Reform’s only Black branch chair, Neville Watson, has quit the party on the basis that their contribution towards, in particular, the current debates around immigration are doing more harm than good, espousing anti-Christian values, weaponising people’s religious faith and damaging community cohesion.
The march in London recently, with Tommy Robinson, where the term Christian nationalism suddenly raised its head, where they were using Christian emblems to advance to me an ideology that is not Christian … I know that Nigel Farage himself has distanced himself from anything to do with the likes of Tommy Robinson, but I do know that there are still people within Reform who are quite sympathetic to his ideas.
Whether it’s Nigel banging on about the [small] boats, or Robert Jenrick talking about Handsworth, [politicians] are stoking a fire. Some might be stoking it with a smaller stick – and that type of conversation, with the boats, the [asylum] hotels, I feel it’s doing more harm than good in terms of community relations.
He himself is a Christian, but sees Reform’s sentiments and actions as being entirely anti-Christian in nature.
Politics is losing its compassion as politicians try to out-Reform Reform and I no longer feel that this is compatible with my Christian faith. I believe migration has been good for this country and that, managed properly, still could be. I’m coming from a very strong, Christian, love thy neighbour sort of perspective, and what I want to say is going to feel different from Reform. … I don’t want to see a society where we weaponise our faith against Islam. We respect our Muslim brothers and sisters.
Having entirely failed on their promise to save tax-payers’ money by cutting largely non-existent waste, Reform are now proactively pursuing spending tax-payers money by introducing their own unnecessary waste.
Exhibit A today is the Reform-led Nottinghamshire County Council. In the midst of a general local council funding crisis they have decided to install 164 – you guessed it – Union Jack flags.
This is estimated to cost an astonishing average of £457 per flag – adding up to around £75,000.
Even the traditionally flag-loving Conservative councillors in the area are appalled. Per Councillor Sam Smith:
To spend £75,000 of taxpayers’ money on putting flags up seems a bit ridiculous to me. That should be spent on services.
Their Labour colleague, Helen Faccio, agrees:
We heard when Reform came to power, that they would make council services more efficient and cut wasteful spending.
Then we hear about huge spending on flags. My residents would say we should spend money filling potholes or investing in youth clubs.
As does the local MP, Steve Yemm:
When my constituents – right across Mansfield – are contacting me about the poor state of our local roads and potholes – I am amazed that the Reform-led county council is spending our council tax in this way.
A few days ago we got an insight into Reform’s chaotic and dictatorial leadership of their “flagship” council, Kent, following the leak of a recording of a meeting several of their councillors attended.
Bitter divisions in Reform UK’s flagship county council have been laid bare in a leaked video of a chaotic internal meeting where members were told to “fucking suck it up” if they did not agree with decisions.
Councillors can be seen complaining about “backbiting” and being ignored by their leader, Linden Kemkaran, who tells them they will be “screwed” and that Reform can forget about winning the general election if they don’t balance Kent’s budget.
In an extraordinary recording, which shows the inner workings of Reform’s Kent operation, Kemkaran shouts down fellow members before telling them they will be “muted” in scenes reminiscent of the viral “Jackie Weaver” video from a parish council Zoom meeting in 2021.
Perhaps the conflict is not all that surprising given Reform’s own opinion of Reform’s leadership in that area:
However, claims have also been made that a culture of abuse and bullying is causing deep splits in the Reform group. The Guardian has been told there have been around eight official complaints to Reform’s south-east regional director in the last three months.
With some questioning her leadership entirely:
The comments sparked dissent from councillors at the meeting, which took place in late August.
Councillor Paul Thomas complained that Reform backbenchers were not being briefed on LGR plans by Kemkaran and other members of the council leadership, adding: “Then, quite frankly, the question is: is that the right leader and the right cabinet?”
Arguments also broke out over a plan by Kemkaran to keep her increasingly unhappy councillors informed through a scheme under which cabinet members would each ‘mentor’ four councillors chosen at random.
“Let’s face it, the situation within the group is not great at the moment,” said another councillor, Dean Burns. “I work my arse off in my own portfolio and I am still getting a rod up my backside every time.”
“There is a lot of backbiting going on and that tends to come from the top down,” he added
The Daily Mail shares a few more choice snippets, including that Linden Kemkaran wishes that she could follow Nigel Farage’s example and go on holiday rather than try to fulfill the promises she made to the electorate:
Linden then warns another councillor who she argues keeps talking over her: ‘PAUL! Paul, I’m going to mute you in a minute! Let me reply!’ before muting them.
