Reform UK is fielding local election candidates who have "posted hate, pushed far-right conspiracies and praised extremists" – despite Nigel Farage's claim to have beefed up the party's vetting process, campaign group Hope Not Hate has said.
Reform UK, which has recruited more than 1,600 candidates for 1 May's English council elections, has made much of its efforts to "professionalise" the party after a series of racism scandals at last year's general election.
Speaking at a campaign event in Dover on Thursday, Farage said the party had put in place "a vetting system that was as good if not better than the other parties" for this year's elections.
The Reform UK leader said "hundreds of people who applied to be candidates for the county council elections were rejected… often because of repeated use of words beginning with F and C on social media."
He said others had been rejected "because they just said things that were just ridiculous, outrageous, embarrassing".
But Hope Not Hate, an anti-racism campaign group which has clashed with Farage in the past, said the examples it had found undermined his vetting claims.
On Thursday last week, the group published details of social media posts it had found from 14 different current Reform UK candidates.
The BBC has spent the past seven days checking the posts and seeking a response from individual candidates, as well as the party's head office.
We sent several requests for comment to Reform UK HQ but have yet to receive anything back.
The posts seen by the BBC include:
- A Reform UK candidate saying "one big nuke bomb" should be used to remove Islam from the world
- Another saying Bradford has a large Muslim population and is a "shithole"
- Others promoting the conspiracy theory that Muslims are seeking to "supplant the native population" in the UK
Some of the posts, on Facebook or X, were made this year, others date back up to a decade.
They appear to have been open to anyone to view when Reform UK selected and vetted the candidates but some have now been hidden or deleted.
