Reform UK Drops 3 Candidates

[Borg Refinery]

Well the respected FT published the claims

https://www.ft.com/content/e5d14398-e866-44b3-8ecb-4e6371167c6d

They talk about how he "evaded" sexual assault claims, good luck suing the Financial Times for libel

[Barry]

Interesting, and it may be that Odey is a wrong 'un.
However I can't find where he has not been found guilty of anything at all.
"Accused" is one thing, guilty is another.

[Borg Refinery]

Crispin Odey attends Reform fundraiser

Crispin Odey, the hedge-fund manager accused of multiple counts of sexual misconduct, including rape, was among a string of wealthy businessmen who attended a lavish fundraising event for Nigel Farage's Reform Party this week.

Odey, a prominent supporter of Brexit, has taken a low profile since an investigation led by Tortoise revealed a series of sexual assault and harassment allegations spanning decades.

In March this year, he was accused of rape. The financier strenuously denies these allegations. The fundraiser was held in Chelsea at one of the properties of the real estate developer Nick Candy and among those attending were the longstanding Farage supporter Arron Banks; the Pimlico Plumbers founder, Charlie Mullins; the sports agent, Jonathan Barnett and Ginetta Cars boss, Lawrence Tomlinson.

The boxer, Derek Chisora, who donated to Farage's campaign, was also there, as was George Cottrell, the convicted fraudster and aristocrat who has long worked with Farage and joined him on the election campaign trail this summer.

Earlier this week, Sky News reported that the fundraiser, hosted by the former Neighbours actress, Holly Candy, was designed to raise millions to professionalise party operations.

The event was not thought to be ticketed, but attendees are expected to commit to significant donations at such events.  As one source said: "The reputational damage of accepting [an invitation] and saying no is high."

Odey's last declared political donation was £10,000 to Reform UK, which was accepted by the party in August 2023 – more than a month after the initial allegations against him were revealed. Over 15 years, Odey has donated more than £1.3 million to political parties and causes, usually of a Eurosceptic nature.

A spokesman for Reform did not respond to requests for comment about Odey's presence.

[Borg Refinery]

Well here you go, ditching their pledges not too long after being elected, yet they're somehow different to all the other mainstream political parties - go figure

Nigel Farage ditches Reform UK's 'contract with the people' just 2 months after election

Reform UK's ruthless pursuit of putting Nigel Farage into Downing Street by 2029 has seen them already move on from their "contract with the people" at the general election just two months ago, the party's new chairman has admitted.

Businessman Zia Yusuf was brought in by Mr Farage to reorganise Reform UK after what the new chair admits was "a scrappy start-up" election beset with scandals over candidates and serious questions over the party's policies.

In a wide ranging interview with The Independent he also said:

That Reform will allow members to ditch their own leader in a new constitution
The party has been inspired by French far-right leader Marine Le Pen doubling her vote in France
That people who work for the Conservative Party have been in talks with Reform about coming over
Zia Yusuf was brought in to reorganise Reform UK after an election beset with scandals and serious questions over policy
Zia Yusuf was brought in to reorganise Reform UK after an election beset with scandals and serious questions over policy (Reform UK)
After Mr Farage declared himself leader of Reform again at the start of the election he publicly ditched one policy agreed by former leader (and now fellow MP) Richard Tice on air during an interview with the Today programme, but now it seems he plans to go further. [..]

On the other hand, at least they're adopting a constitution for their party and allowing them to ditch their leader, so that's one positive

[Borg Refinery]

Yes it uses cookies but alerts you to that fact first and lets you refuse to use them, to comply with data protection laws. If they did nothing wrong how comes they removed the tracking pixel?

The party removed it after being contacted for comment last week. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is examining the case.[..]But the Observer's testing, checked by independent experts, suggests a failure to follow the rules, with the Meta pixel extracting information before consent had been given, and even if the person clicked "deny".

But never fear, Labour have often misused people's private data so they will probably instruct the ICO to give Reform a free pass as they are guilty of similarish things themselves. Or Reform will get a slap on the wrist.

https://www.politico.eu/article/labour-conservatives-liberal-democrats-data/

[Nick]

Reform UK tracked private user information without consent

No doubt the lawsuits are being formulated as we speak


That took so much formatting; for some reason the font size on the link changed to maximum - and loads of broken BBcode tags were inserted which I had to manually delete. Nothing I use on computers these days either online or offline ever seems to work properly, I swear computers used to work better when they were supposedly more unstable in the 1990s? That's how it is

This is a non-story, all websites track user data. This website uses session cookies to track, that's how it knows it's you and you don't have to log in every time you visit. 

[Borg Refinery]

And a bonus:

Reform UK chair was member of Conservatives until last week

The chair of Reform UK, Zia Yusuf, was a member of the Conservatives until last week when party officials were approached by the Guardian.

Richard Fuller, the Conservative party chair, emailed Yusuf to tell him his membership had been revoked last Friday afternoon, after the Guardian asked the party whether it was still active.

