Watch the moment Reform Westminster City Councillor Laila Cunningham blows a fuse after being challenged by Labour MP Barry Gardiner about her party’s ambitious plans to tackle crime.
Tensions were ratcheting up throughout the exchange as Gardiner repeatedly asked how Nigel Farage’s populist party would pay for its radical proposals.
“You haven’t explained where you would get the money from to do the things you have promised”, he said.
“The money you’ve already allocated to it you have already allocated to sorting out the two-child benefit cap.
GB NEWS
|
Cunningham told Gardiner she ‘won’t take lectures’ from him
“So far, in your statements as a party you have no identified it and you spent the money twice.”
Cunningham said “I have all the answers” before telling Gardiner her party has already put together a costings document, only for the Labour MP to confirm he has already seen it.
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
“Did you not understand it?”, she asked, to which he responded: “£17.4 billion you said you were going to be spending. Out of that, you already spent a good half of it twice.
“When it came to the prisons, you said you would have all the new prisons but didn’t cost the officers.”
GB NEWS
|
Cunningham blew a fuse over the Labour MP’s repeated questioning
She said: “Crime costs this country £80 billion a year. The tax gap that crime costs if £9 billion. These measures will pay itself double over.”
“You’ve got to have the money in the first place”, Gardiner quickly interjected.
Cunningham continued by quoting Home Office promises to halve violence against girls in a decade, saying “that’s not going to happen” and it is “too long”.
“Why did you vote against the bill that was stopping them from getting stopped and getting stalked?”, Gardiner angrily hit back.
“That’s what you voted against. You voted against the very things that would keep children safe like the mandatory reporting of sex crimes.”
“Your party did not say anything on the Pakistani rape gangs”, said Cunningham.
“You sat on it. Your MPs sat on it. Your councillors sat on it. I won’t be lectured by what we voted against. Your MPs and councillors were fully aware of the Pakistani rape gangs and did nothing. It’s a disgrace.
“I won’t be lectured by Labour about protecting women and girls. As a senior crime prosecutor, I have seen the CPS policy on women and girls and the last part says ‘this policy applies to women irrelevant of gender’.
“That means if you are a man, you are also in the policy of protecting women and girls. Will that include transgender men who identify as women? Answer yes or no.”
Gardiner said: “The answer is, if anybody is being sexually abused it does not matter if they are a man or woman.”
Cunningham said the policy would be changed by Reform to ensure the policy only applies to women and girls.