Nigel Farage and Richard Tice announced how Reform UK would crackdown an excess of barber shops across the country.
The honorary president and leader of the far-right party launched their election campaign today by honing in on immigration, “cheap overseas labour” – and the long list of places where people can get their hair cut.
LBC reporter Henry Riley asked the pair: “What is the issue with barber shops?
“You said you’d investigate them, are we going to see Detective Chief Inspector Farage or who is ...”
Farage replied: “Do you ever actually get out of London?
“You need to go out more, sunshine! You really do! You can see high streets with five, six, seven barber shops in them.
“Thousands of new barber shops.”
“i’m just wondering what the accusation against them, I’m just curious,” the journalist asked again.
While Farage just chuckled knowingly, Tice said: “You go to towns, and people are saying shop, after shop after shop – I don’t know, maybe it was Covid.
“Maybe our hair is growing faster. Seriously.”
Covid is actually thought to trigger temporary hair loss, or shedding, in some people.
Tice continued: “How come lots of these new barber shops, how come they’ve got no customers in them?
“How come they all want cash only?”
Then, without evidence, he claimed: “These are fronts for money laundering.
“Someone has to talk about it, someone has to have the courage to say that the authorities – they’re either incompetent, and don’t know about it – I’ve been talking about it on a variety of broadcast channels for about two years now.”
He said local authorities and the police need to “do something about it” because it is “wrong and it is the laundering of money”.
He then compared it to “the candy shops popping up” presumably referring to the investigation into the US-style stores on Oxford Circus which were found with more than £500,000 of counterfeit goods in mid-2022.
Tice added: “I’m very happy with my barber but there’s clearly something going badly wrong.”
Reform’s manifesto says “foreign gang crime” accounts for most organised UK crime, costing £37billion per year.
It says: “This includes drugs, people trafficking and money laundering through barber shops, car washes and nail bars.”