Robert Jenrick has defected to Reform UK, saying the “Tories broke Britain”, after being kicked out of the Conservative Party this morning by party leader Kemi Badenoch, to whom he lost 2024’s leadership contest. Here’s an edited selection of what he told this afternoon’s press conference, courtesy of the Telegraph.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. It’s time for the truth. Britain has been in decline. Britain is in decline.

From 1970 to 2007 real wages went down by one-third every 10 years. Since then they flatlined. At the turn of the millennium the average Brit was earning twice as much as the average Pole. By 2031 we are on track to be poorer.

Outside of London and the south-east our economy is closer to Bulgaria’s than to Germany’s. Today 18 to 30 year-olds are the first Britons to earn less than their parents. Houses cost more here than in any other OECD country. We have the highest energy prices in the developed world.

Countless communities in less than 25 years have become totally unrecognisable. The police as we’ve seen this week can’t even police some of our largest cities.

Now my constituents in Newark feel this decline every day. It’s a great historic town. It is the honour of my life to represent it and to represent them in Parliament. They are the best of our country. They are men and women who are getting up at 6am in the morning, 7am out the door… grafting all week but finding nothing left over for something nice with the kids on the weekend.

Their bills, their taxes are surging. Their money is taken to fund hotels for those here illegally in our country or the lifestyle of the guy down the road who everyone knows could be working but isn’t working.

I challenge anyone to argue other than that Britain is completely broken. Those that came before us built a great country, the greatest country in the world. But we are set to lose it. We will for certain if this Government gets re-elected. A suicidal energy policy, crushing workers to fund scroungers on benefits, unions running our public services, payouts to terrorists, prosecutions of veterans, the bravest of the brave. Nine hundred thousand migrants in their first year, 65,000 of them illegally. Ending jury trials, cancelling elections, giving away our territory and £35 billion for the privilege. These people run Britain as if they hate it.

The two main parties are rotten. They are no longer fit for purpose. They both broke Britain and neither can fix it.

It’s a conclusion about the Conservative party that has pained me to reach because I’ve been a member of this party since I was 16 years old. I’ve served it most of my adult life. I have countless good friends in the party not least my own members in Newark.

They are the most decent patriotic people I know and I respect, I cherish the party’s contribution to our country, the party of Pitt and Peel, of Churchill and Thatcher. But our country is in a precarious, dangerous position. And my first loyalty, our first loyalty, must be to our country.

Turning it around will require each and every one of us to speak the truth. And not just to speak it but to act.

Both Labour and the Conservatives broke Britain and both are now dominated without the competence or the backbone needed to fix it.

Both parties if judged by their own actions are committed to a set of ideas that have failed and are failing Britain. Labour started mass migration but the Conservatives ramped it up. After 2019, the Conservatives almost left us without a border.

Five million came, three-quarters not to work. … When I was minister for immigration in late 2022, I fought colossal flights for reductions in legal migration alongside Suella Braverman.

There were 23 people in cabinet back then. Just one or two others were with us. Most of the party ultimately wanted what they viewed as cheap labour. And it’s the same on illegal migration. Blair enshrined the ECHR into British law.

He put the so-called human rights of illegal migrants, of terrorists, of criminals above our national security. But so did the last Conservative government.

It didn’t just keep and execute his plan, it doubled down on it with insane Net Zero targets.

Read More: Jenrick Defects to Reform Saying “Tories Broke Britain”