Reform UK: racism in the ranks

“It’s been more than two years since Nigel Farage promised to expel racist and nasty people from the party,” said Michael Crick in The i Paper. Back in 2024, the Reform UK leader referred to them as a “few bad apples”, insisting that they’d soon be “long gone... You have my 100% promise on that.” Yet a shocking documentary broadcast on ITV on Sunday has shown that this promise was “worthless”.

‘Louts, loons and loudmouths’

In footage covertly recorded for “Undercover: A Year in Reform”, several of the party’s councillors were caught using extreme and highly offensive language about ethnic minorities. Alan Feeney, a councillor in Solihull, describes his local area as “infested” with Asians. “Drag them out their homes, stick them on planes and f**k them off to Pakistan,” he says. His colleague Jamie Campbell suggests burying pork chops on the site of a proposed mosque. In Bromley, Dean Miller refers to King Charles as “a f**king Muslim” who should have his head cut off for treason.

Farage has tried to brush off this latest scandal, said Stephen Daisley in The Daily Telegraph, accusing the show’s makers of “probable criminal activity”, and pointing out that the councillors in question have quit Reform or been suspended. But instead, he should be asking himself why “louts, loons and loudmouths” still find a home in his party. This is frustrating for its supporters. In policy terms, Reform is gaining substance: the party recently set out clear proposals for tackling crime and illegal immigration; but this new professionalism “makes it all the more inexcusable” that it is still “so rankly amateur on vetting... and institutional culture”.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

‘Skin-crawling’

It “wasn’t the racism that shocked me most”, said Poppy Jay in The i Paper. It was vile, but I expected that. It was the comments made by one of the councillors about a female Reform colleague. “If it was my daughter,” he said of this woman, “it’d still be bath night on a Thursday.” “WHAT?” This was “genuinely skin-crawling”; and yet I fear that there will have been people who saw the footage and who were not horrified – but delighted.

The polls suggest otherwise, said James Frayne in The Daily Telegraph. A year ago, Farage’s upstart party was ahead of the pack on 27%, and the extremism or eccentricity of some of its members was excused as teething problems. But as the scandals have mounted up, Reform has dropped to third place. Farage should pay heed, said The Times. “However frustrated Britons may be with the status quo, fewer and fewer of them are willing to look kindly on Reform’s antics as a price worth paying for change.”