UK politics live: minister pushes back at Tory claims linking small boat arrivals to sexual crime | Politics

Good morning. During August, when parliament is not sitting and the tap of domestic news is running dry, opposition parties often like to run campaigns. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is following this model with gusto and today, for the third week in a row, he is holding a press conference on the subject of crime. Reform’s success in the polls is almost entirely down to the fact it advocates hardline policies to cut immigration and small boat crossings and Farage is trying explicitly to link this issue to crime, arguing that asylum seekers are disproportionately likely to be criminal.

The Conservative party don’t have a single theme for their summer campaigning. (Yesterday Kemi Badenoch was campaigning about the uselessness of the Liz Truss mini-budget, a topic where the…