Reform is not a racist party

An undercover investigation by ITV is the latest storm for Reform UK to weather. Recorded by secret cameras, several Reform UK councillors were caught saying undeniably racist things as they campaigned in May’s council elections.

Alan Feeney, a Reform councillor in Solihull, said local Asian families were ‘absolute parasites’, and called for a solution to this issue in no uncertain terms: ‘Drag them out of their homes, stick them on planes and fuck them off to Pakistan.’ Dean Miller, a councillor in Bromley, was filmed calling for King Charles to be decapitated, because he is – supposedly – secretly ‘a fucking Muslim’. Sexist remarks were also caught on camera. The revelations form part of the upcoming documentary, Undercover: A Year in Reform, which is due to be broadcast on ITV on Sunday.

Reform has responded to the scandal by saying ‘a handful of individuals who do not share our values will initially make it through vetting. This is the same for all organisations.’

Of course, MPs from parties apart from Reform have jumped on this for all it’s worth. Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, posted on X:

‘This is chilling. I feel for anyone watching this tonight who is frightened to see such racism and hatred festering in their community. It’s the very worst of what we’re seeing in Trump’s America. We can’t let it become Farage’s Britain.’

I have some perspective on this issue, having a great deal of experience talking to activists in all of Britain’s main political parties. More to the point, I recently spent 18 months travelling around Britain interviewing hundreds of Reform activists, candidates and councillors for my new book, The Rise of Reform: The Inside Story of Britain’s Political Disruptors. In all the interviews I conducted, I can say, hand on heart, that I never heard anything I considered to be remotely racist. The spiciest stuff I put in the book, so you can judge for yourself.

Does that mean there are no racists in Reform at all? Of course not. To claim that would be silly. Yet it’s worth looking at the parties that are now gleefully smearing Reform as a fundamentally racist institution, if only to see how they stack up on the same issue.

I have spent a reasonable amount of time around Conservative members, activists and representatives. I have worked with many Tories and consider a few of them among my closest friends. I have attended more Conservative Party conferences than I can count and I have spoken to hundreds and hundreds of people within the Tory Party over the years.

In all that time, only two people have ever said anything to me that I considered racist. On one of those occasions, the person in question said something so foul that it made the Reform councillors in ITV’s exposé seem woke (for clarity, this person was not a Tory MP, just a party member). Now, this proves to me that the Conservative Party has some racists within it. Yet calling the Conservative Party institutionally racist because a handful of people within it say terrible things would be ludicrous. If you speak to several hundred people within an organisation and only a couple of them turn out to be racist, calling the organisation itself racist overall would be extremely unfair.

That’s before we turn to the Greens. Earlier this month, the Green Party of England and Wales voted for a motion stating that ‘Zionism is Racism’, which calls for the complete erasure of the Jewish State and effectively bars practising Jews from the party. It feels strange to be describing Reform as ‘institutionally racist’ based on a few councillors saying horrible things, when the Greens have made horrible things part of the party’s offer to the electorate. Meanwhile, Green Party council candidates have called Jews ‘cockroaches’ and an ‘abomination’, and two have even been arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred.

The Labour Party has done brilliantly at trying to rid itself of anti-Semitism over the past five years, something for which credit is due. Yet Labour will have some form of a lingering anti-Semitism problem for years to come, perhaps even for a generation. Even so, I would still never call the Labour Party institutionally racist – again, because a few bad activists with awful worldviews do not and should not define a party.

Reform, as a party that defines itself partly by being to the right of the Conservatives, will always attract racists and bigots, just by the very nature of how entryism into political parties works. Reform UK should do as much as possible to root these people out. And yes, sometimes I do think they do not do enough on this front. But I come back again to the hundreds of activists I interviewed for The Rise of Reform. These are mostly decent people who are worried that their country is falling apart and want to stop that from happening.

Whether you agree with Reform or not is beside the point. Defining a party based on a handful of individuals is unfair. And when this criticism comes from Reform UK’s rivals, it is also deeply hypocritical.

Nick Tyrone is the author of The Rise of Reform, published by Swift.