Robert Jenrick's speech to Reform UK Wolverhampton rally

"Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us here in Wolverhampton in the heart of the Black Country - the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.

It is good to be home.

I was born in this city. 

And went to school just down the road, in the shadow of Banks's brewery. At break time, you could smell hops drifting across the football pitch. 

I enjoyed it, and that experience the frequent whiff of West Midlands bitter well, it's made sharing an office with Nigel easier. 

My dad worked at Cannon Industries in Bilston. My mum was a secretary at Sankey's. Two great Black Country firms, one that had made the cannons for Wellingtons army, the other parts for Spitfires. Both gone now. I'll come back to that.

I've had a few things to say about this city and the way it has been led over the years. 

But so much of what I am, I am because of this area. 

Its values are my values.  Its language is my language.  

As you all know, it's not an equestrian statue of Prince Albert in Queen Square it's the man on the oss.

And while, as a Nottinghamshire MP, I back Forest.  

My true calling is as a fan of Wolverhampton Wanderers. 

And yes, they've had a hard year. But if Wolves know one thing, it's how to come back up.

And that's what I've come home to talk about. Coming back up.

Because this area deserves better than managed decline. Frankly so does our country.  

It deserves to come back to what it was. To unleash its tremendous potential once more.

A place where a young person can find a good job and get going in life. Where a family firm founded around a kitchen table could grow into a household name. Where the high street was full, the streets clean and safe, and yes the hops were still in the air.

That isn't just nostalgia. That's hope. Because what was squandered isn't lost.

And the country we had handed to us, is the life that I want to hand onto my three girls, Marina, Sophia and Lila. 

Because Britain is broken. But Britain can be fixed. It just needs Reform.

What we built

The Black Country built Britain.

Iron from Bilston. Glass from Stourbridge. Chains from Cradley Heath. Enamels so fine they now sit in museums.

When the Titanic needed an anchor, they sent to Netherton. It took twenty shire horses to haul it through the streets.

James Beattie opened a draper's shop in this city and built the Harrods of the Midlands.

This is the city that installed the first traffic light. I bet you didn't know that

Family firms. Family pubs. family owned corner shops. And people known the length of this country for one thing above all. Warmth.

But there's one local icon seared in my mind. 

Up the road at Wightwick Manor, there's a painting my Nan used to take me to see as a child. Mostly because she wanted a scone in the cafe. It's called Love Among the Ruins. Two people holding each other while a great city crumbles around them.

Empires fall. Power fades. What lasts is the people you love and the place you belong to. 

Family, community, country. The values of this party.

Let's be honest about the ruins.

Cannon Industries, where my dad clocked on. Gone.

Sankey's, where my mum typed the letters. Gone. 

Beatties, shuttered. Doesn't that look terrible?

Banks's, closed. 

The Crooked House, a pub so bent Andy Burnham asked if it would serve in the Cabinet.

Well, it was burnt down and bulldozed.

Unemployment here is over 7%, more than one and a half times the national rate. In Sandwell, in Walsall, in this city, more than one in three children are growing up in poverty.

There are endemic health problems. Growing lawlessness, from e-bikes to shoplifting to tool theft. Down-at-heel high streets.

The crucial thing is this isn't the fault of the places and it certainly isn't the fault of the people growing up there - they haven't failed.

No, it is we, us the politicians, the politics, the system that has failed.

Time and again they have voted for change - Tory, Labour - cycling through seven Prime Ministers in just over decade. Each promising change, but failing to deliver on what is needed.

The system only seeming more unfair. Britain more broken. 

Take Poundland. 

A father and a son. A market stall in this city. One shop by 1990. Six hundred shops today, and twelve thousand people on the payroll.

That is the Black Country story. Start small. Work hard. Build something that lasts.

But what happened to it?

It was sold abroad. Then it was sold again, to an American corporate raider, for a pound. The whole company. For a pound. They don't even sell the products for that anymore.

Poundland is on course to make eighteen million quid in profit this year.  Yet, its owners have filed for administration, despite buyers at the door offering to keep it whole. Why? So they can sell it off for parts and fat fees.

Think about that. A business that makes money. That employs twelve thousand people. That sells what families can actually afford. And the system's answer is: break it up.

That isn't capitalism. These aren't titans of industry. They're shysters.

These people are organ harvesters masquerading as doctors.

