It comes after party leader Nigel Farage insisted his party had ‘beefed up’ its vetting processes.
Yet another Reform UK candidate has been exposed for posting in support of the Nazis ahead of the local elections due to take place next month.
In what once again amounts to a vetting failure by Reform, the Times reports that Nathaniel Menday, standing for Reform in Sheffield, was found to have said Berlin’s Olympiastadion was built by people who were “real visionaries.”
It comes after party leader Nigel Farage insisted his party had ‘beefed up’ its vetting processes.
Menday, the Times reports, has called himself an “ethno-nationalist” and encouraged the use of white supremacist symbols.
The Times reports: “In January 2024, he shared a picture of Berlin’s Olympiastadion and wrote: “Whichever group of people built this must have been real visionaries!” The stadium was built by Nazi Germany to host the 1936 Olympics and designed by Albert Speer, the munitions minister who was convicted at the Nuremberg trials of crimes against humanity.”
In 2023, he also suggested that “Jewish people in the West” were responsible for the antisemitism they were suffering because they “overwhelmingly favour open borders”.
Menday told the Times that he apologised for bringing Reform “into disrepute” and said he enjoyed “risky humour and pushing boundaries”.
Reform’s problems with candidates sharing support for the far-right as well as posting racist and bigoted posts goes beyond just a few bad apples, with weekly stories exposing candidates.
The Times also reports that another Reform candidate, Ben Rowe, who is standing in the Ham ward of Plymouth urged protesters throwing bricks at police defending a mosque to “get rid of that filthy building” during the 2024 Southport riots.
David Davies, a Reform candidate for Wanstead Village in Redbridge, east London, said putting black people in positions of power would be “disastrous”, described Roma travellers as “the worst people on the planet”, and Muslims as “by far the biggest group of fraudsters”.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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