A far-right group chat has surfaced where people, who openly espouse Reform UK, joke about asylum accommodation being burned down, talk casually about the mass slaughter of Muslims, swap Islamophobic bile, and share chatter about getting hold of weapons. Sitting in the middle of it all is a Reform UK politician and a familiar face from the far-right protest circuit, Mrs Kent, who now wants everyone to believe she had no idea what kind of crowd she had gathered.
We are told, again and again, that Reform are not far right, that they are just “saying what people think”, that critics are smearing ordinary patriots. Yet time after time you find their names and their activists turning up in spaces like this, in chats where people laugh at arson attacks on asylum seekers and fantasise about the Prime Minister being shot. When it leaks, they all reach for the same excuses. They were infiltrated. They never saw those posts. They do not support racism in any form. Anything to avoid saying the obvious, which is that this is exactly the sort of politics they have cultivated.
I am tired of being told that pointing this out is hysterical or unfair. If you orbit around movements that demonise Muslims, that march on hotels, that frame refugees as an invading force, you will attract people who want to take that rhetoric to its logical conclusion. You cannot build a brand on anti-Muslim paranoia and then clutch your pearls when the people around you talk openly about violence. If you truly find those messages shocking, you ought to be asking why your name keeps turning up in the same rooms as the people who send them.
This is the reality of the ecosystem that has grown up around Reform and their fellow travellers. It is not some harmless banter, but a pipeline where ugly jokes about “chemical deterrent” and “Snorty Spice” sit next to fantasies of burning out asylum seekers and shooting elected leaders. We can either keep pretending these are just a few bad apples who accidentally wandered into the wrong group chat or brand it squarely as a far-right culture that nurtures this hatred and then lies through its teeth when it gets caught.
Jack Dart