She continues: ‘Of course it’s easier when it’s face to face! I’m meant to be going on bloody holiday this week, Paul! I don’t want to be having this meeting!’
Many of us are now despairing of this situation and feel it cannot continue any longer.
Some of the other parties represented within Kent Council are obviously unimpressed by both the attitudes revealed in this meeting, along with Reform’s continued and widespread inability to actually deliver on any of their promises:
Labour and the Liberal Democrats, who make up the largest opposition party on the council, said Reform’s flagship council was “descending into chaos”.
Antony Hook, the Liberal Democrat leader of the opposition in Kent, described the recording of the meeting as “truly shocking”.
“It reveals the Reform administration to be taking decisions and making plans based on party advantage rather than interests of the public. The recording also reveals the leader of the council speaking to her colleagues abusively and unprofessionally, in ways that would rightly not be tolerated in most workplaces,” he said.
A Labour party spokesperson said: “Last week, the council confirmed that despite promising to cut waste and deliver savings, they haven’t come close. And now it appears that Reform politicians in Kent are more interested in fighting amongst themselves than working in the interests of their constituents.”
The Reform council leader involved, Linden Kemkaran, has since launched a hunt for whoever leaked the video, describing it as the work of “cowards” committing an act of “treachery”.
The people who did this are cowards. They are weak. They are foolish. They are incapable of displaying true courage themselves, so they look to harm those who are. They are obsessed with personal gain at the expense of group success. They cannot cope with disappointment and personal inadequacies so they seek to bring down others to their level.
…
I want you to know … I passed my suspicions of who is responsible for this treachery to head office and a thorough investigation is already under way. The guilty parties will be expelled from the Reform party without delay. They will have no political future.
It’s already led to four of Reform’s councillors in Kent being suspended:
Councillors Paul Thomas, Oliver Bradshaw, Bill Barrett and Maxine Fothergill have had the whip suspended pending investigation, following evidence that they brought the party into disrepute,
Which means that a total of 7 of the Reform councillors elected to Kent Council no longer retain the whip:
The suspensions now mean that, from winning 57 seats in elections in May, Reform has 50 councillors with the whip. Two other councillors had been suspended while a third joined Ukip.
Making the actual job of running the council harder than it needs to be:
The “chaos” on the Reform group was now having a direct impact on Kent constituents in need, warned Antony Hook, the leader of the Liberal Democrat group on the council.
He said a council committee that would have been involved in school transport issues and which was due to take place on Wednesday has been cancelled as a result of the suspensions.
“This potentially means a child or children delayed in getting school transport granted,” he said.
Says Mr Hook:
“We learned in the leaked video that they have no respect for each other, let alone respect for the public. Now they are turning on each other.”
Sojan Joseph, a local MP for Labour agrees, describing them as an “absolute shambles”:
They’ve not even made it until Christmas – Doge didn’t work. Council tax is rising, and now they’re having to suspend multiple councillors
Louie French, a local Conservative MP makes the valid point that Reform’s chaos in council should be a lesson to us for their future ability to govern:
Reform promised Kent residents the world in May. Six months later they are in complete chaos, with residents facing the prospect of even higher bills. A serious warning to the rest of the UK of what Reform in power looks like
In the mean time, the leader, Linden Kemkaran, is trying to get what remains of Reform’s Kent County Council representatives to pledge personal allegiance to her. She wants them all to sign a obsequiously self-serving written statement “in support of the leadership”, meaning her, which includes the following:
During the hustings and subsequent vote for a group leader on May 8, 2025, Linden won overwhelmingly because we could see that she was the best person for the job.
…
But Linden rose to the challenge without hesitation. She has the opposition firmly on the run and under her guidance, Reform UK members are flourishing in their roles.
Whether or not they will bow to her demands to prostrate themselves in front of a demonstrably incompetent leadership I do not know.
A big part of the pledges Reform made whilst campaigning during May’s local elections was that they would cut vast swathes of supposedly wasteful public spending, leading to lower tax for us, the citizenry.
In practice they are increasingly showing that either there was a lot less waste than they claimed – something that was self-evidently true in many cases, they’re too incompetent to clean it up, or the whole thing was a lie made up for self-interested political reasons. Or, most likely, a combination of all 3.
It is a similar story in Kent, where Nigel Farage insisted that spending was “beyond belief” and that his party was “going to save a lot of money”. Now, rather than slashing spending, plans are in place to increase council tax and ask schools to pay £2.2m more for services that are currently subsidised.
