00:00Hello Reform!
00:02Hello!
00:04Hello!
00:05You all having a good time?
00:07Yes!
00:09Now some of you know me, others may have only seen me argue sometimes a bit aggressively with someone on
00:15TV.
00:16And you may be wondering why the hell does this woman think she can take on the whole London establishment?
00:22Well let me tell you why.
00:24Now if the Uniparty had a home, it is London.
00:28Because you vote Labour, you vote Conservatives, nothing really changes.
00:32It's still crime, climate emergency, punishing motorists, and guess what?
00:39Reform, all of us, are going to take them down.
00:48So let me tell you a little bit how we're going to do that.
00:52And a bit about the London that I'm fighting for.
00:55My parents came here from Egypt in the 60s.
00:59And they came with the sole purpose of becoming British.
01:02They wanted to assimilate.
01:03They loved Britain.
01:05They were proud of it.
01:06And they really taught us what pride in our amazing country meant.
01:11And Britain gave my parents an opportunity to build a successful life.
01:15London gave me mine.
01:17Now I grew up in Kilburn.
01:19Any Kilburn people here?
01:20I doubt it.
01:21And by the age of 12, I was huge.
01:24I was this height.
01:25And no boy ever asked me to slow dance.
01:28Because I towered over them.
01:31And then somebody put a basketball in my hands.
01:34And suddenly, being six inches taller than everybody else was a huge advantage.
01:39And I played pick-up games all across London.
01:42From Queen's Park to Brixton to Croydon to Crystal Palace.
01:46And I learned something very early on that's been useful so far.
01:50The thing that made me different on those courts became my strength.
01:55And that lesson has been useful now.
01:58I spent much of my life being told,
02:00You don't quite fit the mold.
02:02Hang on.
02:02Your parents are from Egypt.
02:04You're a Muslim.
02:05You should be part of the Green Party.
02:09Boo!
02:12Too ethnic, apparently, and too Muslim to be right wing.
02:16Or have some common sense.
02:18Now, I didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge.
02:21I didn't come through Westminster's conveyor belt.
02:24Or an old boys' network with a political career waiting for me.
02:28I had to do something much more unusual in British politics.
02:31Get a job.
02:42And ladies and gentlemen, that's the difference, really, with reform.
02:45We believe Britain should be run by people who have done real things in a real world.
02:53So I became a lawyer for all my sins.
02:55I wanted to be an actress, but my dad said,
02:58No, you've got to earn some money.
02:59And a senior Crown Prosecutor.
03:01I built a business.
03:02I became a counsellor.
03:03And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I raised seven children.
03:15I'm not in politics because I need a life or a career.
03:18I had that.
03:20And almost everything I believe about politics comes from the life I lived before I entered the arena we call
03:27politics.
03:27I didn't learn about crime from a briefing or a headline.
03:30I learned about it as a prosecutor, as a counsellor, as a victim, and as a mother.
03:43I didn't learn about business from a round table with entrepreneurs.
03:46I risked my own money and built one.
03:49I didn't need somebody to explain the pressures on working mothers.
03:52I raised seven children while trying to make ends meet and build a career.
03:57Those experiences shaped my politics long before anyone gave me a mic.
04:02And that's why sometimes I find Westminster really strange.
04:05Don't you?
04:06Because for professional political class, these policies are to be discussed and pontificated.
04:13For the rest of us here, they are our lives.
04:24And frankly, nowhere have I felt that more personally than on crime.
04:29My kids were threatened with knives by mass gangs on our streets.
04:33The police told me they don't have enough resources or didn't have enough evidence to pursue it.
04:39Now, anyone who's a mum here knows I was not going to accept that.
04:44So I went looking for the evidence myself.
04:46I had a baby at the time, put him in the carrier.
04:49I risked my life.
04:51I followed the gangs.
04:52I took photographs.
04:53I gathered the evidence that the police didn't have the resources to do.
04:59The papers called me vigilante mum, and it sounds kind of cool.
05:02It wasn't.
05:04I wasn't trying to be a vigilante.
05:06It was just being a mum.
05:08Doing whatever it takes to keep my kids safe should be the first duty of our government.