That means Yusuf remained a paid-up Tory member despite announcing he had donated a six-figure sum to Nigel Farage's party in June, and then being unveiled as chair of Reform UK in July.

The Conservative party did not cancel his membership even after Yusuf embarked on a series of broadcast interviews attacking Rishi Sunak and the government, and urging voters to make Farage prime minister.


He told GB News in June that the Conservatives were "so divided that I simply don't see how they can govern effectively".

Addressing a Reform UK rally in Birmingham in June, Yusuf accused the Conservatives of having "lost control of our borders" and having "no coherent immigration policy". Within two weeks he had been made chair of Reform UK, replacing Richard Tice.

Had the Guardian not alerted the Conservatives to it, Yusuf's membership might have continued indefinitely, allowing him to vote in the Tory leadership contest in November. It raises questions over whether other senior Reform UK figures are current Conservative party members.

Yusuf told the Guardian in an interview last week that he had voted Conservative for most of his adult life. "They make it quite hard to actually cancel your membership. For all I know I might still have a direct debit with them," he said.


He said he had stopped supporting the Conservatives because of Boris Johnson, suggesting that his government's policies were so leftwing they could have been former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's.

Boris's govt's policies were so left wing that they could have been Corbyn's?

The men in white will be along shortly

[Borg Refinery]

Reform UK tracked private user information without consent

A hidden tracking tool in the website for Reform UK collected private browsing data about potentially millions of people, often without consent, and shared it with Facebook for use in targeted advertising.

An Observer investigation has found that people visiting the website for Nigel Farage's anti-immigration party had details of their activity captured by a digital surveillance tool known as a Meta pixel.

The tracker – active in the run-up to the election, and as recently as last week – was triggered automatically on loading the Reform site, regardless of whether the person gave consent. It then sent a package of data to Facebook's parent company, Meta, with details of which webpages had been viewed, when, and the ­buttons that were clicked.

In some cases, this included sensitive information that could reveal a person's political beliefs, such as details of those accessing forms to become Reform UK members, linked to a unique Facebook user ID. Data gathered by the Meta pixel enters the firm's advertising system and can be used for Meta's own purposes as well as by advertisers such as Reform to re-target audiences with tailored ads. [..]

No doubt the lawsuits are being formulated as we speak


That took so much formatting; for some reason the font size on the link changed to maximum - and loads of broken BBcode tags were inserted which I had to manually delete. Nothing I use on computers these days either online or offline ever seems to work properly, I swear computers used to work better when they were supposedly more unstable in the 1990s? That's how it is

[Borg Refinery]

[Barry]

One of the elected Reform MPs was jailed as a teen for shoving an ex over

Link

He's obviously a REFORMed character as he has not been in an ounce of trouble since. 

[Barry]

Wouldn't surprise me if many of the Reform candidates were past street foot-soldiers of the BNP and EDL. What looked like Farage's minders after his shaking experience, looked like they'd fit in to Griffin's bouncers...

I bet you don't have any evidence for that. It's just one of your favourite "BNP-lite" slights.

[patman post]

Wouldn't surprise me if many of the Reform candidates were past street foot-soldiers of the BNP and EDL. What looked like Farage's minders after his shaking experience, looked like they'd fit in to Griffin's bouncers...

[Borg Refinery]

One of the elected Reform MPs was jailed as a teen for shoving an ex over

Link

In his statement, the MP gave his version of events:
"While I absolutely deny the horrific details in this tale, there is one truth in it that I cannot, nor will not deny or hide from. Nearly 20 years ago, at 19 years of age, at the end of a night out together, we argued and I pushed her."
"She fell over and she was hurt. Despite being 38 now and having lived a whole life again I still feel deeply ashamed of that moment and apologetic. I handed myself into the police immediately and admitted my fault." | James McMurdock
..

[papasmurf]

It seems Reform only attained 4 candidates in total.

Now all the results are in, 5.

[Borg Refinery]

It seems Reform only attained 4 5 candidates in total. Quite the disappointment for them, but not unexpected when in their 'contract' they used German and Slovenian pictures passed off as British

We have Lee Anderson who is well liked by many and a charming chappy all round, we have a billionaire who bankrolls the party, we have Farage of course who rushed back to the UK from Trump's campaign - and we have James McMurdock (more on that story later), we have Rupert Lowe, linked to a failed health venture that engaged in a 'high and unsustainable cash burn' and folded

Rutherford Health was a private oncology provider founded by Mike Moran and Karol Sikora in 2015, with investment from Neil Woodford and the Wales Life Sciences Investment Fund, to develop proton therapy facilities in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Until 2019 it was known as Proton Partners International.[1] It went into liquidation in June 2022.[2][3] According to major shareholder Schroders UK Public Private Trust, the company had pursued a "flawed expansion strategy ... from 2015 to 2019" leading to "a high and unsustainable cash burn".[4][5][6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Lowe