Senior figures in Reform claim to be furious at Keir Starmer’s labelling of their hardline immigration policy as racist, accusing the prime minister of stirring up violence against their candidates.
Leader Nigel Farage said Starmer’s comments would “incite and encourage the radical Left”, labelling them an “absolute disgrace” in the wake of the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk, the right wing US activist.
“I’m thinking of Antifa and other organisations like that,” he fumed, ignoring the fact that Antifa is not an organisation. “It directly threatens the safety of our elected officials and our campaigners.”
Zia Yusuf, the party’s hokey-cokeying former chair, went a step further, claiming the PM was deliberately inciting violence against his leader. “The prime minister knows precisely what he’s doing,” Yusuf claimed. “He knows he cannot beat Nigel at the ballot box, we’ve seen the most extraordinary campaign over 48 hours to demonise Nigel and he is absolutely inciting violence against him.”
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Yet how did Reform respond to someone who actually had incited violence – Lucy Connolly, who reacted to the horrific murders of three young children in Southport by writing “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them” on social media, and ultimately pleading guilty to distributing material with the intention of stirring up racial hatred?
They brought her on to the stage of their conference in Birmingham last month and introduced her to loud cheers as “Britain’s favourite political prisoner”.
Similar rank hypocrisy was splashed over the front page of the Daily Mail, whose headline read: “Now who’s the nasty party? The day Labour dragged politics into the gutter”.
The Mail has dragged journalism into the gutter on several occasions, perhaps most notoriously on November 4, 2016 – in which it did its bit for the safety of our public officials by publishing large front-page photos of three judges whose decision it disagreed with under the vile headline “Enemies Of The People”.
When Connolly was released in August, the high-minded and incitement-averse Mail gave the story five pages, including the front-page headline “The inside story of Lucy Connolly’s prison torment”.
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