Reform UK’s election campaign hasn’t got off to the best start. Richard Tice’s party has already had to drop ten prospective parliamentary candidates after some rather unsavoury social media posts were highlighted by media organisations and campaign groups. The Reform leader has since said that his party had published its candidate list early so that outside organisations could help vet them and that he welcomes the ‘extra scrutiny’. It does, however, raise rather serious questions about the quality of his own vetting processes…
Here is the full list of the candidates ditched so far:
Ian Harris
Harris, a self-proclaimed ‘pastafarian’, is a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He fell out with the DVLA in 2015 after he insisted he should be allowed to wear a colander on his head in his driving licence photo, comparing it to Muslim women wearing a hijab. An account run by Harris was found to have liked tweets by former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson and former British National Party leader Nick Griffin. And, as it happens, Reform leader may have inadvertently safeguarded himself against a future rebellion by ditching Harris. Among the former candidate’s liked tweets were several attacks on Tice himself — including one by Robinson which read: ‘F*** Reform under his leadership. It’s establishment run.’ A narrow miss…
Amodio Amato
The Mail on Sunday uncovered a number of offensive social media posts by Amato — including his description of London as an ‘Islamic State’ and a post that said there would be a ‘Muslim army run by Sadiq Khan’. Amato has also said the First Minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, is ‘most certainly a Hamas terrorist supporter’. But, as his comments were caught too late, his name remains on the ballot paper for the Woodfield ward at the Stevenage Borough Council elections this May. Unlucky…
Jonathan Kay
Kay, who was the party’s South Ribble candidate, was dropped by Tice’s party after remarks he had made online in 2019 came to light. He claimed that Africans had IQs ‘among the lowest in the world’ and that Muslims ‘never coexist with others’. Kay was dropped by the party after campaign group Hope Not Hate discovered his posts.
Mick Greenhough
The Reform candidate for Orpington was ditched by Tice after he was found to have tweeted last year that ‘the only solution’ was to ‘remove the Muslims from our territory’. Four years previously, Greenhough had also posted on Twitter that Ashkenazi Jews were a ‘problem’ and had ‘caused the world massive misery’. Greenhough’s comments were also discovered by Hope Not Hate, and he was removed from Reform’s candidate list soon after.
Peter Addis
Sir David Attenborough should be ‘killed off’, Addis had said on social media, and the former Reform candidate for South Shropshire also called Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, a ‘slag’ and a ‘trollop’. The fridge engineer was found to have written rather vulgarly that anal sex ‘is where brown babies come from’ and was banned from Facebook for 30 days after using a racist term to describe Chinese people. Since being dropped by Reform UK, Addis has apologised but says that people take his remarks ‘literally, when it’s a joke. It’s just being silly really.’
Benjamin ‘Beau’ Dade
Formerly Reform’s candidate for South Swindon, Dade was dropped after Hope Not Hate revealed that he had written an article for the Mallard in 2022 about deporting ‘millions’ of British citizens to ‘rid itself of the foreign plague we have been diseased with’. He called for ‘millions of foreigners and their dependants’ to be removed from the country and advocated for ‘some form of purge’ of civil servants who were ‘corrupted by traitors’. Dade added: ‘The reality of this policy will inevitably be messy. Whole families crying and shrieking and being violent and destructive when they are being detained.’ Lovely…
Ginny Ball
Ball was Reform’s candidate for Rutland and Stamford before it emerged that she had told British-born BBC radio presenter Nihal Arthanayake on Twitter to ‘emigrate to a black-only country’ and suggested that British media personality Shola Mos-Shogbamimu should be deported. And Ball waded into the Elgin Marbles debate to air her view that the UK should, er, ‘give all immigrants back to their countries’. Mr S isn’t much clearer about where Ball stands on the Marbles themselves though…
Nick Davies
Davies, the prospective parliamentary candidate for North East Bedfordshire, resigned from Reform UK after the party ‘spoke to him about the content of his social media’. One image featured pictures of Saqid Khan and, um, Adolf Hitler with the text: ‘Evil doesn’t die. It reinvents itself’. Davies was also found to have to referred to immigrants as an ‘invasion’, calling them a ‘silent army housed in hotels’.
David Carpin
Reform’s former prospective parliamentary candidate for Henley-on-Thames was dropped by Tice after — you guessed it — his social media posts came to light. Carpin had compared transgender and non-binary people to Hitler, called gay pride a ‘sin’ and replaced stars in the European flag with swastikas. He posted an collage of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, transgender TikToker Dylan Mulvaney, non-binary singer Sam Smith and Hitler under text reading: ‘Room is completely engulfed in flames, you can only save ONE…’.
Tice fired Carpin when live on air and warned that ‘people need to learn lesson from that’, adding: ‘You’ve got freedom of expression, that’s the joy of being in a democracy like ours but I’ve also got my freedom of choice as to who is going to be my candidate.’
Roger Hoe
Once Reform’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Beverley and Holderness, Hoe was ditched by the party for his social media posts. He has circulated rather questionable posts online, alongside a number of conspiracy theories — including those about the World Economic Forum, chemtrails and the Russian war in Ukraine. Oh dear.
An unimpressed Tice has since issued a warning to his candidates, telling them: ‘For heaven’s sake, if you’re going to have a glass on a Friday night then don’t use social media.’ The Reform leader went on:
If it’s not sensible, if someone lets us down hereafter then, frankly, if it is inappropriate, if it is unacceptable, then we’re going to part company. You can have your freedom of speech, your freedom of expression. That doesn’t mean you have the right to represent Reform UK as a parliamentary candidate — because that’s our choice.
That’s them told.
But a number of Reform’s remaining candidates have already attracted media attention. Some have shared Covid conspiracies and outlandish ‘Great Reset’ theories that may cause voters to question their credibility. And then there’s the strange case of Iris Leask, the party’s candidate for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, who has rather bafflingly called for meat-eaters to turn cannibal and the human race to be ‘obliterated’. That’s one way of wiping out your competition, at least…
But now that ten candidates have gone, will the ones that remain heed Tice’s warnings? Or will Reform be forced to drop more candidates? Watch this space…
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