Farage’s biggest weakness will be exposed by an early election

It’s been more than two years since Nigel Farage promised to expel racist and nasty people from his party. “Those few bad apples,” he said in July 2024, “will be long gone and we will never have any of their type back in our organisation. You have my 100 per cent promise on that.” ITV Exposure’s shocking film – to be aired in full this Sunday – shows Farage’s “100 per cent promise” was worthless. Several Reform UK councillors are shown on film speaking in the most toxic and offensive terms about ethnic minorities. Alan Feeney, a councillor in Solihull, joined Farage’s party from the Conservatives last year. He complains that his area is “infested” with Asians and that they’re “absolute parasites”, and he refuses to canvass the houses of people with Asian names. Feeney advocates what he calls the “nuclear option, like literally drag them out of their homes, stick them on planes and f**k off to Pakistan”. On Monday, Feeney told ITV he “mutually agreed” to resign from Reform citing “personal reasons”.Dean Miller, a Reform councillor from Bromley, south London, says white people have been “ethnically cleansed” out of London. “The Muslim thing is gonna be the thing that takes over everything and then everyone just has one religion. He even suggests the King has already converted. “Charles is a f**king Muslim,” he says on camera. “Someone from the inside saw a f**king prayer mat and all that in one of his f**king rooms.” “I think that’s f**king traitorous. Cut the c**t’s head off, sorry!”Miller has told ITV he was “heavily medicated for a chronic pain condition” and has also now left Reform. In response, Reform told ITV News: “Where members, activists and councillors have clearly behaved inappropriately, investigations have commenced. In some cases, there have been suspensions and due process must be followed. “Reform UK has improved and prioritised its vetting procedures, but from time to time, a handful of individuals who do not share our values will initially make it through vetting. This is the same for all organisations.” “Inappropriately” – as if their words were simply bad manners? What a grossly understated way of describing sickening and outright racism and nastiness. The weakness of their response suggests Reform don’t even grasp the scale of the problem in their own ranks. Despite regular claims that they have robust vetting procedures, dreadful candidates keep getting through. It’s only been four months since the crucial Makerfield by-election when Reform candidate Rob Kenyon was exposed as having made a string of misogynistic comments on social media. “Women can’t ref [referee], drive or give directions,” Kenyon had said, whilst also giving a thumbs-up emoji to someone who’d graphically described what he’d like to do sexually with the TV presenter Carol Vorderman. It wasn’t too late for Reform to replace Kenyon – a clear “bad apple” – with another candidate, but they didn’t. Much worse, last November the former leader of Reform in Wales, Nathan Gill, disgraced the party in a very different way when he was jailed for more than 10 years for taking bribes to make pro-Russian statements in the European Parliament and in the media. What ITV has exposed in a superb investigation which lasted a whole year, isn’t reasoned debate reflecting understandable concerns about immigration into this country, or the problems of assimilating people from different cultures, but pure, shocking hatred and nastiness – not from ordinary Reform members and activists, but people who have been selected to represent the party and supposedly checked for their views. At a national level, Reform seems to have moved noticeably to the right in recent months, trying to outbid the revived Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch, and the new boys of the nationalist right, Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain. It is especially depressing to hear senior Reform politicians make what many people would regard as racist statements – for example Zia Yusuf’s suggestion that Labour’s candidate in the recent Holborn by-election wasn’t British. More bizarre still was Suella Braverman saying she’s only British not English, because her parents were born abroad. Such statements, and the tougher talk about deportation from the top, can only give racists within the party more confidence about saying what they think. The party still has more than 2,300 local councillors and many of them – probably the majority – won’t be racist, sexist or full of visceral hatred. They will inevitably form a large part of the pool of contenders who’d like to become candidates for Westminster at the next election too. Alan Feeney and Dean Miller have now left Reform so can’t stand at the next election, but the thought of people like them, with their views, becoming Members of Parliament – or even ministers – is horrific. Reform hasn’t announced a single candidate for the next election, which is surprising when Farage says he expects Andy Burnham to call an election and Reform UK are ready. For the recent assembly elections in Wales, Reform didn’t announce its slate of candidates until the very last minute, presumably to stop journalists investigating their backgrounds. It would be stupid for Reform to play the same trick at the general election, and just publish a list of 630 candidates days before the close of nominations. That would be recipe for huge embarrassment as day after day, the media could well expose a string of Reform nominees as racists, sexists and criminals. “Oh my God, we’re all going end up in the papers,” one of Alan Feeney’s colleagues from Solihull prophetically said after their conversation degenerated into highly misogynistic comments about a female party colleague. How right he was! To avoid more highly damaging media coverage, Reform should devote a large chunk ofthe notorious £72m recently received to a proper, well-staffed vetting unit that digs a lot deeper than what might be found online. Ultimately, however, you can’t delve into people’s minds to find their inner thoughts, let alone know when those horrendous thoughts might burst into the open.