They don't want the patient to live. They want him on the table, still warm, so they can sell him off a piece at a time.

Capitalism is the father and the son on the stall. This is something else. A model where it pays better to strip a British business than to build one. And where the Government's only contribution is a bigger tax bill at every till.

I've been on the phone to the people trying to save it, and I will stop at nothing to halt this destruction. To save those jobs. 

The government should stop messing around, use the powers they have in law, to stop workers and suppliers being messed around. 

I won't take any of Andy Burnham's performative nonsense on this. They're the party that have hiked national insurance, business rates, jacked up energy bills and battered businesses just like this. 

British businesses should never be left in that position ever again.

Under Reform they never will be. 

And it isn't only business that Westminster has given up on. It's given up on places like these. 

You have a government department in this city. I should know. I brought it here. Then Labour got in. 

And you know what, the minister for it, Angela Rayner, has never even visited it. Maybe you're grateful not to have her.  But it tells you this.  

Labour does not give a stuff about places like the Black Country. 

Look at your council. Oh, they've been busy. Busy declaring a City of Sanctuary for illegal migrants. Busy running every flag up the pole except two. The Cross of St George. Or the Black Country flag.

There is nowhere in England more patriotic than this. So in May you told them what you thought of that. Eleven Reform gains. We took Walsall. More in Cannock, Sandwell, and Dudley. 

In May next year, we'll take swathes more. 

And look who the Black Country elected. People like Reform Councillor, Tuli Zefi. 

When a nineteen-year-old was stabbed on Cradley Heath High Street, Tuli didn't wait for the police or the ambulance. Despite the violence, he got down in the road and tried to stop the bleeding with his own hands. 

He helped save that boy's life.

Tuli, where are you? Stand up.

What a hero. What. A. hero. That's who Reform Councillors are. 

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Now, I haven't come home to mourn or grieve.  But to tell you how we fix this city  and places like it from the decline Westminsterhas handed them.

Because the story of the Black Country is a parable for the decline so many of our towns and cities have faced.

And if we can fix the Black Country, we can fix Britain.

So, I've come home with three promises. 

One: jobs, here

The first is jobs. Today, I announce that:

A Reform government won't sit by, and allow industrial heartlands to decay. Won't just go an inch when we need to go a mile. Hand out small grants for new paving slabs - anyone seen Wolverhampton city centre right now? Won't just create new mayors - as if more politicians was ever the answer to our problems. 

We will revive our industrial heartlands. We will restore them. We will bring industry back to the places that invented it. New factories and offices and labs and data-centres. Good jobs. Higher wages. 

And with it the pride and purpose that has slipped away over forty years of neglect. 

A Reform government will establish Industrial Strongholds. 

Special economic zones, throughout the country. The first five we will unveil in the months to come.

In every Stronghold, businesses will get transformative tax breaks if and only if they grow and develop their firms there.  

And by enabling these businesses, by getting out of their way, we will bring industry back to this country. We will truly reindustrialise.  

And the very first one in Britain will be in and around the Black Country.

Wolverhampton. Dudley. Sandwell. Walsall. And Cannock.

A new Reform Industrial Stronghold for automotive and engineering. 

A new deal for: 

Every town in it, every trade, every firm, whatever its size.

Create a new job in a Reform Industrial Stronghold, and you pay half the regular rate of employers' National Insurance on the first fifty thousand pounds of that wage. For ten years.

Build a factory here, and you write off every penny against tax. 

Extend your premises in a stronghold, and you pay no business rates on the new part for ten years.

A firm that creates a hundred jobs at thirty thousand pounds saves one hundred and eighty-seven thousand pounds a year.

And the rules are the same for everyone. The family firm going from twenty staff to thirty. The multinational moving to the UK.

You invest, you win. We all win.

I sometimes wonder. Would Noah Hingley have fired the forge that made the Titanic's anchor if he were starting out TODAY? Would Thomas Banks have brewed his first pint of mild? Would Charles and Jeremiah Chubb have opened their lock and safe works? Would James Beattie his department store?

Would Jack Heywood - what a legend - have started out on his entrepreneurial journey that ultimately rebuilt the Moulieux stadium?  

The honest answer is regrettably almost certainly not.

So here's what we're going after: the great Black Country revival.

If we unleash the potential of this region and this country, with cheaper energy, less regulation, more apprenticeships, better infrastructure, lower taxes, then this really can be a new golden age for this region, for this country.

