One of Reform UK’s senior officials publicly defended far-right figure Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (also known as Tommy Robinson), DeSmog can reveal. 

The party is standing by Noel Matthews, who is running as Reform’s parliamentary candidate for North West Leicestershire, despite other candidates having been dropped for similar offences. 

In 2018, Matthews posted an article on Twitter from the U.S. conservative magazine National Review. Matthews’s tweet included the headline of the article: “Tommy Robinson Drew Attention to ‘Grooming Gangs’. Britain Has Persecuted Him”. In an apparent emphasis of the statement, Matthews added the word “THIS”, before the headline. 

Robinson is a prominent far-right figure who founded the English Defence League (EDL). 

A year earlier, in 2017, Matthews encouraged his Twitter followers to watch a video from former UKIP London Assembly Member David Kurten entitled “Why Islamophobia is a silly made up word”. According to BuzzFeed, Matthews has also said that accusations of Islamophobia are an “excuse for closing down the debate”.

Following the August 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Matthews supported then-president Donald Trump’s claim that both sides were to blame for the violence, in which a counter-protester was murdered. “He’s right,” Matthews wrote. 

In response to DeSmog’s findings, Reform UK said: “This isn’t just offence archeology, you appear [to] have reached the mesolithic strata in your excavation.”

In relation to the Kurten video, the party said that Matthews was “arguing against the use of the suffix ‘phobia’ being slapped on to every rights issue”.

A party spokesperson added there was no evidence that Matthews “ever said that Tommy Robinson has been persecuted or whether he thought that to be good or bad”. The party did not respond when DeSmog supplied a screenshot of Matthews’s aforementioned tweet. 

Reform has decided to defend Matthews despite sacking at least two parliamentary candidates for supporting Tommy Robinson on social media. 

The party dropped its candidate for Swindon North, Yvette Maxwell-Darkes, after she claimed that Robinson had “very good things to say”. On 6 April, The Mirror reported that the party’s candidate for Lewes, Ian Harris, had also been dropped after liking tweets posted by Robinson and former far-right BNP leader Nick Griffin. 

In his role as Reform’s national organiser, it appears that Matthews has been personally responsible for sacking Reform candidates. Maxwell-Darkes claims that she was informed of her dismissal by Matthews, matching statements made by several other dropped candidates. 

Matthews was formerly the national election agent for Reform’s predecessor party, the Brexit Party, having previously worked as a director of UKIP. Nigel Farage, Reform’s majority shareholder and honorary president, was the leader of both the Brexit Party and UKIP. 

According to polling published by GB News, which employs Farage and Reform leader Richard Tice, Reform poses one of the biggest threats to the Conservatives in North West Leicestershire. The constituency in which Matthews is standing backed Brexit by 60.8 percent in 2016, while UKIP won 16.9 percent of the vote in the 2015 general election.

Joe Mulhall, director of research at HOPE not hate, said that Matthews’s comments made him “totally unsuitable to be a candidate in North West Leicestershire – one of the party’s top targets”.

He added: “There is also a remarkable level of hypocrisy on display. Matthews holds a senior position in Reform UK despite making comments indistinguishable from candidates he has been involved in removing.”

In a press conference on 8 April, addressing questions about the party dismissing several of its candidates, Tice said: “If you’re going to have a glass of wine on a Friday night, don’t use social media. It’s not sensible.”

He added that if candidates made “inappropriate” or “unacceptable” comments online “then we’re going to part company. You can have your freedom of speech, your freedom of expression, but that doesn’t mean you have the right to represent Reform UK as a parliamentary candidate.”

On the same day, Tice claimed on BBC Radio 4 that “we’re the fastest party to get rid of inappropriate candidates”. The party has been forced to drop at least 50 candidates, and still has more than 200 candidate vacancies to fill before the general election, which is expected to be held later this year.

Reform’s Climate Science Denial

Reform UK has been campaigning on an overtly anti-climate platform, and has called for the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target to be scrapped. The party has also proposed holding a referendum on the subject. 

The party last year received £135,000 from donors who deny climate science or have business links to fossil fuels. 

Tice has said “CO2 isn’t poison, it’s plant food”, while the party’s London mayoral candidate Howard Cox has said “man is not responsible for global warming”.

Reform’s policy platform claims that “scientists disagree as to how much” humans have had an impact on global warming. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, has stated that it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”.

Tice claimed in his 8 April press conference that Reform would be able to spend more money on the NHS by scrapping the UK’s net zero target.

The UK’s Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on measures to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, estimates that the combined policies will cost less than one percent of the country’s national output.

The Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s independent economic forecaster, has also said that “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.

According to Scarlett Maguire, director of the polling company JL Partners, “A substantial majority of every major demographic believe the climate is changing as a result of human activity, and overall support the government’s target of reaching net zero by 2050.”

A version of this article was published by The Mirror