05:23And that experience taught me something about government.
05:26You see, we talk a lot about freedom and reform, as though the only way government can take it from
05:31you is by passing another law telling you what you cannot do.
05:35And do we know they like to do that?
05:37But government can take your freedom through failure, too.
05:41If fear of crime changes the way you live your life, then crime hasn't just made you less safe, it
05:47has made you less free.
05:48The woman who changes her route home.
05:52The pensioner, who's too scared to walk to the shops.
05:55The teenager, my kids, afraid to take out their phone.
05:59And the parent, who just won't let their child out.
06:01That, ladies and gentlemen, is a loss of freedom.
06:04That's why when we talk about public safety, it isn't separate from freedom.
06:08It is what makes freedom possible.
06:18Any Londoners in the house?
06:22I love London.
06:23Because it's where my family built its life.
06:25It's where I grew up.
06:26It's where I learned to play basketball.
06:28Where I built my career, started a business, and where it's raising my children.
06:32This city gave me an extraordinary chance.
06:36But the London my children are inheriting is not the London that gave me mine.
06:42And like all of you here, I'm not willing to accept that.
06:46And that's why I'm acting.
06:48Because there is a world of difference, and I know you can all agree,
06:51between talking about a problem, as politicians do, and actually doing something about it.
06:58And it is why crime became such an important part of my politics.
07:03See, I already spent years seeing the other end of the system, as a prosecutor.
07:07I had the humble pleasure of prosecuting people who arrived in our country illegally.
07:13And upon arrival, as a sign of gratitude, committed crimes in London.
07:17And I've seen publicly paid prosecutors, paid by all of you ladies and gentlemen,
07:23stand up in court and argue that crossing the channel in a dinghy is a form of trauma.
07:31And should be treated as mitigation.
07:34I would stand up and say, hell no.
07:36Being here illegally is not a mitigating factor.
07:40It is a crime.
07:51Needless to say, I didn't have many friends in the Crown Prosecution Service.
07:56Because all of us know that if you're here illegally, you shouldn't be here in the first place.
08:02And if you weren't here in the first place, that crime would have not been committed.
08:12Because we've reached a stage in this country, surprisingly, where crime is excused.
08:19But here at Reform, we're fighting for something fundamental.
08:22We are fighting, and we'll always fight, for justice for the victims, not for the criminals.
08:34And my experience prosecuting criminals is one reason Reform trusted me to speak about crime
08:39when we launched the Britain is Lawless campaign.
08:42Because for me, lawlessness, again, isn't something I discovered in a focus group.
08:46I've prosecuted it, I've spoken to its victims, I've been a victim, and I've had to save my children from
08:52it.
08:52And I've also spoken to victims of spiking.
08:56I know the panic, the missing time, the terror women feel for not knowing what may have happened to them.
09:04So when so cleverly joked about a little bit of rohypnol in his wife's drink,
09:09saying it was not really illegal, if it's only a little bit.
09:14I'm sure like all of you here, I was frankly appalled.
09:17He apologised and said it was a joke, but I can tell you, spiking is never funny.
09:29It's not banter, it strips a woman of control of her own body.
09:34And it's these kind of jokes that normalises crime against women and girls.
09:38You see, for some politicians, crime is something to talk about, spin, or sadly joke about.
09:44For me, it's been my job and one of my greatest fears as a mother.
09:48So ladies and gentlemen, when I say there will be zero tolerance for crime, I mean it.
10:02I'm running because I want criminals looking over their shoulders, not Londoners.
10:07But crime was not the only thing actually that made me realise something had gone really bad with our politics.
10:12As you all know, and I repent, I spent years in the Conservative Party.
10:18You know why? I believed in lower taxes.
10:21I believed in control of immigration, law and order, rewarding work.
10:25Remember that thing, personal responsibility?
10:27And then I watched the Conservative government promise those things and do the opposite.
10:32Migration went up. Taxes went up.
10:34And the state just kept getting bigger and bigger.
10:38And while people were robbed, raped and knived, the Tories had the audacity to ask the police to arrest people
10:45for tweets.
10:47The political class became more confident policing opinions than policing our streets.
11:02In Britain, disagreement or offence should never be a crime.