So that the next great retail giant is born here, built here and kept here. And the next Chubb. The next Banks. The next Hingley's forge. The next JLR.

Born here. Built here. Kept here. In a new Industrial Stronghold.

The great Black Country revival. Leading the way for an - even - greater - national - revival - too!

Two: British jobs for British workers

But here's the question no other party will ask. Jobs for whom?

Since 2014, this country has added three point seven million jobs. One in five went to a British worker. One in five.

Since 2020, for every extra young Briton employers took on, they hired twenty-seven young workers from outside Europe. Twenty-seven to one.

And all the while nearly a million of our own young people sit at home, out of work, out of college, out of hope.

That is not an economy. That is a betrayal.

So here is the second promise. Under Reform, jobs in Britain go to British workers first.

Advertised here, to our people, before an employer can look anywhere else. And no sitting out the clock to fly somebody in on a visa.

And we'll make it cheaper to say yes. Rachel Reeves' jobs tax, scrapped for every British worker. Paid for by a levy on the firms that would rather import cheap labour than train a local lad.

Cheaper to hire from Bilston. Dearer to hire from abroad.

British jobs for British workers. It's about time you came first. 

Three: a wage that goes further

The third promise. A job is only worth having if the wage goes somewhere.

Ask yourself why the weekly shop costs what it costs. It isn't the farmer. It isn't the shopkeeper. Too much is the Government.

A crazy new tax on packaging. Green levies on the electricity that runs through the freezers. A carbon tax. A climate levy. A jobs tax on the person stacking the shelves. And the job-destroying Employment Rights Act on top.

Every one of those costs put there by a politician who frankly knows nothing about business. Every one of them now in the price of your shopping basket.

And nobody feels them more than a shop that tried selling things for a pound.

Reform will scrap all that. Nearly four billion pounds and counting off the cost of food. A hundred and forty pounds a year off the average family's shopping.

And we're just getting getting started. 

We'll tax £250 off your energy bills.  

We'll raise the tax free personal allowance to £15,000. That's £1,000 in the pocket of every family.

We'll abolish tax on overtime. So if you take on extra shifts, you keep what you earn.

And in so doing, make our whole nation affordable once again.

Not just an alright place to live, or a better-than-average place to live but the greatest place on earth. The greatest place to live, to raise a family, to start a business and to have a good life.

So that's the plan.

Jobs, here. Good Jobs. For our people. And a wage that goes further.

I started with Wolverhampton's great painting. Love among the ruins.

For thirty years, politicians have looked at places like this and only seen the ruins. 

The empty works. The shuttered shop. The pub that isn't there any more.

I look at this room, and I see the other half of the picture. 

People. Who love their family, their community, our country.

That's the half that lasts. And that's the half you build on.

The old parties have let places like this down. They say they'll fix it. 

But in the words of Wolverhampton's finest singer:

Shoulda, woulda, coulda.

They've had their time. 

The moment has come for a new movement.  

To turn the metaphorical Wolverhampton traffic light from Red to Green. To rev up the engine again.

To recognise places like the Black Country built Britain.

With their hands, with their nerve, their grit.

Built it one family firm at a time. 

Link by link until that blackened chain was complete.

To believe that places like the Black Country will build Britain again.

New factories, offices, labs, data centres on old ground.

New Apprentices starting out once more. 

New Shops opening not closing. 

New feats of engineering rolling off new and ever more technologically advanced production lines. 

And British workers doing every job that a British worker can do.

There will be money left at the end of the week.

There will be a father and a son on a market stall with an idea, in a country that lets them keep what they build.

There will be a Cross of St George and a Black Country flag over every town and cit hall.

And Wolves will be back in the Premier League 

Well. I'm a politician, not a miracle worker.

But I like our chances. We've done it before. We'll do it again.

Just think about this city's motto.  

Out of darkness cometh light.

It was chosen by people who knew what dark days were. Who believed in the dawn nonetheless.

It was chosen by people who knew love in the ruins.

Chosen by people who forged the chains and cast the anchors that held this country steady.

Well, a new golden age is coming.

For Wolverhampton. For Dudley. For Sandwell. For Cannock. For Walsall. For Britain.

The Black Country built this extraordinary country once.  

And with Reform, we'll build it again.

Thank you."