At a packed-out rally held as part of Reform’s campaign tour, leader Nigel Farage told residents Sussex had been “much neglected and oft-ignored”.
The rally, held on Wednesday, was part of Reform’s local election campaign which kicked off earlier this month on the Isle of Wight.
The event, under the strapline "Reform will fix it", took place in the Queen’s Jubilee Hall at the South of England Showground in Ardingly and was advertised as a "high-energy, broadcast-style event".
The hall, which has a capacity of 1250, was almost entirely full, with tickets sold at £5.
Among the speakers was 19-year-old George Finch, leader of Warwickshire County Council, David Bull, chairman of Reform, Zia Yusuf, the party’s spokesman for home affairs and leader Nigel Farage.
Each speaker’s entrance was accompanied by hype-style music with pyrotechnics saved for the arrival of Mr Farage who was also greeted by a standing ovation and uproarious applause.
Immigration, the delay of local elections, farming and net zero were discussed in lively tones by Bull, Yusuf and Farage.
Zia Yusuf promised Reform would “move at the speed of light” to “secure the country’s borders, deport all illegal migrants and ensure all those involved in the rape gangs face the heaviest possible price for their crimes”.
He emphasised the need for a culture, saying a country without culture was a “shopping mall with a flag waiting to be exploited”.
He said the party would “protect and defend the Christian heritage of the country” and end the “practice of turning churches into mosques”.
Farage started his speech by telling his audience that Reform “want to make Britain great again”.
He criticised the Prime Minister, saying he had never seen “a weaker, more useless Prime Minister, less patriotic Prime Minister than Keir Starmer”.
“We’re the only party standing up and saying stop poisoning the minds of our kids at school,” he said. “We’re the only party saying we are a country based on Judeo-Christian values.”
He promised that Reform would remove the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights to allow for deportations.
He argued the UK was “deindustrialising at a terrifying rate” and promised a Reform government would “make us self-sufficient in energy, bring down prices and reindustrialise the workshops of our nation”.
He said the “culture of attacking success” needed to be fought against and that “we need to reduce the number of young people going on to disability benefits for conditions like mild anxiety”.
He described Sussex as a “much-neglected and oft-ignored county that has been taken for granted blankly by the Conservative party for many decades”.
“There should be a thriving in-shore fishing industry in Sussex,” he said.
He added: “We are behind these rural communities. We will stand up for farmers, we will stand up for fishermen.”
Finally Farage invited the Sussex Reform candidates up onto the stage as it was announced that Conservative Wealden District councillors David Greaves and Neil Cleaver had defected from the Conservatives to Reform.
In an interview with The Argus and other local media before the event, Farage was asked about how receptive he thought Sussex would be to Reform, asked his opinion on his effigy at Lewes Bonfire and questioned over a number of local issues including the Crowborough camp, the Family Farm Tax and council issues like social care.
Mr Farage said he had “huge sympathy” with Crowborough residents, saying that “if I was a resident in Crowborough, I’d be very concerned” because “those that go in there are free to walk the streets”.
“Whether you put them in hotels – which drives everyone mad, army camps which makes small towns like Crowborough anxious or HMOs in the middle of streets all over the country, either way it’s not acceptable, it’s not fair.”
Mr Farage was then asked what a Reform led East Sussex County Council (which is currently spending nearly half their annual budget on adult social care) would do differently to tackle the challenges of adult and social care.
He said: “I’m not going to pretend for a moment I can wave a magic wand over the massive burdens that local government faces, what I can tell you is that there are savings to be made.
“Frankly the millions being paid to agencies in most councils around the country, including in Sussex, is eye-watering.”
Mr Farage was keen to point out that it was Reform’s legal challenge against the government’s plans to delay May's elections which means they will now go ahead on May 7.
Asked about the family farm tax, Mr Farage said he was a “country boy at heart” and said the “assault on rural England from this Labour government is absolutely monstrous”.
He said that it was generations of families, managing land as “custodians, not owners”, who have safeguarded the English countryside.
The MP argued against the potential ban on trail hunting, saying things had gone “way too far”.
“What are we doing to these really decent hardworking people who don’t earn very much money,” he said.
Following the May local elections last year, Reform won 57 of the 81 seats for Kent County Council but the party has been hit with a string off defections and suspensions, with a loss of ten councillors.
Asked if this was an admission that things had not been as smooth as he might have liked, Mr Farage admitted he had been “running quite hard” up until the election, with limited funds and personnel.
“Perhaps I was obsessively focussed on May 1 without much of an afterthought for what came on May 2 and afterwards and to be frank, I didn’t really expect that level of success. I was overwhelmed with the level of success, and we didn’t have the infrastructure to support it.”
He added: “I can accept that when you build something from nothing into a huge organisation in terms of votes that sometimes the structure does not quite keep up with the success. We will be much better prepared this year I promise you.”