Reform are actually perfectly happy with spending more money than was the case prior to their various election victories – as long as it is on themselves.
In Lincolnshire, where former Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns pledged deep cuts after she became mayor, it is now proposed that the budget for her office should actually go up by a whopping 128%, from £115,000 to £262,000.
Whilst simultaneously failing to meet the obligations of her job in that case:
Perhaps her next purchase should be an alarm clock – in her short time as mayor, Jenkyns has missed two meetings of the Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority and been half an hour late for one.
Two Reform UK councillors have been suspended from the party “pending an investigation into their conduct”.
Northumberland County Councillors Nicole Brooke and Patrick Lambert had the “whip suspended pending investigation for breaching the Reform council group rules in a manner that could be detrimental to the party’s interests”, a statement read.
This is only a couple of weeks after their Northumberland Council colleague John Allen – another Reform councillor – was also suspended whilst under investigation for various violent, racist and homophobic social media posts.
A Reform UK councillor has been suspended from the party amid an investigation into his conduct. This follows complaints made against Kent County Councillor Robert Ford by several female members of staff.
The party has said on Monday (October 13) that the councillor, who represents Maidstone Rural West at County Hall, “refused to engage” with the process after being put under investigation and has now had the whip removed.
Reform UK’s deputy leader has admitted the party cannot deliver the £90bn in tax cuts promised in its manifesto, saying it would concentrate on public spending cuts once in government.
Tice now says that what were once concrete manifesto pledges were in fact "aspirations", before going back to bang on about Reform’s favourite subjects, none of which would save £90 billion if we want to have a country left at the end of the exercise.
Richard Tice said key election pledges such as lifting the income tax threshold would be an “aspiration” and that once in government Reform would concentrate on cutting the civil service and scrapping net zero.
A Labour spokesperson says:
"Farage continues to flirt with Liz Truss’s economy-crashing unfunded pledges – which would leave family finances at risk. Working people simply cannot trust Reform. They offer anger but no answers."
The Conservatives are equally as scathing, claiming that the plans are:
"…all over the place … Reform stood on a platform last year of huge unfunded commitments which would have wrecked the public finances. They cannot be trusted to run our economy."
The Institute of Fiscal Studies never believed it was possible – implying Reform are either extremely incompetent or liars:
“Regardless of the pros and cons of shrinking the state, or of any of their specific measures, the package as a whole is problematic,” it said. “Spending reductions would save less than stated, and the tax cuts would cost more than stated, by a margin of tens of billions of pounds per year.”
Rumours spread online that Kilgraston School, near Bridge of Earn, which closed last year and was recently sold to a private developer, was going to be turned into large-scale asylum accommodation.
A petition, which had nearly 600 signatures and has since been removed from Change.org, was launched by a woman who states she is a member of the Reform Party.
South Lanarkshire councillor Ross Lambie, who defected from the Tories earlier this year, reposted the initial tweet urging followers to sign it.
It turns out that there was never a plan to turn the building into asylum accommodation – something you would have hoped a councillor from a party so obsessed with all things asylum seeker related would know
Owners of the site, Lumar Capital, called the rumours “entirely unfounded and wholly inaccurate”.
Well, perhaps it’s less that Reform were ignorant and more that, once again, they were happy to whip everyone up into a misinformation-filled frenzy of hate against something that was never happening in the first place in order to themselves profit politically.
That seems to be what MP for Perth and Kinross, Pete Wishart thinks anyway:
MP for Perth and Kinross, Pete Wishart, believes the false rumours were “deliberately weaponised to stoke fear and division”.
He blamed the Reform Party members for “cynically pushing” the misinformation to “inflame tensions” and “exploit people’s anxieties.”.
He said: “This is exactly the kind of faux outrage and hate-filled politics that Reform thrives on; spreading lies, sowing distrust, and turning neighbour against neighbour.”
“It is dangerous, it is reckless, and it has no place in our democracy.”
One of the many important topics that Reform appear to have no clue about, nor plan for, is how to reconcile their self-destructive policies with the current situation regarding Northern Ireland.
The Reform leader said in August he would “renegotiate” the Good Friday Agreement in order to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
But Farage said it would “take longer” in Northern Ireland, and later said the region would “not be at the forefront” of their proposals.
Their Conservative colleagues are justly concerned:
Leeman was asked by BBC News NI if he saw Reform as a threat to the Conservatives.
“I see it as a threat possibly more to the union of Northern Ireland, when you heard Nigel Farage said Northern Ireland will just have to wait,” he said.
