Royal Parks say no evidence to back Nigel Farage’s claim that migrants are eating their swans – UK politics live | Politics
Royal Parks says there’s no evidence to back Farage’s claim their swans being eaten by migrants
The Royal Parks have rejected a claim from Nigel Farage that migrants are killing and eating swans from their grounds.
The Reform UK leader made the assertion in his LBC interview this morning as he deflected a question about whether Donald Trump was wrong last year when he claimed migrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats. Trump’s comment was widely dismissed as a racist slur.
The LBC Nick Ferrari asked Farage about the Trump claim in an interview a year ago and Farage said that, when Trump said something like this, there was normally some basis of truth behind it. He bet Ferrari £10 that within a month or so evidence would emerge to prove Trump right.
Today Ferrari challenged Farage to pay up, on the grounds that one year on Trump has still not been able to prove that he was telling the truth.
But Farage refused, saying he would only give Ferrari his £10 if he could prove that Trump was wrong.
He went on:
If I said to you that swans were being eaten in royal parks and carps were being taken out of ponds and eaten in this country from people with different cultures. Would you agree that is happening?
Asked who was doing this, Farage said “people who come from countries where it’s quite acceptable to do so”. Asked if he meant eastern Europeans, he replied: “So I believe.”
A Royal Parks spokesperson said:
We’ve not had any incidents reported to us of people killing or eating swans in London’s eight Royal Parks.
Our wildlife officers work closely with the Swan Sanctuary to ensure the welfare of the swans across the parks.
Claims that swans have been eaten by migrants have been periodically surfacing in British newspapers for years. But the reports almost never include compelling proof, and in recent years the police have not caught anyone in connection with these allegations.
Key events
Cabinet Office says government has saved £480m using AI data tools to crack down on fraud
The Cabinet Office says it has saved £480m by using AI data tools in what it describes as “the government’s biggest ever fraud crackdown”. In a news release it says:
Over a third of the money saved (£186m) comes from identifying and recovering fraud committed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Government efforts to date have blocked hundreds of thousands of companies with outstanding or potentially fraudulent Bounce Back Loans from dissolving before they would have to pay anything back. We have also clawed back millions of pounds from companies that took out Covid loans they were not entitled to, or took out multiple loans when only entitled to one …
Alongside Covid fraud, the record savings reached in the year to April 2025 include clamping down on people unlawfully claiming single persons council tax discount and removing people from social housing waitlists who wanted to illegally sublet their discounted homes at the taxpayers’ expense.
A council-owned hotel has cancelled a launch event for a new political party backed by right-wing activist Tommy Robinson and the billionaire Elon Musk, PA Media reports. PA says:
Advance UK, led by former Reform deputy Ben Habib, was due to hold a conference in Newcastle on Saturday.
The new party announced the event last month without revealing the venue but it was understood to have been planned to be held at the Crowne Plaza hotel in the city centre.
In a social media post last month, the party said it had chosen Newcastle, “the symbolic heart of Brexit” and vowed that it “will fight unapologetically for sovereignty, free speech, and restoring pride in our nation”.
Following an online protest, the hotel management has cancelled the booking “on health and safety grounds”, Newcastle city council said.
Lib Dems accuse Farage of following ‘Trump’s dangerous anti-science agenda’
The Liberal Democrats have condemned Nigel Farage for his comments about Donald Trump, paracetamol and autism. (See 10.23am.) Helen Morgan, the Lib Dem health spokesperson, said:
Nigel Farage wants to impose Trump’s dangerous anti-science agenda here in the UK. Peddling this kind of nonsense is irresponsible and wrong.
It seems Farage would rather see pregnant women suffer in pain than stand up to his idol Donald Trump.
Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, devoted much of his party conference speech yesterday to attacking Farage. Asked about the speech, Farage told LBC this morning that he thought Davey was suffering from “Farage derangement syndrome”. He went on:
[Davey] didn’t tell the country what he was for. Just what he’s against, which is me and Trump. And he doesn’t want us to live in a Trump-style country.
I understand that. He doesn’t want borders. He doesn’t want economic growth. He doesn’t want men taken out of women’s sport. Honestly, I really don’t think we should take anything he said seriously.
Here is Peter Walker’s story about the Davey speech yesterday.
And here is Rafael Behr’s column about the party.
Farage declines to back UK public health leaders who say Trump wrong to claim link between paracetamol and autism
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has declined to back UK medical leaders who say that Donald Trump was wrong to link paracetamol to autism.
In an interview on LBC, Farage claimed that he had “no idea” whether or not the president was right when said that taking paracetamol during a pregnancy could lead to a child having autism.
Trump’s claim has been widely dismissed as unfounded, or even dangerous, by public health organisations and experts around the world.
Yesterday the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency in the UK said:
There is no evidence that taking paracetamol during pregnancy causes autism in children.Paracetamol remains the recommended pain relief option for pregnant women when used as directed.
