Two Reform candidates who stood in Hull have broken the law by failing to submit their campaign spending return.
A failure to submit a return is a criminal offence and comes with the risk of unlimited fine.
After elections, candidates and their agents must complete a candidate spending return to their local council returning officer within 35 days of the result being declared. Even if no money is actually spent, the law requires the submission of a nil return
This seems particularly strange for a party that bangs on about public scrutiny so much. All talk, no action, once again.
The candidates involved were Neil Hunter and Julie Peck. Thankfully neither won the election, but that doesn’t make any difference to the legal requirement to submit the return. Julie Peck claims she was previously a police officer, making the law-breaking feel even more gregarious.
To be fair, Peck was only brought in at the last minute. It was her partner, Ian Broadbent who was supposed to stand. However, as Angus Young writes, he had to step down from candidacy some time before the election took place due to some particularly unsavoury social media posts. I’m sorry to feel compelled to reproduce them below.
According to a story in Mail on Sunday, they included one post on X in which he called on Russian president Vladimir Putin to ‘take out’ the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Defence Secretary Grant Shapps. He also described Sunak as a ‘foreigner running the government’.
In another post, he said London was a ‘third world shithole’ because there were ‘no whites running the city’ and accused Mayor Sadiq Khan of being ‘busy building his Muslim army’
The posts are of course now deleted and denied, although he apparently missed the one telling the former Scottish minister Hamza Yousef to ‘fk off back home m fight for ur country.’