Meet Joe Martin, the maddest Reformer in Wales

Joe Martin may not be a name which trips off the tongue yet, but remember where you heard it first. The Reform member of Wales’s Senedd is rapidly making a name for himself among the party’s high command with a series of deliberately incendiary speeches which have now seen him banned from speaking in the chamber.

Martin is Reform’s shadow minister without portfolio (there isn’t actually a minister without portfolio with him to shadow, but new leader Helen Jenner created the role to give him something to do and keep him inside the unhappy party tent).

He first came to wider attention with a speech in June in which he claimed that attacks in Wales by Sudanese asylum seekers were “inevitable”, something he followed up the very next day with another speech mocking the educational achievements of Wales’s young people (he had posed a question “to some Welsh students who had been through our underfunded education system, but we didn’t get a reply because we had e-mailed them and they couldn’t read”).

Suggested Reading

The real story of the Russell Brand conviction? Immigration, says Reform MP

Rats in a Sack

He followed this up in September during a debate on the Welsh Gender Service, where he said that it “should be closed forever and the doctors in the UK who performed surgeries on children should be imprisoned for what they’ve done” and described medical staff as “liars and… butchers” (the Welsh Gender Service had only provided care and support for adults over the age of 18).

Now he has been barred from speaking in the Senedd until he apologises following another speech in which he claimed that white people would soon become a minority in the UK.

Asking for a statement “on the demographic replacement of white British people taking place in the UK”, Martin said on Tuesday that “the scale of change has been breathtaking. Mass immigration and differing birth rates mean that, in just 37 years’ time, in 2063, we will be a minority in our own country. That change has already taken place in London, Birmingham, Leicester, Slough, Luton and Manchester, and I don’t want it to happen here.”

The Senedd’s Llywydd (speaker) Huw Irranca-Davies has now ruled that the contribution made was “unnecessarily provocative and deliberately offensive”. He said: “This is not the first time the member has pushed the boundaries in his contributions and I had previously warned him about his conduct.

Suggested Reading

Andrea Jenkyns’s mysterious lack of declarations

Rats in a Sack

“Until I receive a clear indication that the member understands the boundaries of acceptable parliamentary conduct and apologises to the Siambr [chamber], we will not be calling the member to speak.”

It comes in the same week that leaked WhatsApp messages to the Substack The Will Hayward Newsletter showed that Martin had spoken of how he does “enjoy keeping up with the nutters in Plaid. They are like a different species” and, asked what the phrase political literacy meant, replied: “Learning to spell the names of Plaid’s front bench.”

Will any of this count against him? Hardly. Martin’s gobbishness has apparently endeared him to Nigel Farage and, more importantly, Matthew MacKinnon and Ed Sumner, the party’s director of external affairs and head of communications respectively, the London-based enforcers the leader dispatches to Cardiff Bay whenever the group displays any worrying signs of independence. He’ll go far!