Nigel Farage and his Reform party are not saviours of English culture - Yorkshire Post Letters

This is not the first time that Taylor has banged the drum for the Reform Party - aka the business registered with Companies House as Reform UK Party Limited - but let’s not forget that the Reform Party's manifesto was written safe in the knowledge that the party would not be forming a government.

Free speech is important, but it should not be used as a shield behind which to tell untruths. The idea that Labour could soon deem his article "a hate crime", and that he could be "arrested and imprisoned", is just plain daft.

There is nothing patriotic about a man (Farage) who puts himself before his country. A man who, when the election was announced, declared he was heading to the USA to help Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, only to do a volte face and place himself as candidate in a town he had previously stated wasn’t a place he wanted to spend his Friday nights.

A man who wants to move the NHS to a system like the one in France (oh, the irony) and who thinks we should pay for GP appointments (note to Nigel, most of them already do pay, it’s only free at the point of need, we shouldn’t have to pay twice).

A man who, when it was revealed one of the Reform candidates thought we should have appeased Hitler, dismissed it as pub talk. A man who was happy to take EU money as an MEP whilst his behaviour in that role - supposedly representing his country - was worse than any toddler I’ve ever known; remember when he and his Brexit Party allies turned their backs on young musicians playing Ode to Joy, or his blatantly boorish rudeness to a Belgian MEP?

I am no fan of the Conservative Party but when I heard Farage state that he’d like to “destroy” it, a chill went down my spine - just as it does when I hear him parroting Putin, and his belief that Andrew Tate is an “important voice” for the emasculated.

We’ve just emerged from an election campaign, during which many lies were spoken, mostly by those on the Right, lies that were persistently repeated even when fact checkers corrected them - yet still Labour won, Tories second, Lib Dems third.

We voted, aware of the current electoral system. Taylor’s column contains so many wild and unsubstantiated conjectures that it is impossible to address them all in the space of a letter, but to correct just a few examples: Labour has stated (much to the disappointment of many of us) that there is no plan to declare war on Brexit; Rayner has not declared open house on immigration; being woke (having an awareness of social, sexual and racial inequalities and injustices) is not a bad thing, unless one is ok with misogyny, elitism and racism. If Taylor really believes that “the preservation of English culture, our heritage and beliefs are in the hands of five Reform MPs” then he would be well advised to brush up on his history, and educate himself about the many cultures and nationalities involved, over many centuries, in the making of the “English” heritage he believes so endangered.