Last week saw one of the proudest moments of my journalism career. Leaked messages from a WhatsApp group containing several senior members of Reform UK in Wales seemed to suggest that the party’s director of communications called me a bad word in January this year. I won’t say the word, but it’s the bad one beginning with C.
Personally I don’t have any issue with being called that inside a private group. I would have considered it a stain on my professionalism if any political party’s comms chief had given me a glowing review. Mates of mine have actually suggested that it’s perhaps the most accurate thing to come out of Reform UK HQ. However, it is symbolic of behaviour from Reform in Wales that makes me far more concerned about what the party would be like in power, and which should worry voters both here in Cymru and in the wider UK. The first concern has to be its attitude to scrutiny.
The message thread in which Reform treated me with such warmth was discussing a social media post where I’d suggested that the fact the party hasn’t named a Welsh leader was disrespectful to Wales. I had posted: “They are telling the people of Wales: ‘Vote for us, but if you do, you’ll only find out who your first minister will be after we win.’” Former Conservative MP Mark Reckless posted in the chat:“My inclination would be to ignore it.” This has been Reform’s attitude to Wales ever since it put the Senedd in its crosshairs – it offers almost nothing specific to Wales, and having no Welsh leader it therefore avoids the scrutiny that comes with the position.
Last year I went to Reform UK’s Wales conference in Newport. Nothing sums up its attitude to a free and independent media like this bizarre experience. First I was denied an interview with Nigel Farage because I was a Guardian columnist. When I explained that the vast majority of my work was as an independent reporter scrutinising the decisions made by the Welsh Labour government, party officials relented and granted me “two minutes” with the chief. By contrast, they gave 15 minutes to GB News, whose interviewer still only found time to ask one question about Wales.
Just before my encounter began, one of Farage’s righthand men came up to me and said: “I have never worked with you before, and it will depend on how this goes whether I ever work with you again.” The message seemed clear to me: if you ask hard questions, you won’t get access. I can see why this threat may have worked in the past. Farage is a huge driver of newspaper sales and online clicks, so denying a journalist access to him is a powerful stick.
It’s not hard to extrapolate what it would be like if the party were ever to get its hands on the levers of state. Much like in Trump’s US, access would be predicated on support for the regime. We have already seen this in Reform-run councils such as Nottinghamshire, which banned the local paper over a disagreement about a story it ran on local government reorganisation. It meant that none of the paper’s journalists or those covering the council for the BBC-funded Local Democracy Reporting Service were able to attend council events or interview councillors, as well as being taken off distribution lists for press releases. The ban was only lifted in October, after more than a month, following a legal challenge from the paper. That will be the party’s famous love of free speech in action. In Kent, another council the party controls, it was revealed last month that Reform planned to drastically cut the number of committees scrutinising its work.
Another lesson the rest of the UK can take about Reform’s actions in Wales is that its members are really bad at turning up for the jobs they claim to want. The party only had one Senedd member, Laura Anne Jones, who defected from the Tories. She was labelled a “part-timer” after declining a place on a Senedd committee, making her the only MS who isn’t a member of any of the parliament’s 16 committees.
One councillor recently elected in the Vale of Glamorgan is named Brandon Dodd. He won a byelection in September on the basis of being “a real local voice on the Vale council” who would “speak up” for local residents. In the first two council meetings held there since he was elected, the “local voice” failed to speak. He didn’t show up for the third one this week, when a key vote affecting a development in his ward was happening.
In that WhatsApp group is encapsulated perhaps the most defining trait of Reform – and its precursor, Ukip – in Wales: bitter infighting. Of the seven Ukip candidates elected to the Senedd in 2016, only one of them was still a member by the end of the five-year term because of internal disagreements. One of them, Gareth Bennett, defected and became the first ever Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party MS (though not before he claimed £10,000 on an office that never opened).
We can already see the cracks forming within Reform UK in Wales. The very fact that someone within the inner circle was willing to leak internal messages, just to do over a rival, shows that the tension is there even before the Welsh elections next May. Back in summer, in the space of six weeks, seven of the 15 Reform branch heads were removed. Three of these were women, meaning that there is only one woman in any position of power left within the Welsh party.
If you want to understand a party, look at its actions and not its words. What we have in Wales is a chaotic party whose dislike of scrutiny seems only to be surpassed by its members’ dislike of each other. All credible politicians know that the freedom of the media to hold them to account is vital to a functioning democracy. If Reform UK is trying to hinder that media, you have to ask why.
Will Hayward is a Guardian columnist. He publishes a regular newsletter on Welsh politics and is the author of Independent Nation: Should Wales Leave the UK?
