James O’Brien has gone after Nigel Farage and Reform UK over their furious reaction to an Instagram post connected to Green Party leader Zack Polanski.
Here’s what actually happened. Polanski went to a Green Party event in Bristol and agreed to become a “collaborator” on a post someone else had made, a carousel of photos from the night. Buried in there was a photo of a man wearing a T-shirt with a guillotine on it and the words “We’re only making plans for Nigel,” a line lifted from the old XTC song but widely read as a dig at Farage.
Nasty image, no question, especially given the actual threats politicians face. Polanski’s mistake was agreeing to the collaboration without apparently scrolling through every photo attached to it first.
The Greens say Polanski didn’t create the post or upload it himself. Once someone flagged the T-shirt, the collaboration came down. “Once this image was brought to his attention, he immediately unshared the post,” a party spokesperson said. “He unequivocally does not support this type of dangerous message.”
Reform reported it to the police anyway, calling it an incitement to murder. Farage went further and demanded Polanski be arrested. “This is what Zack Polanski has just posted on his Instagram,” he wrote on X. “If I was to post anything as inciteful then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski.”
The Met confirmed it had received a third-party report and was making enquiries, which isn’t the same as concluding a crime took place, and nobody’s actually claiming Polanski designed, commissioned or personally endorsed that shirt.
O’Brien spots the obvious problem here
Nobody’s saying Farage can’t be annoyed about the image, and political violence shouldn’t be treated as a joke by anyone. O’Brien’s point is simpler than that: Reform applies a completely different standard when the inflammatory language comes from someone they like.
He put it next to Reform’s long-running support for Lucy Connolly, jailed after calling for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire. Her post, written right after the Southport murders, called for “mass deportation” and said: “Set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care.” She later pleaded guilty to stirring up racial hatred and got 31 months. She tried to appeal the length of the sentence; the court found no reasonable basis to call it excessive.
Farage still said she shouldn’t have gone to prison at all. Reform then gave her a prime slot at its 2025 conference, where she got applause and was introduced during an interview as a “political prisoner.” She told the conference she’d “love” to work with Reform in future. Richard Tice praised her appearance and said she could help the party’s free speech campaign.
Given all that, it’s not exactly subtle when the same party suddenly discovers a real appetite for arrests over offensive social media content. “There are some things that everybody has to agree on and this should be one of them,” O’Brien said. “Unfortunately, you’ve got someone who routinely talks about picking up rifles or knifing civil servants claiming that a T-shirt is profoundly offensive, and Lucy Connolly is some sort of folk hero. You’ve got hypocrisy on a scale that is almost impossible to process.”
Farage’s own record with violent language
O’Brien wasn’t just making these examples up for effect. Back in 2017, Farage said he’d be forced to “don khaki, pick up a rifle and head for the front lines” if the government didn’t deliver the Brexit he wanted. His spokesperson said afterwards that he’d simply meant returning to campaigning and was opposed to violence in general.
Two years later, Farage told an audience that after Brexit, “we’ll take the knife” to civil servants he called “overpaid pen-pushers.” Police looked into it after complaints came in and found no offence had been committed. Farage said he’d meant shrinking the size of the Civil Service, nothing more sinister than that.
Fine, context matters, that’s what Farage and his defenders say every time. His language was metaphorical, and shouldn’t be read literally. Which is exactly why the reaction to Polanski looks so one-sided. Reform wants maximum generosity applied to its own rhetoric, rifles and knives included. The second an unpleasant image turns up connected to a political opponent, suddenly context doesn’t matter at all and an arrest is the obviously correct response.
None of this is a defence of the T-shirt. It was genuinely inflammatory, and Polanski should’ve checked the post more carefully before it went up on his account. Taking it down was the right call. And Reform’s hypocrisy doesn’t make actual threats against Farage any less serious either, he’s reportedly had hundreds of threatening messages sent his way, and police have acted before on posts containing explicit threats against him. Those deserve proper investigation, every time.
But there’s a real difference between saying an image was wrong and demanding somebody’s arrest before the police have even worked out whether a crime happened.
Free speech, but only when it’s convenient
Reform’s spent a lot of time building itself around the idea that Britain locks up too many people for what they say online. It wants the Online Safety Act gone, and regularly argues offensive speech shouldn’t automatically be treated as criminal. Farage has held up people convicted over social media posts as proof that free expression is genuinely under attack in this country.
Yet the second Reform’s on the receiving end, that position seems to evaporate fast. Polanski didn’t write anything calling for violence. According to the Greens, he accepted a collaboration request on a post with multiple photos and pulled it once the offending one was flagged. Connolly personally wrote and posted a message calling for hotels full of people to be burned. She admitted the offence in court. Reform then put her on stage at its own conference and treated her as proof the justice system’s gone too far.
People are entitled to think the guillotine image crossed a line, and entitled to think Polanski was careless and owes an apology for it appearing under his name. What Reform can’t really do with a straight face is insist context should shield its own people while demanding immediate arrest for its opponents.
That’s the contradiction O’Brien’s pointing at. Reform’s version of free speech seems to depend an awful lot on who’s actually doing the speaking.
4 responses to “James O’Brien exposes Reform’s ‘impossible hypocrisy’ over Zack Polanski Instagram row”
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There is some mental gymnastics in there Jo Connor.
What Polanski should do is apologise properly for sharing / endorsing / promoting this. He should find the bloke wearing the shirt and report him to the police and kick him out of the Green Party if he’s a member. Reform are correct in going for this as they are and the lefts ability to spin and twist common sense never ceases to amaze me.-
You obviously didn’t read the whole article. And then you repeat exactly the same rancid dogma. The irony of your stupidity is colossal.
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