Reform say they’re the best at vetting candidates. What are they smoking?

Last week Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesman, was asked if his party had a problem with vetting candidates for elections. 

“I would argue we’ve got the best vetting in the country,” he boasted on a podcast.

We would beg to differ.

Here is a brief glance at how Reform’s local and devolved elections campaign is going so far:

• Four of Reform’s 96 Welsh candidates have quit. These include their top candidate Corey Edwards, who posted a video of himself drinking a beer behind the wheel of a car, and was elsewhere photographed making a Nazi salute
• Five candidates of Reform’s 73 Scottish candidates have quit, including one who called Humza Yusuf “not British”. Another was accused of financial irregularities
• Reform’s Holyrood candidates still in the running include the party’s Scotland leader Malcolm Offord, who had to apologise for a grim homophobic joke…
• … And Senga Beresford, who called for all Muslims to be deported from the UK

• Meanwhile in England, Anas Huggan (Newcastle City Council), shared Britain First propaganda and said: “We want our country back”
• And Chris Parry (Hampshire and Solent mayoral), called a Jewish ambulance service “cosplayers”. Last year he said David Lammy, who was born in the UK, should “go home to the Caribbean”. Parry has been suspended

If this is Reform’s vetting at their best, we’d hate to see them at their worst.

🤮 Another success of candidate vetting

We’d also like to highlight Derek Bullock, standing for Bolton Council (Hulton ward) next month. He has a grim track record. A former supporter of the far-right English Democrats group, Bullock has posted BNP material on Facebook and called the Muslim politician Sayeeda Warsi a “cuckoo in the nest”. After the Manchester Arena bombing, his response was: “Shoot the Pakis on the spot.” When Bullock was in the Tories, he was expelled twice for Islamophobia. He’s evidently welcome in Reform.

🫤 Who’s delusional, exactly?

It’s been a bad few days for Staffordshire County Council. Last week, we broke the news about a senior Reform councillor named Lynn Dean and her racist comments. She posted on social media about the intelligence of black people and especially black Africans, calling them “backward” and “delusional in their desire to get one over white people”. In response to Britain First’s Ashlea Simon she also wrote: “Blacks have more than made up for what happened to other blacks in the past, with their violence and law breaking.” Dean has now been suspended and is listed as an independent. She has also resigned her seat on the local borough council.

☁️ Oh tell me why? Are there chemtrails in the sky?

In the wild world of conspiracy theorists, chemtrails are the belief that the government is spraying us with mind-control chemicals from airplanes to make us more subservient. The fact that these chemtrails look, and in fact, are identical to the condensation trails from the 12.45 EasyJet flight from Manchester to Alicante is besides the point. It’s all part of a top-level plan to control us!

Which makes it quite funny that Hayley Coles, Reform’s deputy leader of Staffordshire County Council (we did say it was a bad week for the council) seems to be a big believer in chemtrails. A keen poster in Chemtrails UK, a Facebook group, she has shared photos of clouds in the sky and posted in another group about the “Panscamic”, about jabs being “manipulation” and complaining about the “crimes against humanity” of the World Health Organisation.