11:07It is a symbol of a free country.
11:10Offence is not violence.
11:17And I can assure you, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not going to City Hall to police opinions.
11:21I'm going to police, rape, robbery, knife, crime and grooming gangs.
11:27Remember the ones Khan?
11:35The one Khan lied to our face about existing.
11:38And anyone who covered it up, I can assure you, they won't only be fired, they will be prosecutors.
11:53I'm not covering up for anyone.
11:55I don't owe anyone any favours but those girls.
11:59But what has become impossible for all of us in this room to ignore is the gap, and I think
12:04that's why we're all here,
12:05between what politicians promise and what they actually deliver.
12:09And what I find shocking is that when they fail, somehow they get promoted.
12:14You know?
12:15I mean, that is professional politics.
12:17It's the industrial political complex.
12:21And we've seen it for decades.
12:22Failure without consequence.
12:25Ordinary people don't get that luxury.
12:27And that's why I left the Conservative Party.
12:30I left, and I think a lot of you have as well, because loyalty to a party can never, ever
12:35come before loyalty to the public.
12:38And that's why I joined Reform.
12:41Nigel understood...
12:45Nigel understood before most of Westminster did that millions of people were sick and tired of being told what they
12:52see happening around them wasn't actually happening.
12:55He built a party prepared to say that Britain is broken and that tinkering around the edges isn't going to
13:02fix it.
13:03And he trusted people who had actually done things outside of politics.
13:07He trusted me to take on crime because I had spent my career prosecuting it.
13:12Nigel didn't ask me how many leaflets I delivered.
13:15He didn't ask whether I had spent 20 years climbing the political ladder.
13:19He looked at what I had actually done.
13:22So when Reform wanted someone to make the case that Britain had become lawless,
13:26he trusted a former prosecutor to make it.
13:30And in London, if the old parties have their way,
13:32Londoners will be offered not one, but two career politicians from the same political establishment.
13:40One represents the political class that failed London.
13:44The other represents the political class that failed Britain.
13:48Because London is broken in many of the same ways that Britain is.
13:52And the people who broke it can never be the people that we ask to fix it.
14:08We need the doers who see a problem and want to fix it.
14:13Just look at the economy.
14:14I mean, London used to be a city where we asked, what can you build?
14:19Now the council and city hall literally ask, have you filled in the form?
14:24And the people trying to build something in London are being squeezed from every direction.
14:29The shopkeeper pricing theft into the cost of doing business.
14:34The tradesman paying Ulez to use his van.
14:37The restaurant losing a day's trade because the tube is on strike again for some Legoland ticket.
14:45The young worker, and I've spoken to so many, earning a decent salary and still wondering
14:50how the hell will I ever afford a home in the city I grew up in.
14:55These are abstract policies.
14:57They decide whether people can build a life here.
15:00My parents could.
15:02I'm lucky I could.
15:05Increasingly, sadly, our children cannot.
15:09And that's the bargain that has been broken.
15:11But listen, I'm not standing for mayor merely to tell you what's gone wrong in London.
15:16I don't want to be another commentator commenting on decline.
15:20I want to be the person who ends it.
15:23I want to restore the promise London gave me and gave my family.
15:27I want a child growing up in Kilburn to believe the thing which makes them different might
15:33one day become their strength.
15:34I want the woman sitting at her kitchen table with an idea to believe she can build the next great
15:39company.
15:40I want London to be a city where millionaires happen.
15:44Where the nurse, the police officer, the teacher and the small business owner can afford a life.
15:50I want my seven children raising their family right next to me.
15:56Close enough for Sunday lunch but not too close that they can dump all their kids and washing.
16:08And that is the London I'm fighting for.
16:10You see, the theme of this conference is the first hundred days.
16:13And I love that.
16:15You know why?
16:15Because it assumes something so important for the future of this country.
16:19It assumes we are going to govern.
16:22And when we govern, people will not judge us about how angry we are in opposition.
16:26They will ask whether we actually changed anything.
16:31Public office is not a prize for surviving the longest in politics.
16:34Tell that to James cleverly.
16:36It's a duty to deliver.
16:39Something the Tories and Labour have completely forgotten.
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