While the Reform Party has stormed onto the 2024 general election scene, hitting double-figures in polls, vying with the Tories, we’re seeing a lot more of its candidates than the party would rather – if they’d ever looked at at all.
In early June a Channel 4 News report revealed the Horsham candidate Hugo Miller had linked his Facebook page to a video containing the N-word.
Later, Ian Gribbin, while also praising Putin and calling Churchill ‘abysmal’, said the UK would have fared ‘far better’ had it agreed to Hitler’s offer of remaining neutral while the Nazis took over Europe – blaming the country’s ‘warped mindset’ and its ‘weird notions of international morality rather than looking after its own people’ – a position that strikes at the patriotic heart of all who commemorate Britain’s sacrifices fighting the Nazis, plus dismisses Ralph Richardson’s view in the Brexiters’ cinematic holy of holies, The Battle of Britain, that ‘Hitler’s guarantees, guarantee nothing’.
Reform Party candidate Grant StClair-Armstrong, standing in Saffron Walden where formerly sat Kemi Badenoch, was then reported to have previously called on people to support the British National Party.
Reform Party candidate Jack Aaron, looking to oust Grant Shapps from Welwyn Hatfield, had posted on Twitter that Hitler was “brilliant” at using his personality to “inspire people into action” – though he condemned his “incoherent” rationale and “utter evil”, yet also called President Assad “gentle by nature” and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “legitimate”.
We discover that Reform’s Glasgow West candidate, Dionne Moore, was in fact a Brexit Party candidate Dionne Moore Cocozza in 2019 before standing down when accused of Islamophobia. More views from more candidates coming to light, ranging from wanting to deport Diane Abbott to decrying King Charles as weak, can be read here.
Reform’s reaction
Now Miller was dropped. StClair-Armstrong quit, saying he wrote it during a bad time in his life. Gribbin apologised, and the Reform Party (who may be Populist but are not far-right, oh no, no) said that was that. Moore? Still there. Gribbin, Aaron, we might venture they were simply making historical hypotheses of questionable worth, but …
And what did the newly returned big boss Farage have to say? He blamed ‘admin’, vetting failures by a company he’d hired (there he goes, blaming outsiders), hinting at sabotage as the company has suspiciously strong links to the Tories. Otherwise, he was ‘powerless’ to stop them being candidates – despite the party having dropped some already.
He said he’d only been in the job nine days before taking a Culture War counter-charge, that we were criticizing ‘how ordinary folk down the pub speak’ which the ex-public school, City, Coutts’ client knows so well. He earthily asided the Germans should ‘get a sense of humour’ re England fans singing ‘Ten German Bombers’ at the 2024 Euros, adding the Puritanism that prevented young men from drinking beer, singing and chanting, was pushing these Gen Z males into his camp.
That Blokey mask slipped when he dismissed the critics of his campaign with the antisemitic trope that they were organized by the Soros Foundation.. And of one in ten Reform candidates liking the Facebook page of Gary Raikes, leader of the fascist New British Union? Oh, they were just ‘unwitting’. A bag of snakes would be shocked by such writhing.
It was never the vetting
Whatever the fates of such minions, Reform’s established big guns are bad enough. See leading light Lee Anderson, the MP who defected to Reform to evade suspension by the Tories for refusing to retract his claim Islamists had got control of London mayor Sadiq Khan. See committed culture warrior Ben Habib, veteran of 2016 and ex Brexit Party MEP, who said ‘absolutely’ that refugees crossing the Channel in boats should be left to drown, even drawing opprobrium from Julia Hartley-Brewer. To his defence came Richard Tice, who when leading the Brexit Party’s Hartlepool campaign in 2019 praised the industriousness of his helpers who had some pretty nasty, bigoted views.
It’s all ‘immigration’ and ‘stop the boats’ now, and it was in 2016, as it’s always been, he infamous campaign that Leave EU’s former CEO Andy Wigmore admitted took inspiration from the propaganda techniques of the Nazis (and ISIS) saying, “take away all the hideous horror and that kind of stuff, it was very clever, the way they managed to do what they did.
“In its pure marketing sense, you can see the logic of what they were saying, why they were saying it, and how they presented things, and the imagery.” Nigel’s most famous victory won in no small measure by stoking racial angst and division, but without even meaning it, just “pure marketing”. That is cold.
The celebrity ally of Europe’s far right. His reiterated praise for Vladimir Putin – unabashed support for convicted felon and rapist, Donald Trump (succored with support from the KKK) notwithstanding.
The posh half of Steve Bannon’s terrible twins with Tommy Robinson.
The public schoolboy who led the cadets in charge to march singing Horst Wessel Lied, among other Nazi anthems.
This is the thing, this information is all out there, but it’s not hitting home. None of it seems to count. Many don’t care. Too many, however many, think it’s great. Reform is on double-digits in the polls, vying with the Tories who seem on the brink of an implosion that could leave Farage’s mob as the de facto opposition. Farage indeed may yet break his electoral duck (or dolphin) and this time win a seat in Clacton, opening the gateway to the Commons for all his real backers.
And, yet, he wouldn’t have to win. It’s near enough now that he screws the Tories by costing them their seats – it’s not for the good of the country, it’s for the wrecking of its hegemonic ruling party, and not because they’ve become bitterly corrupt but because now he’s poisoned its collective mind and yet he is for now utterly unaccountable, untouchable, like all his lot behind Brexit, and may remain so. All the while, dominating the airwaves, hogging the debate, warping it.
God help us all.
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