𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Voters in Britain’s former industrial heartlands have been “betrayed” by the Conservatives and taken for granted by Labour, according to the man Nigel Farage wants to appoint Chancellor in a Reform UK Government. Robert Jenrick, who once battled Kemi Badenoch for the Tory leadership, visited the iconic Red Wall seat of Redcar on Monday and set out his ambitions for Reform to be the true “workers’ party”. The 44-year-old walked along the seafront and described how the voters who handed the seat to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019 feel “totally betrayed by that government”, blasting the former prime minister’s “fanatical” support for net zero and the Tories’ record on immigration.

Turning his fire on a former Hartlepool MP, he said: “The truth is this area had Labour politicians who took it for granted, like Peter Mandelson, who just saw these as safe Labour seats where they could have a nice perch and do what they wanted down in Westminster.” Mr Jenrick is fighting for Reform to win in seats which “voted for change” in 2019 before backing Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party in 2024 and discovering this is “even worse”. He said: “This cycle of constant failure and betrayal has to come to an end. That’s the point of Reform.”

Setting out his ambitions for the party which was in second place in Politico’s poll of polls on Monday on 22% – behind Andy Burnham’s Labour (26%) but ahead of Mrs Badenoch’s Conservatives (18%) – he said: “I want Reform to be a workers’ party. Everything [we do] should be putting British workers and pensioners who’ve worked hard their whole lives first. That means that my job is to cut all the waste, the stuff that other governments just won’t tackle, like foreign aid, migrants on benefits and net zero subsidies, and use the tens of billions that we save [to] make life better for people in places like this.”

Describing a flagship policy, he said: “We want to raise the personal allowance to £15,000 so that an average worker in a place like Redcar can get £500 extra a year – £1,000 if you’re a family with two people in the workplace.”

His party is a proud defender of the triple lock, the safeguard against pensioner poverty which Mr Burnham wants to alter to fund a National Care Service. Confident that as Chancellor he could help revive the centre of the town, he said: “If we can save industry in the north of England by scrapping net zero then we give these businesses a fighting chance of recovering.”

Redcar’s steelworks have been closed since 2015 but taxpayers are spending £1.3million a day, according to Westminster’s public accounts committee, keeping British Steel’s blast furnaces at Scunthorpe open to preserve the country’s primary steelmaking capacity. “We have to keep them open, and we’ve got to invest in their future,” Mr Jenrick said. “At the moment you’ve got a Government that doesn’t really have any plan as to how to make this a viable industry into the future. So, they’re just wasting millions of pounds on sticking plasters and consultants instead of really working out a viable path forward. The only way to do that is bring down the cost of energy by scrapping net zero and potentially stick tariffs on Chinese imports of steel and other products like cars to stop people dumping on our industry here and destroying the remaining jobs in heavy industry. At the moment Reform is the only party that’s willing to do that.”

He is not impressed by Mr Burnham’s pledge to set out options for a new partnership with the European Union, arguing the UK has performed better in recent years than comparable EU economies.

“[The] problems our country faces are not because of Brexit and the worst thing that we could do now is spend the next five to 10 years in another pointless debate about Britain’s relationship with the European Union,” he said.

However, the former immigration minister is damning in his account of Britain’s record in this area since Brexit. He claimed his old party “managed to design an immigration system even more liberal than the one that we had in the EU, where we traded high-skilled, motivated people from Eastern Europe for low-skilled workers”.

Claiming that post-Brexit “opportunities are out there to be seized”, he said: “We can fix this. I am optimistic on the economy that we can turn things around… If you have a Government that comes in with a serious plan it can create a climate of optimism very quickly and get things moving again.”

If he moves into the Treasury, he may face many of the same challenges which today confront Chancellor John Healey as he wrestles with numerous threats to the public finances. Does he fear market panic? Mr Jenrick said that neither the Conservatives nor Labour had “instilled enthusiasm” in the markets. “We’ve had Liz Truss’s mini-budget, Rachel Reeves crying in the House of Common, John Healey making promises he can’t keep,” he said. “I think there’s actually an opportunity to come in and surprise the markets [and show] that for the first time in a long time they’ve got serious people running this country. The way to do it, actually, is cutting the benefits bill. That’s what is the number one thing you could do, very quickly, to instil confidence in the bond markets.”

Bringing down benefits payments, he said, would show investors that “we’re serious people who know what we’re doing and we’re going to be careful with people’s money”. Mr Jenrick joined Reform in January after being sacked as Shadow Justice Secretary by Mrs Badenoch. Did it feel strange for him not to be with former colleagues in Birmingham for the annual conference?

He said: “I always like going to Birmingham because I was born in Wolverhampton… But no, I [am] actually very pleased to be in Reform and this feels like home to me, so it’s been great.”

Days later, after Mrs Badenoch had delivered her conference speech and pledged to exempt family homes from inheritance tax, Mr Jenrick told the Express: “The Tories have given up on working people, in favour of their mates in Kensington. Andy Burnham abandoned them too to court votes on Benefits Street. Reform is the only national party interested in cutting taxes on the hard-working majority. That’s why in my first Budget I will raise the tax-free personal allowance to £15,000 to give 40 million a tax cut. It’ll mean the state pension is never taxed and work pays again.”