Questions need to be asked about the Reform party’s ‘paper candidates’ - Yorkshire Post Letters
From: Gareth Robson, Kent House Road, Beckenham.
Please could I applaud GP Taylor for his impassioned support for voting reform in The Yorkshire Post, July 10, ‘Why Reform were real winners of the election’.
Reform's votes (over four million of them - a terrifying thought) should indeed earn them more seats than went to the Lib Dems (for whom fewer votes were cast).
I look forward to Mr Taylor's attempt to explain in an upcoming article, for the benefit of his loyal readers, how the various voting systems work; which of them would be his recommendation; and why.
In the meantime I hope he will do some checks into the background of the 609 Reform candidates.
Had those names not appeared on ballot papers Reform could not have clocked up so many votes - but just how experienced and suitable were the vast majority of those ‘candidates’?
How loyally and diligently would they have worked as MPs, I wonder?
I hope he remembers Mr Farage saying "We didn't have time to vet them".
I hope he noted that Reform issued a statement after the election acknowledging that some were "paper candidates" who didn't do any campaigning "but were there to help increase the party's overall vote share" - in other words just names lent to the party to put on the ballot paper so that people could put their X next to Reform.