Subscriptions
Read our Monthly Magazine
And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system
Several more Reform UK candidates have been caught sharing social media content that is racist, promotes conspiracy theories and fringe far-right ideas.
The discovery comes less than three weeks after a Byline Times report led to the party – which insists it isn’t far-right – confirming it had dropped Andrew Raw, its candidate for Darlington, after he was accused of sharing “extreme racism and hateful ideology”.
At that time, it was thought Raw was at least the 11th candidate Reform has had to bin since the party gained its first MP, following Lee Anderson’s defection from the Conservative Party in March.
It also comes as the party faced another election set-back in recent days when – hours before nominations closed – Tom Wellings, the Reform candidate for the new seat of Stone, Great Wryly and Penkridge in Staffordshire, quit and put out a statement endorsing former cabinet minister Sir Gavin Williamson.
Before nominations closed there had been speculation that as many as six Conservative MPs and other candidates may defect to Reform after Nigel Farage announced on 3 June that he was standing in Clacton and becoming the leader of the party. However, that never happened.
Reform chair Richard Tice has since accused the Conservatives of “dirty tricks” and challenged Williamson to say “whether money, jobs or a safe seat was offered to Wellings to do this”. Wellings said he was concerned his candidacy risked splitting the vote in the seat, handing victory to Labour.
Sean Matthews, the Reform candidate for Louth and Horncastle, is the latest member of the party whose social media judgement has been called into question.
In February, he retweeted a photo of Keir Starmer with the caption “owned by muslims”. The account that posted the original tweet wrote, “If you vote for this man you will get the Islamification of Great Britain”.
Matthews also regularly shares climate change denial content on X. Posts he shared included one claiming that “CO2 is irrelevant” to the planet’s warming, that there is “no definitive proof that CO2 is responsible for any of the slight warming of the global climate” and a post describing “the man-made global warming scam”. Reform UK’s manifesto opposes Net Zero.
Byline Times has previously reported on several other instances of climate change denialism from Reform UK candidates.
In August 2023, the party received a £10,000 donation from the disgraced financier Crispin Odey who has previously invested heavily in a Brazilian agribusiness that received numerous fines for aggressive deforestation. The party has also received £1,578,000 from Jeremy Hosking, including a donation of £15,000 in July 2023. According to Open Democracy, Hosking’s company had at least $134 million in investments in fossil fuel companies in 2022.
Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, previously told Byline Times that “the material on the Reform UK website is demonstrably false and it’s not just the result of incompetence, it’s disinformation, it’s deliberate misinformation about climate impacts”.
Reform Parliamentary Candidate Who Shared Racist Content Resigns After Questions by Byline Times
Nick Davies shared a post featuring London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Adolf Hitler
Conspiracy theories among Reform candidates extend beyond climate change denial. Byline Times previously reported on the prevalence of the ideology of the “freedom movement” which states there is a global plot by the World Economic Forum and WHO to enforce lockdowns, insect eating and major restrictions on movement.
One politico with a penchant for this kind of conspiracy theorising is Rowland O’Connor, the party’s candidate for North Cornwall. He regularly shares conspiracy theories on X including false claims that 17 million people have died from the Covid vaccine. Research by the UKHSA and Cambridge University suggests that Covid vaccines saved more than 100,000 lives in England alone.
Another post suggested that the snap election means people should avoid London in case of “false flag attacks” – a theory that states the government organises terror attacks for political gain. He also shared a post supporting a theory that the population is being subjected to “military grade hypnosis” and a link to “a video endorsing a Scientology theory of the hidden ‘third party’ supposedly causing every conflict in the world.
O’Connor also retweeted a post praising a speech at CPAC Hungary which espoused the Great Replacement Theory. It originates in the writings of French fascist author Renaud Camus which alleges that there is a deliberate plot by a global elite to replace white populations with non-white ones through migration.