But, when Farage was asked by LBC’s Nick Ferrari if he thought Trump’s comments were right, he replied:
I have no idea… you know, we were told thalidomide was a very safe drug and it wasn’t. Who knows? Nick, I don’t know, you don’t know.
He [Trump] has a particular thing about autism, I think because there’s been some in his family, he feels it very personally. I have no idea.
Asked if he would side with medical experts on this issue, Farage replied:
When it comes to science, I don’t side with anybody. I don’t side with anybody because science is never settled, and we should remember that.
Farage’s reference to thalidomide will be seen as scaremongering. Thalidomide was sold as a sedative in the late 1950s, but it was quickly linked to birth defects and withdrawn from general sale after about four years. Paracetamol has been in use for around 70 years, and repeated studies have said that that it is safe for pregnant women.
Farage has adopted a similar position in the past on global warming – refusing to accept the overwhelming expert consensus that climate change is real, on the grounds that the science is disputed.
He is also normally reluctant to criticise Trump, whom he counts as a friend and who’s anti-immigration nationalist populism is aligned to Reform UK’s.
But, in the LBC interview, Farage did not endorse what Trump claimed about sharia law being established in London.
Farage said the president should be taken seriously, but not literally. He went on:
Is [Trump] right to say that sharia is an issue in London? Yes. Is it an overwhelming issue at this stage? No.
McFadden tactfully says Trump wrong about sharia law in London, calling comment ‘misreading of our great capital’
In his interviews this morning Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, also dismissed Donald Trump’s false claim yesterday that Sadiq Khan is introducing sharia law in London, where he is the Labour mayor.
Some Labour MPs have reacted very angrily to the claim, which Trump made in the course of a provacative and rambling speech to the United Nations, accusing the president of Islamophobia.
But McFadden dismissed it more diplomatically, almost laughing it off.
Asked on BBC Breakfast what he thought of Trump’s sharia law claim, McFadden replied:
Well, I’m here at Selhurst Park in south London where we don’t have sharia law, we have British law.
It’s a great capital city that we have. I think it’s a great asset to the UK. And I’m afraid I differ from the president on that.
McFadden also said Trump had had “a good state visit”.
Asked again about the sharia law claim, McFadden said:
I just think it’s a misreading of our great capital city.
In a separate interview with Times Radio, McFadden said Trump and Khan had “had a beef for some years”.
Last night Emily Thornberry, the chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, joined those Labour MPs condemning Trump more robustly over this. She posted this on social media.
I’ve known @SadiqKhan for over 30 yrs. He’s a feminist, a socialist & an LGBTQ+ ally. I’m so proud he’s our London mayor. For the record, he’s as interested in introducing Sharia Law to London as I am – ie 0%. Those who suggest otherwise are deluded, or have a v sinister agenda.
Pat McFadden dismisses Tory claims that Morgan McSweeney misled elections watchdog
Good morning. Pat McFadden has been on media round duties this morning. He is now work and pensions secreratary, and his interviews (conducted from Selhurst Park) were ostensibly about an announcement about premier league football clubs getting involved in a £25m expansion of the youth hubs programme.
In his old job, as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, McFadden was in effect the “minister for the Today programme”, the No 10 figure sent out to hose down the media in the face of assorted scandals and problems and there was quite a bit of that going on this morning. He was asked about Donald Trump’s latest outburst. And he was asked about the Conservative allegations that Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s chief of staff, mislead the elections watchdog over donations to a Labour thinktank when the party was in opposition.
The Tories have been banging away at this for some days, and last night they escalated this, publishing a leaked email from a Labour lawyer to McSweeney implying that McSweeney was advised not to tell the Electoral Commission the full reasons why donations were not declared. The Daily Mail has splashed the story. Here is our version, by Pippa Crerar.
The story has not achieved mega lift-off – BBC Breakfast did not even ask McFadden about it – but on Times Radio he was asked if he had confidence in McSweeney, and McFadden replied:
Yes, I do. I worked with him very closely on the election campaign. He’s a person of enormous talent.
And on the Today programme McFadden was asked if he was 100% sure that McSweeney had done nothing wrong. McFadden replied:
The Electoral Commission made a statement on this last night, and they said that they’d looked into all these things some years ago and they really didn’t have anything to add to it.
Look, I’m not surprised that the Conservatives are trying to, attack someone who was very effective, who was an integral part of Labour’s general election campaign last year in delivering the Labour victory. And they don’t happen very often; they don’t fall from the sky. They require talented people to work on them. He did that, and he did it in a very effective way.
Asked again if he was convinced that McSweeney did nothing criminally wrong, McFadden said:
Look, I think the Electoral Commission have looked into that. They’ve said there is nothing to add here. They are the people actually charged with policing the rules around declarations to nations and all the rest of that. And they looked into this as far back, I think, as 2021.
I will post more from McFadden’s interviews shortly.
The Commons is in recess, and Labour and the Conservatives are both preparing for their party conferences. Labour’s starts this weekend, and the Tories’ the week after. The political diary looks quite empty, but the news never stops, so something will come up.
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