Meet the SEVEN Reform candidates in Doncaster who posted Hitler memes, white nationalist articles, and antisemitic conspiracy theories

Gregory Davis and Harry Shukman

Reform UK is trying hard to convince voters that it is now “professional”. After last year’s shambolic election, when he had to remove more than 100 candidates for racism and extremism, Nigel Farage concluded “amateurism let us down”. He and his team have now said that the party has 400 branches, 223,000 members and has “professionalised”. Zia Yusuf, the party chairman, boasted last week that “the talent pool that has availed itself to us…is incredible”.

However, a new HOPE not hate series investigating Reform candidates at the upcoming local elections raises questions about its claim to be a smooth-running political machine. Our analysis of the group’s candidates in Doncaster reveals seven individuals — more than a tenth of the total — who have once again failed to be picked up by Reform’s vetting procedures.

They are:

1) Mark Broadhurst (Hatfield)

Broadhurst posted a photograph of Hitler alongside the caption “For fuck sake If I had chosen muslims I would have been a fucking legend [sic]”. He also posted the image above entitled “How to Make a Muslim”.

2) Steve Plater (Adwick-Le-Street and Carcroft)

A fan of Patriotic Alternative (PA), the neo-Nazi organisation, Plater has reposted six PA articles on his Facebook page. One claimed “we are now living under a multicultural and anti-White tyranny”. He has also written that Muslims “can’t wash off the smell of donkeys” and “cook over burning camel shit”.

3) Paul Cutts (Wheatley Hills & Intake)

Cutts has voiced Islamophobic conspiracy theories that the religion plans to “out Breed us, And take Over [sic]”. He has called the anti-Muslim extremist and serial criminal Stephen Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) “A PATRIOT”, and called on his followers to attend a demonstration in October 2024. Elsewhere he posted in favour of Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer.

4) Isaiah-John Reasbeck (Hexthorpe & Balby North)

Reasbeck has said that Bradford is “one of the biggest shitholes in Europe” and blamed it on the Muslim population. He further said people should be “fucking terrified” of Islam.

5) Guy Aston (Wheatley Hills & Intake)

Aston has posted about the so-called “Kalergi Plan”, a conspiracy theory that claims white people are the victims of a genocidal plot. A post he liked earlier this month claimed the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, and the Baruchs — all Jewish banking families — are “responsible for funding Kalergi’s genocidal ideology”.

6) Gerald “Ged” Squire (Norton & Askern)

Last year, Squire wrote in support of Tommy Robinson no fewer than 41 times. “Release him now or you may see a different tolerant people,” he said last month. He elsewhere said that Robinson’s jail sentence (the result of a guilty plea) was “so unjust”. “They will never silence Tommy,” he said.

7) Howard Rimmer (Roman Ridge)

Rimmer is a fan of the Traditional Britain Group (TBG), a far-right organisation that advocates for “repatriation”, a euphemism for mass deportations of immigrants and citizens of foreign descent. “We are importing low IQ people and when they commit heinous crimes they are given more lenient sentences by the Judges [sic],” said one of Rimmer’s reposts of the TBG. “They come from shit countries and want everything that we have built,” said another. Rimmer has also called for a boycott of “unChristian” shops and praised both Tommy Robinson and Anne Marie Waters, an anti-Islam activist.

‘We were let down – that amateurism let us down’

After the general election last year, Farage said his party was let down by “amateurism”. “We are just at that stage of our development, we weren’t big enough, wealthy enough, professional enough to vet general election candidates properly,” he said. In the intervening year, it looks like very little has changed indeed.