LONDON — Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party received another blow Tuesday in its election campaign after a candidate resigned from the party and accused it of racism and misogyny.
Georgie David, the party’s candidate in West Ham and Beckton in East London, announced Tuesday she was suspending her campaign and joining the Conservatives.
It’s the latest challenge facing Farage’s insurgent party on the right wing of British politics, just days before the U.K. general election in which it hopes to make gains from the ruling Conservative Party.
So far, it’s unclear whether the allegations swirling around Farage’s party are denting support for Reform UK or if its supporters are ignoring the whiff of scandal.
In a statement, David said she was “in no doubt that the party and its senior leadership are not racist.”
“However, as the vast majority of candidates are indeed racist, misogynistic, and bigoted, I do not wish to be directly associated with people who hold such views that are so vastly opposing to my own and what I stand for,” she added.
David also said she’d been “significantly frustrated and dismayed” by the failure of Reform’s leadership to tackle the issue, suggesting they “instead try to brush it under the carpet or cry foul play.”
David will still appear as Reform UK’s candidate on the ballot paper, as it is too late for any changes. However, if she was elected, she would sit as a Conservative MP.
In a statement, a Reform UK spokesperson said: “We are very disappointed with Ms. David’s course of action. We strongly disagree with her sweeping comments about the ‘vast majority’ of our 600-plus candidates, the vast majority of whom she can never even have met.”
Six Reform candidates have been suspended for online comments or their former party membership since nominations closed in June, as the party accused a vetting company of failing to run any background checks on its representatives. The vetting company said it did not have time to scrutinize all the candidates before the election.
The party’s official account on X posted a video highlighting the diversity of its candidates, saying: “Whatever the mainstream media tells you, Reform UK is a party for everyone.”
The Times reported Monday evening that Robert Smith, the party’s candidate in Orkney & Shetland, which is the most northernly of the U.K.’s constituencies, wrote online abuse against women including former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde.
Smith called Lagarde “head bitch of the globalists” and said Rowling was a “wild bitch.” He also said the rainbow symbol used on posters supporting the NHS during the Covid-19 pandemic was “the new swastika.”
In an interview Monday, Farage told Times Radio: “Nobody is angrier than I am, particularly as we’re doing so well with black and ethnic minority voters,” adding he would put the party “under much, much stricter control” in future.
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