Elected at the 2025 local elections to represent Crook division on Durham County Council, Cllr Paul Bean has kept a relatively low profile online, restricting himself to a few comments in his local Reform UK groups.
But, as often seems to be the case, Bean allows himself to speak more freely via an anonymous social media account. Bean makes use of a YouTube account to post
Most striking are Bean’s innermost thoughts on Reform and party leader Nigel Farage. Reacting to anti-Muslim activist Tommy Robinson’s tirade against Reform on 2 August, Bean announced that he would be quitting the party and following the extremist in joining Advance UK, the splinter party set up by ex-Reform Deputy Chairman Ben Habib.
While Robinson’s endorsement of Advance appeared to trigger this particular post, it is clear that Bean’s disillusionment with Reform goes much deeper; in posts from early 2024 he described Reform as “clueless nobodies” and “amateur.”
Bean decided to join the ranks of the clueless amateurs himself in July of that year, announcing that he had joined the party and hoped to be selected as a candidate. But by March this year, as Reform reeled from its bad-tempered fall out with Rupert Lowe MP, Bean was once again criticising the party harshly and mulling a defection, this time to UKIP.
He nonetheless decided to hand in his nomination papers two weeks later, and was duly elected to Durham County Council in May under the banner of Reform. Yet Bean has also levelled some very serious criticisms against Farage, including stating that he has “submitted” to Islam, that he despises Reform voters and even an apparent (and baseless) suggestion that he is implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal:
When not criticising his own party, Bean’s posts range from puerile to extreme, often using the language and rhetoric of the online far right. On a video discussing the EU, Bean asked if EU officials were aware that they would “get seriously hurt when the Boogaloo happens”, using a far-right slang term for a civil war, while on a video discussing Net Zero policies he predicted that violent revolution was imminent:
Embarrassingly for Reform, as the party tries to shore up its shortfall among women voters, some of his posts reveal a crude and misogynistic side to Cllr Bean, using slurs and offensive language to describe female anatomy:
Alarmingly, Bean works as a civil servant assessing asylum claims for the Home Office, a job he frequently references in his comments:
Since Advance is happy to accept Tommy Robinson and many of Reform’s cast-offs, we have little doubt that Cllr Bean would be welcomed with open arms. But will he jump, or will he be pushed?
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