The mask has slipped – now we can see the real, shameful face of Reform

“Build concentration camps, and everyone who comes across the channel, you’re in there,” says another.

“I’d go full fucking metal jacket. I’d start shooting and killing,” a Reform member says, just a few minutes after the early credits have rolled.

Over the course of its runtime, the programme shows Reform councillors – several of whom are in positions of elevated responsibility in their councils, or in the Reform Party, and boast they’ve been tapped up to stand as MPs – refer to black or Muslim Brits as “fucking animals”, and worse.

But after years of repeated scandals involving the social media posts and online activity of Reform politicians, this material – grim as it is – is hardly a surprise. Reform, as it usually does when someone is caught out in this way, can shrug it off, suspend the individuals involved, and even try to claim that it shows the party isn’t extreme, because they take action when they get caught.

While catching councillors out in this way is important and good journalism, the real strength of the documentary lies elsewhere – because time and again, Reform politicians tell ITV’s undercover reporters that they are convinced Reform would be far more radical in power, and is just playing at being more-or-less acceptable to get into power, in the manner of far-right parties through history.

“You’ve just got to be a bit savvy, get the broad appeal, then once you’re in, you can do what you want,” Reform councillor and later deputy council leader of Solihull Alan Feeney says. 

“You’d need a proper nuclear option, like literally drag them out their homes, stick them on planes and fuck them off to Pakistan… If they get a good majority in parliament of genuine Reformers, they will, and I think they’ll pursue it…they’re playing it sensible for now.”

Feeney is far from alone in his view that Reform would be far more radical once elected. “Certain things are best left until you’re in power, because there’s no way you’re going to be able to even discuss a tenable solution without being called a fucking Nazi,” Hounslow councillor David Kerr explains.

“You need to seem palatable to everyone, to get the majority… there’s certain things that need to be done to turn the country around that the general public I think here [in Makerfield] would accept, but the south would never accept it and we still need their votes…

“The board is sound, and by that, I mean the board is hardline… there are views held by the board that if you said publicly that if you said as a councillor on a podium, you’re gonna get yourself kicked out of the party for being an idiot.”

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Kerr’s Hounslow colleague Adam Parkins is of a similar mind. “We go after the civil service, we go after the police force, we go after everyone who has ignored this shit for the last 30 years – brutal, brutal fucking punishments,” he says.

“We’re not politicians in the sense of, we don’t need to go out there and announce stuff and say we’re gonna do things, because we’re actually just doing them. So the stuff that people feel uncomfortable with – don’t even announce it, just do it… we just need to get fucking elected, that’s all that really matters. There are enough people within our group that understand what needs to be done.”

ITV’s documentary is called A Year in Reform – which is accurate, given it spans a year of time. But it implies the channel sent a reporter deep into the organisation, to spend months winning over the trust of Reform members and getting them to spill their darkest secrets to someone they know well.

The reality is different: ITV got an undercover reporter into Reform’s press office in its party HQ, but she only lasted for around three weeks before being fired. The rest of its footage was obtained by an undercover journalist going along to help deliver leaflets during by-election campaigns and the May local elections, posing as an activist from out of town.

The comments made by the councillors, then, were things they were comfortable saying in front of someone who was a near-total stranger, in the pub after the end of a few hours delivering leaflets. This was not some group feeling a need to act in near-total secrecy lest they be found out by the leadership or the wider membership, but people who felt confident an average Reform activist would be entirely on board.

Put simply, the revelations hint that many elected officials within Reform – people who passed its vetting got elected, and now hold positions of responsibility – believe the party is putting on an acceptable face to get elected, and then would install a British ICE, engage in mass deportations even of legal migrants, or enact violent reprisals against civil servants, police officers, and others who it felt had betrayed Britain.

Nigel Farage and the Reform leadership might argue that these people are misguided, that they have never been promised such a thing, and that it rejects extremism – though the evidence suggests that the councillors making these boasts thought they had the support of individuals right at the top of the party, sitting on its board.

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The ITV documentary has done something crucial: it has removed the benefit of the doubt from Reform. Farage has spent most of the last two years trying to play a double game, simultaneously embracing a policy of mass deportations that he spent most of his political career rejecting – and trying to appeal to supporters he was losing to Restore Britain – while simultaneously trying to seem like a safe place for relatively moderate voters sick of the main two parties to place a protest vote.

To many of us, it seems like Reform’s councillors have given the game away. The UK has even fewer constitutional and legal checks and balances than the USA. A majority government that is determined enough to force through radical change is almost impossible to stop – they can override laws that would curb their powers, as we have no constitutional backstops they can’t amend. 

They can withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. They can repeal the Human Rights Act. If it stood in their way, they could scrap the House of Lords. Reform’s own politicians and candidates have told us – when they thought they were free to speak candidly among friends – what they believe their party would do with such power.

We should believe them, the first time.