Is Reform really election ready? Despite the party’s bullish proclamations, the surprise election announcement has caught the party on the hop, and their preparations are woefully behind schedule.
HOPE not hate can reveal:
Read on for a closer look at the party’s crankish candidates and parlous preparation…
As the nation woke up on Thursday to the first full day of General Election campaigning, Reform UK delivered a flurry of important announcements.
Firstly, despite endless teasing and “will-he-won’t-he” speculation, the party dashed its supporters’ hopes by announcing that Honorary Chair Nigel Farage would not be running for parliament. He has plumped instead to assist “the grassroots campaign” for his old chum Donald Trump in November’s Presidential Election, a statement that surely stretches the definition of “grassroots” beyond any recognised definition.
We were also informed that Reform’s tetchy and charmless leader Richard Tice would not be running in Hartlepool, as had been advertised on the website for at least six months, but had suddenly decamped 160 miles down the A1 to Boston and Skegness in Lincolnshire.
Third: The party admitted that it has only selected 500 candidates of the 632 needed, but said it has “many more” going through the selection process.
With all of the above, the “WE’RE READY” graphics posted to social media the same morning seem much more like a desperate aspiration than an accurate description of the state of play.
But Reform’s problems are even worse than they seem. For starters, the party’s website shows it has only selected 463 candidates, not 500, and therefore needs to fill 169 vacancies in the next fortnight if it is to fulfil its promise of running a full slate.
And even the 463 candidates they’ve got in place right now cannot necessarily be relied on to stick around til nomination papers are handed in:
Our analysis shows that an astonishing 110 seats have seen their candidates dropped or swapped since January, four of which have actually had two different candidates dropped in that time.
And this shedding of candidates may not be over. You might imagine that, given the number of embarrassing and hateful candidates that the party has dropped already, Reform UK would be extra careful when vetting their replacements, but HOPE not hate can today reveal another two candidates whose names should be nowhere near a nominations paper:
Drafted in to replace a candidate who moved to a neighbouring constituency, Hugo Miller is yet another dud pick.
A longtime political activist, Miller claims to have worked closely with UKIP and Nigel Farage since 1994, and he went on to stand as the party’s candidate for Horsham at the 1997, 2001 and 2005 General Elections.
HOPE not hate can reveal that Miller holds views on black people that are particularly unsettling, such as his view in June 2020 that black Americans – who he regularly refers to as “negroes” – should feel “gratitude” for being allowed to integrate into American society:
In another comment from the same thread, he complained that a Facebook friend had blocked him after he used a racial slur about black people:
“Then I posted a video of a gang of Black rioters, whom I described as ‘jungle bunnies’, violently attacking a police car and crawling all over it to try and gain access to the officers inside. […] the reason I described them as ‘jungle bunnies’ was not because of their skin colour, but because of their behaviour, which reminded me of nothing so much as the baboons at Windsor Safari Park. But it was all to little effect – she still dumped me!”
Facebook post, 25 June 2020
Nor are his views on Muslims any less offensive; Miller endorses the “Kalergi plan” conspiracy that migrants are being used to destroy European nations, and that Muslim immigration means that Europe is destined to become part of an Islamic state:
“The Jews assimilate effotlessly into British society and British culture. Unlike the Muslims, whose culture and values are completely at loggerheads with our own in practically every way. They have not the slightest desire to assimilate – it is their belief that we sould bend to their rules.[…]
Facebook post, 9 July 2020
Not only are dubious Muslims pouring into our country un-checked, they are breeding like rabbits. The bald fact – and this is mathematic, not racism – is that UNLESS THINGS CHANGE, Britain will become a Muslim majority country within the next twenty years, and an Islamic State not long after that.”
Standing in Leeds West and Pudsey, candidate Andrea Whitehead harbours a hatred for the London Mayor Sadiq Khan that is unusually pronounced even among Reform UK candidates, and it seems clear that his ethnicity is a factor in her loathing. She replied “True !!” to one Facebook comment which referred to Khan as an “undercover Jihadist not for English” [sic] and liked others that said “his Muslim mates will get the scrote back in” and that “only Ethnic British should be allowed a vote”
She has also made and endorsed statements that incite violence against Khan. In a status posted to her candidate campaign page she said she would “love to snip” off his nose, and in another joked about deliberately running him over.
She has also “liked” a number of comment from other Facebook users that target Khan with racist abuse and allusions to violence, including one that said “He should not have any say on anything, he’s a bloody Foreigner” and another that said said there “must be someone out there that could make him disappear for good”
Alongside her obsessive dislike of Sadiq Khan, Whitehead has a keen interest in a wide range of crank conspiracy theories. repeatedly posting memes to her Facebook page that refer to “my tinfoil hat” and suggesting that conspiracy theorists are simply people who “figure out the truth before most people.”
Despite her rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change, Whitehead IS concerned about the weather. Specifically, she appears to believe that the weather is being changed by so-called “chemtrails”, the conspiracy theory which holds that the government is using aeroplanes to spray dangerous chemicals onto the population.
The kindest thing that can be said about Whitehead as a candidate is that her indiscriminate sharing of political memes occasionally leads to some unintentional humour, such as when she reposted in earnest a clearly satirical image of Nigel Farage:
Responding to the flurry of deselections that the party was forced to undertake in April, Richard Tice suggested that his party had conducted initially vetting on its candidates and any offensive comments must have been posted at a later date:
The offensive comments unearthed in many cases date from well before the party would have been vetting their candidates, however. Hugo Miller was only announced as a candidate on 21 May this year, yet the racist comments about black people highlighted in this article – which are viewable to anyone on his Facebook profile – date back to 2020.
If the five years of buildup to this election were not enough time to assemble a full slate of well-vetted candidates , we can only fear that the 169 candidates due to be waved through over the next two weeks will be even more of an embarrassment.
HOPE not hate will, of course, be keeping a close eye on the situation.
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