Reform UK accused of vetting failures after ‘extreme’ posts by new councillors uncovered

12 May 2025, 11:49 | Updated: 12 May 2025, 16:06

Reform UK has been accused of lying about its vetting process after LBC was shown social media posts by newly elected councillors.

The social media posts have been described as racist, Islamophobic, and misogynistic – including a post by one elected councillor who "joked" about beating his wife.

The party got its highest share of the vote to date at this month’s local elections, taking hundreds of seats from Labour and the Conservatives and storming to victory in 10 councils across the country.

After being marred by controversial candidates, Reform UK was forced to drop in last year’s general election campaign.

The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, said it had since improved the vetting process, making it “as good if not better” than other parties.

But LBC has been made aware of social media posts by several Reform UK councillors across the country, which campaigners say undermine those claims, with one Labour MP accusing Farage of “fibbing”.

The posts seen by LBC include:

• A Reform UK councillor "joking" about domestic abuse and racially stereotyping former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
• Another saying we should build fewer mosques because they “divide communities”.
• Others appearing to promote conspiracy theories that climate change is ‘geo-engineered’ and supporting far right figures including Tommy Robinson.

When probed by Tom Swarbrick, Deputy Leader Richard Tice said "anybody that's inappropriate will be looked at and investigated".

"If someone requires investigation, they will be investigated", he added, saying if people had "concerns" they could send it over and team will look at it.

Many of the posts were made in the last year, with some posted while candidates were campaigning for the local elections.

In comments criticised by campaigners, newly elected councillor for Hythe West in Kent, Peter Osborne, made several posts about women on Facebook.

One of these, dated 2020, appeared to show a text conversation with a friend in which he says his wife ‘crashed’ the Porsche and had locked herself in the bathroom to avoid being beaten by him.

Another post, also historic, showed a photograph of a woman called Eileen covered in white liquid with a crude reference to the song, Come On Eileen.

He also posted a photo of the then-Prime Minister Liz Truss in 2022 with the caption: “On the bright side, she has got a cracking pair of t**s”.

Another post from October 2022, when Rishi Sunak was Prime Minister, appeared to racially stereotype him, showing a picture of 10 Downing Street being turned into a Londis convenience store.

Read more: Tackling child poverty could be Labour’s defining mission – and its best chance to stop Reform UK’s rise

Read more: Lib Dems launch internal ‘Reform Watch’ in bid to monitor Farage-led policies

Since he was elected, Mr Osborne’s posts have been hidden from the public.

He is among several newly elected councillors in Kent, where the party now has overall control of the council, whose social media has been described as extreme.

Dean Burns, councillor for Ashford East, commented on one of his Facebook posts in April this year, saying that the UK should build less Islamic mosques because they ‘divide communities’.

Mary Lawes is the newly elected councillor for Folkestone East. In November last year, she shared conspiracy theories on Facebook about ‘geo-engineered’ climate change and ‘chemtrails’ – the widely discredited belief that airplanes are spraying toxic chemicals to control the weather – writing that she had been talking about this “for years.”

This was followed by a post on April 25 – just over a week before the local elections – where she accused Microsoft founder Bill Gates of “geo-engineering” and “playing god”.

She also shared a speech about migration by German far-right MEP Christine Anderson, a member of the AFD, which is being monitored by the country’s spy agency for suspected extremism.

Ms Anderson is a former campaigner for the Pegida movement - Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West – a German far-right group which believes Europe is being taken over by Islam.

Another example seen by LBC was a YouTube music video made by a Reform councillor, also in Kent, which describes ‘new people filling up the country’, accompanied by AI generated images of black and brown men, with some appearing to wear traditional Arabic headdresses.

A local Kent branch chair, now an elected councillor, was also found to have a historic picture on Facebook of someone with their face painted brown, captioned: “New staff member”.

Labour MP Mike Tapp, who is a vocal critic of Reform UK, described the findings as “disturbing” and said they exposed the party’s vetting failures.

He said: “Nigel Farage boasted that his party’s candidate vetting procedures were robust. If he’s fibbing about that, then what else isn’t he telling the public?”

LBC was also shown other examples across the country – including in Durham, where several Reform councillors may be forced to resign over a conflict of interest because they already have council jobs, according to reports.

LBC was shown evidence of Delves Lane councillor Jackie Teasdale offering vocal support for jailed far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

In a post on X, which has since been hidden, Ms Teasdale said it was a “f***ing disgrace” that Robinson was imprisoned.

Responding to a video alleging to show a male migrant verbally abusing police, she called for “that” to be “strung up” and suggested Robinson should be freed.

The video was originally shared by Turning Point UK, a group which co-organised a demonstration on Remembrance Day in November 2023 to ‘protect’ the Cenotaph from pro-Palestine protesters, leading to violent clashes between far-right protesters and police.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is currently serving an 18-month prison term for repeating false claims about a 15-year-old refugee and has previously been arrested under the Terrorism Act.

Farage has said he "never wants anything to do with" Robinson, ruling out calls from some members to allow him to join the party.

Campaign group Hope Not Hate, which has repeatedly criticised Reform UK, said LBC’s findings were consistent with its own research.

Director of research, Dr Joe Mulhall, said: “Sadly it’s no longer shocking to find Reform candidates engaging in this sort of extremism – some of it Islamophobic and racist, some of it deeply nasty and distasteful.

“It’s clear Reform has a real problem with racism against Islam and anti-migrant sentiment.

“It’s a core element of their supporter base - and it shows the level of tolerance for extremism and racism in the party.

“This is not just a bad apple – it’s a deeply rooted problem within the party and across the country. Some of these people clearly weren’t vetted at all.

“And we’re increasingly seeing that Reform is not removing these candidates once people provide evidence of how extreme they are.”

Mr Farage has previously said hundreds of people who applied to be candidates in the local elections had been rejected because they said things which were “ridiculous, outrageous, embarrassing”.

LBC has reached out to Reform UK’s central office and to each councillor we have named.

And celebrating his party’s “landslide” victory, Farage said in a video on X last week that he had “transformed” and “professionalised” the party.

According to reports, Reform used an AI software leading up to the local elections to scan candidates’ social media accounts, and in an interview last month, Mr Farage said the party used AI techniques to “give us a bit of a shortcut”.