Lee Anderson vows to strip BBC of funding after repeatedly mocking Reform: ‘We’re coming for YOU next!’
Lee Anderson has said that Reform UK will strip the BBC of its funding if Nigel Farage enters power after accusing the broadcaster of repeated jabs at the populist party.
The Ashfield MP made the claim after Nigel Farage’s recent appearance on Question Time, with Reform UK’s leader being asked: “How do we balance border control, diversity and pressure on local services?”
The X account of the BBC’s “Have I Got News For You” show posted a screenshot of Farage looking stumped at the question, joking that if Farage was a contestant on “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire”, then he would be at a loss if he tried to ring Anderson for help.
Reacting to the jab, Anderson said: “When we’ve sorted border control out we’re coming for YOU next. That’ll save us a few billion a year.”
Earlier this year, the BBC was accused of producing “biased” content after a “Have I Got News for You” episode saw the panellists burst into a lengthy rant about Farage.
Regulars Ian Hislop and Paul Merton were joined by stand-in host Alex Horne and guests Carol Vorderman and Jack Dee, with the group sticking to the same narrative during the tirade.
Merton remarked of Farage: “He’s got the publicity that he sought because he said he wasn’t going to and then a week later he did – and he’s become the leader of the party and he stayed in Clacton.”
He continued: “It’s the seventh attempt, is it? Or eighth attempt to become an MP?”
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“Eighth,” Vorderman chimed before Hislop added: “He’s standing in Clacton.This is the place he said, a few weeks ago when he didn’t want to become an MP, he said if he were to become an MP, it’d be far too much work and he said ‘I don’t want to spend every Friday for the next five years in Clacton.’ That’s flattering, isn’t it, to your electorate?”
Hislop also accused the Clacton MP of resembling President-elect Donald Trump.
He said: “Farage did a couple of interviews this week and in all of them he was just very close to losing it when confronted by reality.
“He’s just pure Trump, isn’t he? He thinks ‘I’ll just call everyone boring, make stuff up.”
And as far back as a decade ago, Farage was once more the butt of many jokes on the panel show.
In one segment in a 2014 episode, Farage, who was then the leader of Ukip, was forced to play a game called “Fruitcake or Loony”, which was seen as an attempt to poke fun at supporters and members of the anti-EU party.
Then-Prime Minister David Cameron had dismissed Ukip as being composed of “fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists”.
During last week’s episode of Question Time, Farage also slammed the Conservative Party, condemning Kemi Badenoch for the Tories record on immigration control.
The heated exchange occurred during a panel discussion featuring Conservative Minister Kevin Hollinrake, former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, and ex-No10 spin doctor Alastair Campbell.
Farage accused the Tories of wilful deception over their repeated promises to reduce net migration numbers.
He said: “How can you as the Conservative party keep a straight face to this audience having promised in 2010, 2015, 2017 that you would reduce net migration to tens of thousands a year, having promised in 2019 substantial reductions and net migration is nearly a million. You have broken your promise time after time and you will never be forgiven for it.
“You have not got a cat’s chance in hell of winning the next general election. Shame on you for what you have done, it was willful deceptive and wrong.”