Lee Anderson says Ashfield residents aren't racists - they've just been ignored

Lee Anderson has said that white working-class constituents in Ashfield have shifted to the right because they've been ignored or branded “racist” over immigration concerns.

The Reform UK MP said those in old industrial areas have been taken for granted. “The political establishment is just completely out of touch,” he told the Express. “I still see it every single day in Parliament, not just with politicians, but with some of the journalists as well.”

Anderson, 58, explained that he is called a “racist bigot” for saying he wants his “country back”. “What I want is [for] my kids to go to schools and learn, not be told that there could be 25 different genders. I want to be able to ring up a doctor in the morning and get an appointment the same day.”

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He added: “I want bobbies to walk the streets. I want rapists and murderers locked up for life and I don’t want illegal migrants being put up in four-star hotels. It’s not much, is it, really?”

Formerly a Conservative MP, and deputy chairman under Rishi Sunak, Anderson defected to Reform in March last year after having the whip removed. He became the party’s first MP, successfully ran for election again in 2024, and now serves as Reform’s chief whip.

Anderson said that his constituents who were being branded “far-right racists” were “people on minimum wage who have seen and digested massive changes”. He said: “They’ve gone from being traditional Labour voters to first-time Tory voters in 2019 to voting for me and Reform.”

At the age of 18, Anderson took up the same career as his father and became a coal miner until the colliery closed. He said the area had “gone from being a load of coal miners and factory workers to drug dealers and doleys”. He later went on to work for Citizens Advice and in hostels supporting homeless care leavers.

In February last year, Anderson had the whip suspended after making claims that “Islamists” had “got control” of London mayor Sadiq Khan. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister at the time, condemned the MP’s comments as “wrong, unacceptable and ill-judged” but said “I don’t believe Lee is a racist or Islamophobic person”.

He began his political career as a Labour councillor on Ashfield District Council and worked as an office manager to the constituency’s Labour MP, Gloria De Piero. Anderson was suspended from the council’s Labour group in February 2018 for using a digger to place concrete blocks to stop travellers illegally camping in a car park. A month later, he defected to the Conservative Party and said Labour has been “taken over by the hard-left”.