Kemi Badenoch warns Reform UK's media bans show authoritarian tendencies

Reform UK’s decision to ban some journalists from its conference shows that Nigel Farage would use state power to target opponents and be authoritarian in government, Kemi Badenoch has said.

Answering questions after a speech on defence in London, the Conservative leader was asked about Reform’s decision to refuse accreditation to a series of journalists for its conference this week.

One of the journalists was Anna Isaac, the Guardian’s City editor, who broke the story that Farage had accepted an undeclared £5m gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

Farage’s attacks on the media were “very personal” at times, Badenoch said, also citing the targeting of journalists by Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesperson.

She continued: “I think you could … [see] what kind of government they would be – authoritarian and using state power actually to pursue opponents is what they’ve effectively been threatening.

“We believe in free speech. We believe in a free press. And yes, of course, that might be painful for us as politicians, but public scrutiny is part of the gig. If Nigel Farage can’t handle difficult questions about his dodgy £5m then he shouldn’t be a politician.”

Reform refused to say why it had banned Isaac.

In other questions at the event, Badenoch defended her party’s new policy of cutting housing benefit as a way to finance increased defence spending, but declined to say if any savings might be cancelled out by other costs, for example by people being made homeless.

In an announcement overnight, the Conservatives said they would make defence spending hit 3% of GDP by 2029-30 through £10bn of savings, primarily from social security.

A significant chunk of this would be made by cutting local housing allowances, which sets out how much housing benefit people receive in their local area for private tenancies. This has been frozen anyway since 2024, and already does not fully cover the majority of rents.

Asked whether the assumed savings factored in likely knock-on costs, for example people losing their homes and having to seek emergency accommodation from councils, Badenoch slightly evaded the question.

“It all needs to be coordinated,” she said. “What we are doing on defence is very closely linked to welfare. My shadow welfare secretary, Helen Whately, is looking at all of the impacts across the board, because we know that every change does create a new situation.”

Badenoch stressed what she said was the urgent need for increased defence spending given the threat from Russia, saying that other European countries like Poland and Germany were moving more quickly.

She said: “Like Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham is kicking defence spending into the long grass. I cannot tell you how urgent this is.”

Burnham’s government has pledged to meet a Nato commitment of spending 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035, but has delayed giving a timing for reaching 3% of GDP. As Starmer’s defence secretary, John Healey insisted this should be reached by 2030, but has dropped the target as Burnham’s chancellor.

Separately, Badenoch rejected concerns that her policy to bar non-UK nationals from social housing could see a repeat of the Windrush scandal, where checks on immigration status saw people who had lived their lives in the UK denied access to services.

She said: “I don’t think that this is anything like what happened with Windrush, where there were people who had citizenship but couldn’t prove it. And there are lessons that have been learned around the administration of those schemes.”