Reform UK recently sank to yet another new low in terms of immoral and unworkable policy nonsense. About immigration naturally.
Specifically, this is Nigel Farage’s recent decision where, should they ever have the power to do so, Reform UK will abolish the legislation behind and concept of the UK’s “indefinite leave to remain” scheme.
Farage vows to scrap settled status, placing thousands at risk of deportation
For context, the Indefinite Leave to Remain scheme allows long-term immigrants who have already lived in and contributed to the UK for a long time to gain a “settled” status. This gives them the right to remain in the country – to live, work and study for benefit of all involved. It’s a key pathway that migrants can pursue if they wish to eventually become full British citizens.
It is not an easy status to acquire. There are various different routes and criteria involved in getting it. The dominant requirement for most applicants is that they must have already legally lived and worked in the UK for at least 5 years by the time they apply. For example, you may have been here under a skilled worker’s visa.
Most applicants will also have to meet requirements around being able to speak and understand the English language as well as having enough knowledge of British history, culture and values in order to pass the “Life in the UK” test.
You must also be judged to have “good character”, which includes such things as not having a serious criminal record.
In summary: applicants must have integrated reasonably well to British life, and generally will be paying tax, and contributing in other ways towards the well-being of Britain and its citizenry as much as any native Briton does.
In short, these are the sort of immigrants the less rabid members of Reform might claim to value, or at least not to hate, not ti fear. After all, “it’s not about race” for them, right?
The ILTR group are then, by definition, not the hordes of (imaginary) small boat criminal masterminds that supposedly come to our shores intent only committing a violent crime-spree. They are perfectly legally compliant and well-integrated folk who happen to be of foreign but actively want to live in and contribute to the UK – and have shown over a period of several years that they can do so successfully.
In return Britain grants them a settled status so that they can go ahead and live their life, the same as the rest of us want to, safe in the knowledge that the roots they put down in this country – their homes, family life, children, spouses, jobs, community activities et al. – will not be cruelly ripped away from them at some point in the future due to a loss of employment, their visa expiring or an idiot somehow landing the Prime Ministership.
But that’s not good enough for Farage et al.
He has decided that – should he get the power to do so – he is going to abolish the very concept of indefinite leave to remain. There will be no such thing. If you happen to have been born abroad then you will always and forever need a constantly renewed visa if you wish to live in the UK, irrespective what benefits you are actually bringing to the country.
You can never really settle down. You could never dare wholly dedicate your work or personal life to our nation, because there is no reason not to worry that someone will decide you have to leave the country – and the life you have prospectively built up for yourself and your family over the past few decades – next year, next decade, or sometime beyond that – with no justification required, no right of appeal.
Most cruelly, most unfairly, this change would not only apply to new applicants. He wants to remove it after the fact from all our existing valued and beloved neighbours who already have been granted indefinite leave to remain. The doctor in your town who’s been your GP for the past decade, the newly-weds down your street with their young children who have never known another country and any number of other indescribably cruel and self-defeating scenarios.
Farage demands then that their “indefinite” leave has an definite end date. He aims to burn the rule book, to destroy what remains of any sense of “British” fair play – all to further fragment the country in the name of his own personal riches and power.
These are the folk that our country already gave its promise to that they can live, work, study, settle down, form families, start businesses and otherwise enrich the life and culture of their fellow citizenry.
This likely includes categories of folk that have been specifically invited to settle in the UK for various reasons:
He left open the possibility that families in the UK could be broken up and that Ukrainians and Hongkongers who moved here using special resettlement routes could have their rights to remain revoked.
Sure, these people could in theory continue, for the rest of their lives, to apply for visas to stay, but these will come with fresh new conditions such as you having to have a salary of at least £60,000. This is way above the average salary in the UK, which is around £37,000 for full-time employees; i.e. unachievable by most people irrespective of where they happened to be born.
It’s certainly unachievable by many of the immigrants that currently work trying to prop up our critical National Health Service, literally saving the lives of some of us day in, day out.
When asked about Reform’s plans, Trinity told London Centric: “It seems like there’s a strict salary cap, but if you work for the NHS you don’t normally meet those caps, which is why you have health and care visas. It’s not clear to me that there would be any clear route for me to stay as an NHS worker who is in a lower income band.”
Even if you did pass these conditions, you would have your ability to access national health or social security services taken away from you. There would be new rules governing with or not your spouse or other family members may come along. You would also have to give up any other citizenship you have.
