Reform UK candidates are Facebook ‘friends’ with fascist leader | At least 41 people who are standing for the party are connected on the site with Gary Raikes, whose group sees parliamentary democracy as an ‘obstruction’ to be replaced with a dictatorship
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/reform-uk-candidates-are-facebook-friends-with-fascist-leader-8zzhzxjkt
Posted by Coolnumber11
6 Comments
I dislike these cretins but that logo goes hard.
Starmer should steal it and say “what ya gonna do about it”
>Close to one in ten candidates for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party in England are “friends” on Facebook with Gary Raikes, the British fascist leader, The Times has found.
Raikes, a former organiser for the British National Party, founded the New British Union in the image of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, with activists who call themselves “blackshirts”.
The New British Union has called for a “fascist revolution” and sees parliamentary democracy as an “obstruction” to be replaced with a dictatorship.
>Analysis from The Times shows that at least 41 of Reform’s parliamentary candidates in the general election are friends with Raikes on Facebook, despite his account being active for only about a year and having about 4,000 connections.
> Raikes has shared promotional material for the party on his Facebook account, including photos of himself next to NBU insignia and images of Mosley, the face of British fascism. His Twitter/X account has also shared Islamophobic and xenophobic material, images of men performing Nazi salutes, and slogans such as “the future is fascism”.
Leslie Lilley, the Reform UK candidate for Southend East & Rochford and one of the 41 candidates following Raikes, posted messages suggesting that “the Illuminati” control the world and that the Covid-19 vaccine rollout was a “crime against humanity”. The same account is now being used to promote his parliamentary election campaign.
> Steve Beatty, the candidate in Didcot & Wantage, captioned an image denying climate change with “Correct” and reposted an Islamophobic conspiracy theory. Grant Randall, standing in Rayleigh & Wickford, posted material denying the theory of evolution. Both men still have Raikes as Facebook friends.
Seven of the 41 Reform “friends” of Raikes were projected to finish second in their constituency, and a further 27 were forecast to be third, according to the latest YouGov polling, conducted before Farage returned to lead Reform and before Rishi Sunak’s D-Day gaffe.
I’m pretty damn sure the relationship is waaaaayyyy closer than that. I’m betting they all have rather sombre coloured shirts in their closets.
Given how (understandably) paranoid UKIP were about having anyone linked to the BNP associated with themselves, this is pretty shocking.
If true it feels like it’s been a deliberate and coordinated effort by the far right to take over Reform.
All thanks to being very badly organised & Sunak pushing the timeline so they haven’t had a chance to vet people properly.
P.S.
Anyone who genuinely thinks that Farage, Tice & co are far right hate filled nut cases like Raikes is, you’re just wrong. You can disagree with them and dislike them for all sorts of reasons, but the are essentially just old school conservatives (pre Cameron/Osborne).
I’ve just found out that one of the most unpleasant people I have ever had the misfortune to meet is standing for Reform in Erith. He is a Hitler apologist, loves Trump, lives at home with his mother (who excuses everything he says or does), is a horrible misogynist and liked to slap his ex girlfriend around.
An ex-girlfriend who is also standing for Reform in the neighbouring constituency…
This is the kind of bonkers stuff you simply couldn’t make up.if you tried.
Assuming Reform vet their candidates, these must be the most moderate guys they could find.
Unfortunately Reform is only a vehicle for Farage and nothing they do is going to reflect on him.