It cannot be denied any longer – Reform is riddled with racism

After election campaigners for Nigel Farage were filmed voicing violent racist and homophobic slurs, the leader suggested such people end up in his party because ‘they haven’t got the BNP to go to anymore’. But when it comes to hate speech, Reform has got form, says Femi Oluwole

Nigel Farage said he was ‘dismayed’ by the ‘appalling sentiments’ made by Reform UK canvassers (Getty)

If you were shocked that an activist working for Reform UK’s leader Nigel Farage has called Rishi Sunak a “f****** P***” , and argued that people crossing the English Channel in small boats should be used as “target practice” by the army, where exactly have you been?

The history of Reform UK – the populist right-wing party with roots in Ukip, and which started in 2019 as the Brexit Party, before changing its name after our exit from the EU – perfectly explains why people with such views end up there. Farage, who condemned these violent remarks and racist slurs, saying he is “dismayed” by them, today went on Loose Women and suggested the reason such people end up in his party is because “they haven't got the BNP to go to anymore”.

It seems to me that racist stereotyping is at the literal foundations of Reform UK. Catherine Blaiklock, who founded the party, once said Black people were inherently violent due to excess testosterone; she then had to leave it in 2019, after Islamophobic tweets were uncovered, though she later described them as “out of character” and admitted they were unacceptable. Their only MP to date, Lee Anderson, jumped ship from the Conservative Party after he accused Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, of being controlled by Islamists.

In my opinion, bigotry against Black and Brown people runs through Reform UK from start to finish. When Rishi Sunak missed part of the D-Day commemorations earlier this month, Farage said it was because Sunak “doesn’t understand our culture”. Why would that be his attack line? Everyone who has grown up in the UK understands how important D-Day commemorations are, especially to Conservative voters. But Farage chose to frame Rishi Sunak’s decision in a way that implies he’s not one of us.

During the 2016 referendum, Farage unveiled his infamous “Breaking Point” anti-immigration poster showing Middle Eastern asylum seekers in mainland Europe. Our EU membership would not have allowed them to come here. The only way they could have is if they had integrated into a EU country over several years and become citizens of that country. They might then have chosen to come to the UK as German or French citizens. But at that point, the only relevance of Farage’s poster that I can see would be to point out their ethnic origin.

Farage defended the poster during his recent stint on I’m A Celebrity. In a recent Sky News interview, he also said Muslims are “against” British values – and repeated the findings of a poll commissioned by the Henry Jackson Society, a right-wing think tank, that suggested 46 per cent of British Muslims “supported” the terrorist organisation Hamas. But the 1,000 respondents had been asked who they had more sympathy for – Hamas, or the Israeli government, which has killed tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza.

Farage used the statistic in a misleading way, to paint nearly half of British Muslims as terrorist supporters. He has used Brown faces to scare people about European migration, and accuses a PM with Indian heritage of not understanding our culture. He has also publicly condemned the comments of Andrew Parker, the Reform activist who called Sunak a “f****** P***”. But Parker himself has since said he regrets the language he used, and claimed it was just “typical chaps down the pub talk”.

From my experience, what Reform UK supporters say to each other in private tells a different story. Last weekend, I managed to get into their Stafford rally, where their deputy leader Ben Habib warned Reform candidates: “Anything you might have said in innocent company, not knowing how it was going to be taken out of context later, will be taken out of context.”

Habib’s intervention came not long after a Reform candidate was found to have praised Hitler.

But this isn’t the first time people involved in one of Farage’s campaigns have praised the Nazis. Reform leaders Richard Tice and Nigel Farage also ran the Brexit campaign Leave.EU, an organisation that posted cartoons of a Jewish Holocaust survivor holding puppet strings controlling Tony Blair. Their communications director Andy Wigmore, when asked about their campaign, said Nazi propaganda was “very clever”, and that the kind of campaign he ran with the now leaders of Reform UK was “not new” to the Nazis.

George Jones, a long-time Reform activist who has also been out canvassing for Farage in Clacton, was filmed by Channel 4 News making homophobic comments, using the F-word to refer to gay people, and calling the Pride flag “degenerate”.

Farage said the comments were “drunk and vulgar”. But there is no longer any excuse for ignorance about Reform UK. At the Stafford rally, Habib attacked the concept of being “woke” (against social injustice) because it “promote[s] ethnic minorities, religious minorities, minority sexual preferences, and then the whole transgender ideology lot… more often than not, to the detriment of the majority”.

Reform UK admits that the Brexit they were created to promote has failed. Its candidates in Stafford have said that Brexit has made us poorer – so the narrative that they are the real champions of the working class is dead. It seems to me all they have left to offer is naked bigotry. The question is: will voters remember that at this election, and the next?