Reform UK leader Nigel Farage arrives at the Reform UK South East conference, at Sandown Park Racecourse in Esher, Surrey, January 10, 2025
LABOUR slammed Reform UK today amid a deluge of damning evidence against the right-wing party’s mayoral candidate Chris Parry, who said David Lammy should “go home to the Caribbean.”
Nigel Farage’s party has faced calls to drop the retired Royal Navy officer as mayoral candidate for Hampshire and the Solent after it emerged he had posted on X in February: “Lammy must go home to the Caribbean where (his) loyalty lies.”
In a press conference on Tuesday, Reform deputy leader Richard Tice claimed that he was “not familiar” with Mr Parry’s remarks against the Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary, but added, “whether we think he’s doing a good job or a bad job is just part of politics.”
Reform UK continued to refuse to condemn Mr Parry yesterday amid new reports that he suggested at least eight other politicians from minority ethnic backgrounds do not have a primary loyalty towards Britain.
Racism is central to Reform UK, but the party is also entangled with anti‑establishment fakery, climate change denial, transphobia, misogyny and pro‑corporate policies.
The anti-establishment fakery was on display last November, when Farage posted on social media, “Big business and big government work together. There is nothing about Sir Keir Starmer that represents change.”Adding to this already vile concoction of politics is misogyny and transphobia. This was on display at Reform UK’s recent regional conference in Leicester, where Tice opened his speech with a transphobic joke about pronouns. The result is an over-arching package of the politics of division. This is hardly a surprise from a party whose senior members say they look to Marine Le Pen’s fascist National Rally (RN) and the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) as inspiration.
Farage likes to paint Reform UK as the insurgent force in British politics. He claims that Reform UK is “very much on the side of the little guy or woman”. Its MPs often denounce the two-party system and multinational corporations in favour of “real entrepreneurship”. This language is an attempt to mobilise the historic base of the far right, which has typically built among small producers and independent professionals.
But Reform UK is as establishment as it gets. Four out of the five Reform UK MPs—Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, Rupert Lowe and Lee Anderson—are millionaires.
Its policies are a mish-mash of pro-corporate proposals. Tax cuts for business, austerity measures totalling £50 billion a year, a massive programme of deregulation, tax relief for private healthcare, abolishing inheritance tax for property under £2 million and scrapping net zero climate targets.
It’s clear the party stands for putting more money in the pockets of the bosses and the rich.
And it uses climate denial to drive further division. Deputy leader Richard Tice is one of the worst for this. At one point he stated “there is no climate crisis” and claimed “CO2 isn’t a poison. It’s plant food”.
Adding to this already vile concoction of politics is misogyny and transphobia. This was on display at Reform UK’s recent regional conference in Leicester, where Tice opened his speech with a transphobic joke about pronouns. The result is an over-arching package of the politics of division. This is hardly a surprise from a party whose senior members say they look to Marine Le Pen’s fascist National Rally (RN) and the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) as inspiration.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage arrives at the Reform UK South East conference, at Sandown Park Racecourse in Esher, Surrey, January 10, 2025
