INSIDE REFORM’S CANDIDATE NIGHTMARE
FOR a new political party facing a ‘make or break’ election, it doesn’t get much worse than some cretinous candidate riffing about 1930s Germany.
FOR a new political party facing a ‘make or break’ election, it doesn’t get much worse than some cretinous candidate riffing about 1930s Germany. When it comes to Reform UK, there are already quite enough people determined to mischaracterise the party as “far right” without playing into their hands.
From the start of the election campaign, Nigel Farage’s party has been dogged by hostile media scrutiny of candidates. Some of the criticism has been desperate stuff, like the snobbery surrounding a tarot card reader. Other cases have been more troubling.
It is hard to overstate the anger and frustration inside the party over idiots who risk undermining everybody’s hard work by “liking” or following dubious characters on social media. Sure, just ‘liking’ someone doesn’t automatically mean you agree with them, but it’s a bad look. Anything remotely “off colour” is great ammunition for those who want to frighten voters away from the party by smearing it as “extreme.”
A series of exposes by hostile media organisations has prompted soul searching about what could have been done better.
It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that the many millions of people in this country who are appalled by the scale of net migration and tidal wave of so-called asylum seekers arriving by boat are not racists or xenophobes. As I have said so often on TV, public concern is about numbers not nationalities. Cries of “racism” are the easiest and laziest way to silence legitimate concerns. As Reform’s opponents know, such accusations are damaging even when they are completely baseless, which is the vast majority of the time. It is utterly exasperating for the party when individuals with deeply unpleasant views give the critique legs.
Reform UK wants absolutely nothing to do with such people – any more than the Labour leadership knowingly embraces anti-Semites or the Conservative leadership welcomes Islamaphobes. Unfortunately, as we have seen in recent weeks, individuals with questionable views do find ways to worm their way into all political parties. As the only mainstream party that is truly and credibly committed to slashing met migration and turning back the boats, Reform UK naturally attracts support from those with strong views about immigration. Among the many decent, tolerant people worried about our population explosion are a handful with very unpleasant views, a few of whom mistakenly seem to think they are welcome in Reform UK.
Other political parties attract different sets of dubious characters. To date, no Hamas sympathising nutters have tried to get on Reform UK’s candidates’ list; but they’re a very real problem for Labour. The Greens have been embarrassed by candidates with antisemitic views. Meanwhile the Tory party seems to have more than its fair share of individuals with questionable private lives.
All this makes vetting vital. The problem is time and money. Diving into everything an individual has ever said or done; and then checking everyone they’ve ever ‘liked’ or followed on social media too; is phenomenally time consuming and comes with a six or even seven figure price tag. Snap elections make it particularly difficult. Both the Conservatives and Labour have big budgets for due diligence - yet even they miss things. Just this week, the Tories were forced to condemn “wholly inappropriate” online comments about women by the now ex-Tory candidate for Bridgend Sam Trask.
Media organisations that throw resources at deep dive investigations do small parties a favour by providing due diligence for free, but subcontracting the problem to the press is a very suboptimal solution – especially when newspapers deliberately hold back their findings until it is too late for the party leadership to remove names from ballot papers.
Failing to weed out undesirables looks incompetent; generates bad press and is a huge distraction from what everyone is trying to achieve in what is already a very truncated election campaign.
Like all parties, Reform uses a range of internal and external vetting, but does not have the resources of well funded media and political opponents, who have been putting extraordinary effort into scraping years of old information. Their devotion to the cause demonstrates the scale of the political threat they believe Nigel Farage and Richard Tice pose. In a highly targeted operation designed to blow the party off course, the Conservatives have been working with other groups to do their worst. Judging from the latest polls, it isn’t working. Why? Because voters are focused on the bigger picture. On the doors, nobody talks about this stuff.