Another Reform Candidate Who is Former Conservative Councillor Accused Of Sharing ‘Fascist’ Content

Nigel Farage‘s Reform has selected a parliamentary candidate who previously faced calls to resign from the Conservative Party after sharing far-right material on social media, Byline Times can reveal. 

Michael Hearn, a paramedic and Reform UK’s candidate in Richmond Park, has posted racist statements on Facebook in the past month. 

This comes to light as an undercover investigation by Channel 4 found that canvassers for the party engaged in open racism and homophobia, including calling Prime Minister Rishi Sunak a “f**cking P*ki”. 

In 2018, Evolve Politics reported that Hearn, then a Conservative councillor, had listed Hajo Hermann – the Nazi lawyer who defended Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis in court late into his life – as an ‘inspirational person’ on his Facebook account. Herrmann’s obituary in the Scotsman described him as “an idol to neo-Nazis”.

Hearn also shared content from the far-right group Generation Identity, protesting at the perceived unfairness that Stephen Lawrence’s racist murder by white men is remembered, but Kriss Donald’s racially-motivated murder by Pakistani men is not. Generation Identity is a neo-fascist movement with branches across Europe.

The Comet also reported that, in 2018, he had shared posts from far-right group Britain First.

More recently, a post on Hearn’s Facebook account implored people to vote for Reform because “as an Englishman we have seen our entire country changed without our consent without thought without consideration to our tribes within the kingdom our heritage and culture”.

The post continued that “rapists murderers terrorists and tomorrow’s groomers of our children can just walk in”, claiming “the natives are the least important” compared to ethnic minorities.

Hearn appears to have several Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) accounts under various versions of his full name: Michael Steven Frederick Storm Hearn. 

An X account with the handle @StormHearn has the username Michael Hearn, and notes that he is a paramedic. It contains a banner image of the slave-trading East India Company logo.

A second account with the handle @HearnStorm has posted about Stevenage, where Michael Hearn is from, and again includes the logo of the East India Company as its profile picture.

The @HearnStorm account has repeatedly posted racist content.

In a reply to a tweet about Labour’s London Mayor Sadiq Khan walking his dog during lockdown, the account posted: “Has he strapped small explosive vests to them yet like his friends in Hamas do.” 

Another tweet included the phrase “a feral third world imported and its ideology running rampant on the streets of civilisation”.

The first tweet of the account was “All Lives Matter” – a phrase used by white nationalists to undermine equality movements. It was posted one month after George Floyd’s racist murder in the United States.

The @StormHearn account which has “Michael Hearn” as the username has also tweeted racist content. 

In response to a story of an antisemitic attack in Belgium, he replied: “We imported a religious system of hate from Africa which hates everything but more so Jewish people and we allowed this to happen easy solution deport the hatred back to their homeland and keep the jews safe”.

Richard Hames, co-author of two books on the far-right, told Byline Times that the distinction drawn between mainstream right and far-right politics in the UK is “the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism”.

“Civic nationalism does not think that the root of nationalism is race and ethnonationalism does believe that,” he said.

The way in which the Conservative Party has historically managed this relationship is essentially by not promoting those “who are on the edge of the party, so you don’t see them on the breakfast round, you don’t see them on TV, you wouldn’t hear from them,” Hames said.

But people on the far-right are in Reform, he added. 

Its predecessors UKIP and the Brexit Party were “pretty good at toeing the line of not seeming like they were ethnonationalists,” the author told Byline Times. “They would reject people like Tommy Robinson… [But] because the Tory Party has moved to the right, Reform has moved too and remains about as far to the Conservatives’ right as it was before.”

Some have now crossed over this civic/ethnic nationalist boundary “that was previously preserved in British politics,” he added. 

On Michael Hearn’s posts, Hames added: “One thing that is weird about this is that it is couched in the language of antisemitism: the idea that there is a hateful third world ideology out there, which confusingly is imported from Africa.

“This form of confusion has become a major part of far-right organising, because the organisational structure of the far-right has essentially become networked online, meaning they pick up… sets of views that don’t necessarily cohere into a single organised programme.”

Byline Times has found a number of instances of Reform candidates sharing content from Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (known as ‘Tommy Robinson’), Britain First, and other ethnonationalist figures, with some candidates being dropped by Farage’s party as a result. 

Michael Hearn and Reform were contacted for comment.