Oh dear, it seems like the election scandals are coming thick and fast at the moment. Today, it was the turn of Reform UK, after it was revealed that one of the party’s candidates claimed Britain would be ‘far better’ if we had ‘taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality’ instead of fighting the Nazis during the second world war. Talk about a vote winner…
Ian Gribbin, Reform’s candidate for the Bexhill and Battle constituency, has caused a spot of bother for Nigel Farage’s party after a selection of his online posts came to light today. Commenting on the UnHerd website in July 2022, the Bexhill candidate wrote:
‘Britain would be in a far better state today had we taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality…. but oh no Britain’s warped mindset values weird notions of international morality rather than looking after its own people.’
In a separate post written in the same month, Gribbin went on to criticise war hero Winston Churchill, writing: ‘In Britain specifically we need to exorcise the cult of Churchill and recognise that in both policy and military strategy, he was abysmal.’
Gribbin was also found to have stated that women are the ‘sponging gender’ and should be ‘deprived of health care’. What a charmer…
The posts have put Farage’s party in a rather sticky spot now that the candidate nomination deadline has passed, meaning that he can’t be replaced in Bexhill. Reform UK appears to be sticking with its man for now, saying the comments were not ‘endorsements’ but rather ‘written with an eye to inconvenient perspectives and truths’, adding: ‘As for the feminism point, his tongue is so firmly in his cheek one should be able to spot it from 100 yards.’
A Reform spokesman continued: ‘His historical perspective of what the UK could have done in the 30s was shared by the vast majority of the British establishment including the BBC of its day, and is probably true.’
As for Gribbin, he issued an apology this afternoon, saying: ‘I apologise for these old comments and withdraw them unreservedly and the upset that they have caused. I myself are upset at the way these comments were taken out of context especially when my mother was the daughter of Russian Jews fleeing persecution.’
It’s only been a few days since Rishi Sunak faced widespread public displeasure for leaving the D-Day commemorations early. It remains to be seen if the residents of Bexhill and Battle will be similarly unimpressed with their Reform candidate…
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