Reform said anyone who had indefinite leave to remain would have it rescinded – and would need to reapply for a visa – throwing the lives and status of many families into uncertainty.
There are some further problems with the scheme, even aside from its abject unfairness and immorality.
Remember Brexit, the disaster that was successfully campaigned for most strongly by Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage? Well, any EU citizens settled here are probably protected by the Brexit deal, so his new rules can’t apply to them. And that’s apparently 60% of folk with settled status.
Plus, despite the constant inflaming of tensions online and in our media, the abolishment of this sort of scheme is actually rather unpopular within UK public opinion.
The NatCen panel asked a question last year regarding when British people thought migrants who work and pay taxes in the UK should start being able to access the same welfare benefits as other UK citizens.
Even the majority of folk who held negative views on immigration thought they should be able to do so after 5 years, which is what the current ILR scheme enables.
Only 3% of respondents thought it should never be possible, which is what Farage is proposing.
97% of the country realises how unreasonable Farage’s policy is.
Even among those who agree with Farage that migration has been economically harmful, only one in ten would favour permanently excluding migrants from the welfare system. Opponents to this proposal will substantially outnumber supporters even among Reform’s existing voter base.
Sure, Britons were split around 44:43 regarding supporting vs opposing the granting of indefinite leave to remain in general (13% ‘don’t know’). This is presumably looking forward to future applicants.
When it came to the question of whether the people who have already made the effort to earn the right to stay should suddenly have it removed from them, most people oppose it. Less than a third of of people would actively approve of that.
Less than half of even the people who would support the ILTR law being abolished in general would support the rights already granted being taken away from those who were already promised that they qualified for it forever.
It’s not only members of the public in general that are against Farage’s plans. Many organisations are virulently opposed to it too.
The people swept up in these potential mass deportations include many of those who work in the NHS, caring for us all in the UK. The general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing seems understandably both disgusted at the idea of it and concerned for what it would mean for the future of the British National Health service, saying:
Threatening to sack thousands of migrant nursing staff is abhorrent beyond words. These are people who have come to the UK to care for patients and become part of our communities. They deserve so much better than this.
The policy of retrospectively removing people’s rights in this way would be unprecedented, leaving migrant nursing staff unable to work or access welfare, despite having paid tax. It shows neither compassion nor an understanding of the fundamental role our brilliant migrant nursing staff play in health and care. Without them, services would simply cease to function.
The Labour party chair, Anna Turley, elucidates how, in line with most other big Reform “policy” announcements, it seems it hasn’t been thought out at all:
Reform have been forced to admit that their policy does not apply to people from the EU – destroying Farage’s claims that it covers all foreign-born nationals. Farage is unable to say how many families his policy would break up, what the cost to businesses would be, what would happen to pensioners and how long it would take to implement
The Mayor of London:
Threatening to deport people living and working here legally is unacceptable
The leader of the Lib Dems:
Nigel Farage has not clearly thought this through. He has not worked out the impact on red tape or on taxes. He has not realised that lots of these people have made their lives here, contributing to businesses, to the health service
The SNP’s deputy Westminster leader:
…desperate and despicable
The (Conservative) shadow home secretary:
half-baked and unworkable
The directory of the British Future thinktank:
Threatening to revoke the settled status of millions who already have indefinite leave is morally wrong, beyond the legal and practical chaos it would cause – it undermines the very idea of belonging in this country
A senior partner at a law firm shows how this policy, coming of course from Reform, a party packed with fake patriots, would likely make the country poorer:
This policy, Barrett-Brown said, would dissuade “skilled workers, CEOs and scientists” from moving to London: “It would also have a financial impact in terms of tax intake… It’s all predicated on the notion that they think everyone who gets indefinite leave is on benefits, but, in reality, they are actually overall net contributors.”
and is anyway sceptical that they could even implement it:
However, Barrett-Brown cast doubt on whether Reform would actually be able to deport people en masse. “There would be so many legal challenges, that it would really affect their ability to implement it,”
And once again the whole policy is based on at best inaccurate figures. Surface level quantitative sounding “cost savings” in an attempt to appear more frugal than racist that, yet again, turn out to be built on quicksand.
Reform claimed this move would save £230 billion. Unsurprisingly, given Reform’s history of financial deception and incompetence, this figure is seemingly based on a report which even the people who authored it said shouldn’t be used.
Reform’s central claim that the move would save £230bn was called into question when it emerged that it had been sourced from a Centre for Policy Studies report whose authors said the figure “should not be used” because it was based on erroneous data.
