Nigel Farage’s hard right party Reform UK have won another parliamentary seat in the May 2 local elections, despite (or more likely, because of) their extreme anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-migration policies.
The party won the Runcorn & Helsby seat by just six votes, after the incumbent Labour MP Mike Amesbury was convicted for assault, an incident that triggered the by-election.
Reform candidate Sarah Pochin got 38.7% of the vote, the BBC reports. The Conservatives came third, and the Green Party fourth. Pochin campaigned on an anti-immigration ticket that targeted a local asylum hotel, according to the Financial Times.
Reform also won its first mayoral contest, with former Tory MP Dame Andrea Jenkyns getting 42% of the vote in Greater Lincolnshire. The Conservative candidate came second, with 26% of the vote.
Celebrating his victories, Reform leader Nigel Farage said that Labour’s vote in its heartland had “collapsed and much of it has come to us, adding: “I think we’ve supplanted the Conservative party now as the main opposition party of the Labour government.”
The Reform gains have, however, sparked alarm amongst marginalised groups, including LGBTQ+ people, as the party’s policies target the transgender community.
In its election manifesto, the party states “transgender indoctrination is causing irreversible harm to children” alongside blasting multiculturalism and “divisive, ‘woke’ ideology”.
The party states in its education section that it will ban “transgender ideology” – a term widely considered an anti-trans dogwhistle – in both primary and secondary schools.
“No gender questioning, social transitioning or pronoun swapping. Inform parents of under 16s about their children’s life decisions,” the pledges read. It is not clear how Reform UK would enforce this policy and how it would stop people using certain pronouns.
Furthermore, another pledge of Reform UK would be to review the Online Safety Bill because “social media giants that push baseless transgender ideology and divisive Critical Race theory should have no role in regulating free speech”.
Critical race theory is an over 40-year-old academic field that holds that racial bias is inherent in many parts of western society, especially in its legal and social institutions, on the basis of their having been primarily designed for and implemented by white people
The Reform manifesto also pledges to eliminate The Equalities Act 2010, which offers significant protection for marginalised groups such as transgender people, adding that they will also “scrap Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DE&I) rules that have lowered standards and reduced economic productivity.”
Although the Reform party website’s policy section states that “social and cultural issues (i.e., abortion, gay marriage, end-of-life decisions, and similar topics) should not be our focus as a party,” Reform candidates have been caught on camera using homophobic and Islamophobic slurs.
Channel 4 went undercover within the Reform campaign in Clacton in June 2024, and revealed that a canvasser had made racist and Islamophobic comments to potential voters in the Essex constituency.
The undercover investigation by the broadcaster focused on a Reform canvasser named Andrew Parker, who went on the campaign trail with the Channel 4 reporter.
Within a conversation with the undercover reporter, he was found to use vile racist slurs, reportedly describing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as a “f**king p***”.
The Channel 4 News investigation also revealed that a campaigner for Reform had used homophobic language on the campaign trail. George Jones, who runs events for Reform, was caught on camera calling a Pride flag displayed on a police car a “f**king degenerate flag”.
“You see that f**king degenerate flag on the front bonnet? What are the old bill doing promoting that crap? They should be out catching nonces, not promoting the f*****s,” he was reported as saying.
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