we can talk about missiles and all sorts of things, but the reality is that we’re still closing in on 200,000 people, most of them undocumented men turning up on our beaches, uninvited, essentially an invasion of this country over the last eight years.
“No doubt, some of those are IRGC, Iranian state-backed terrorists coming here, plotting terrorist attacks. MI5 have already confirmed they have foiled 20 attacks on our soil by Iranian IRGC fighters, and yet, not only has Keir Starmer not prescribed the IRGC, just like the Tories, he’s happy to continue this open borders policy, which is extremely dangerous to the people of Britain.”
On warnings that Britain is not prepared for a war, Yusuf said: “Obviously it is shocking, and it’s obviously really concerning for anyone listening to this programme, watching this programme, but I’ll be completely honest, I’ve been in politics now for coming up to two years, and I’ve spoken to a lot of people currently serving in our Armed Forces and veterans who have told me that time and time again.
“They’ve said, you know, pretty much all aspects of our military, other than small, relatively niche areas, are currently incapable of projecting power when it matters. And that’s not merely speculation or just what some people say. We can actually see that in terms of what happened during this Iran war when, of course, the Prime Minister ordered a destroyer out to the theatre of battle, and it could not get there on any sensible time frame.
“We were talking about weeks. And when it eventually did turn up, it was there for a very short period of time before needing to return to maintenance. And that is not in any way a criticism of our incredible troops and every man and woman who serves in our military.
“It is a withering criticism of 14 years of Tory rule, when they took defence spending as a percentage of GDP down from 2.7% down to 2.3% utterly hollowed out our armed forces and obviously Labour have only continued that.
“It’s been farcical hearing, on the one hand, the Prime Minister talk about increasing basically, following Reform. It was Reform – we first talked about taking defence spending to 3% and then 3.5% of GDP before even the last general election, talking about that.”
