Glenn Gibbins, the Reform UK councillor elected in the Hylton Castle ward in Sunderland last month, has been reinstated by his party following an investigation into posts in which he said Nigerians “should be melted down and fill in the pot holes.” In the now-deleted 2024 social media post, Gibbins wrote: “Carnt [sic] believe amount of Nigerians in town… should melt them all down and fill in the pot holes!!” After an investigation, Reform issued him a “final written warning” and returned him to his position. Labour chair Anna Turley said Nigel Farage had “sunk to a new low.”
The posts – and the wider pattern
The pothole post was not an isolated example of Gibbins’s social media activity. He also called television presenters Mel and Sue “the two unfunniest fat repulsive lesbian hosts ever.” During a 2021 Ireland versus Japan rugby match, he complained about a female commentator: “Yet another woman commentator. It’s getting out of control. There must be a hundred better male commentators but had to give it to a female.” He added: “Wish they wud stick to cooking, sewing and homemaking.”
Gibbins told local paper ChronicleLive that the posts were “intended as jokes” and were “made in extremely poor taste and with poor judgement.” He said: “I fully recognise that these comments were entirely inappropriate and I sincerely apologise to anyone who may have been offended by them.”
Reform’s response was an investigation followed by reinstatement. A party spokesperson said Gibbins had been “issued with a final written warning” and “has apologised for making the post and accepts that it was made in extremely poor taste showing poor judgment.”
How the party handled it in real time
The handling of the Gibbins case as it developed was characteristic of Reform’s approach to its own accountability problems. Richard Tice, the deputy leader, refused to directly criticise Gibbins when the posts first emerged. Instead, he accused the media of “smearing” the party: “Voters have heard all of this smearing and this sneering against all of us, and they have voted for more Reform.”
On BBC’s Politics North, Durham County Council deputy leader Darren Grimes said Gibbins had been suspended and that the party was investigating “very serious allegations.” He agreed it had been “a failure of the vetting process.” A Reform spokesman simultaneously told Metro that no decision had been made yet. The statements were contradictory and both turned out to be incomplete: the investigation concluded with reinstatement rather than removal.
As we reported in our Corbyn Reform councillors piece, Jeremy Corbyn noted that Reform’s newly elected councillors “don’t have any clue what they’re doing” and observed that seventeen Reform councillors had left the party or been removed in a single month. The Gibbins case adds a different dimension: not a councillor who left, but a councillor who said something that most political parties would treat as disqualifying – and was kept.
The second case – Jay Cooper and the Holocaust
Gibbins was not the only Reform local election winner to emerge with serious questions about their past statements.
Jay Cooper won one of three seats for Sefton Council in the Bootle West ward with 705 votes. In a since-deleted Facebook post, he referred to the death of US right-wing activist Charlie Kirk with the caption “Heartbreaking. Murdered for having an opinion.” When another user mentioned Adolf Hitler in the same thread and asked if he deserved to die, Cooper responded: “I don’t agree with him murdering innocent people. But the Hallocaust [sic] is a hoax. There wasn’t [sic] even 6 million Jews in Europe at the time. Propaganda.”
In January 2024, Cooper shared a video claiming the September 11 attacks “is not what we thought it was.” That post remains visible on his profile.
Cooper’s case sits alongside Gibbins as a documented failure of candidate vetting in the same electoral cycle. Both men won seats. Both had public social media histories that, had they been identified before the election, would presumably have prevented their selection – or at the very least triggered the kind of investigation that in Gibbins’s case ended with a warning and a return to his seat.
What Labour said
Anna Turley did not hold back. “Nigel Farage has sunk to a new low. Nobody who has made such disgusting comments is fit to serve the public – shamefully Nigel Farage clearly thinks that’s not the case. He must reverse this decision and prove that there is no place for racism in Reform UK.”
The challenge embedded in Turley’s statement is a real one. Reform cannot simultaneously argue that it represents the interests of all working people, as Mick Lynch identified in our Lynch Cunningham piece – that it believes in “taking advantage of poverty to divide people and make your friends even richer” – and also retain councillors who say that Nigerian residents of their own wards should be melted down to fill potholes.
The party’s position is that the warning is sufficient. The question the reinstatement raises is a different one: what, exactly, would not be sufficient?
The vetting problem in context
As we reported in our Stefanovic Reform policies piece, Reform’s Great Repeal Act would scrap the Equality Act – the legislation that currently makes it unlawful to discriminate against people on grounds of race, sex and sexual orientation. The party’s platform is therefore simultaneously one that would remove the legal protections against discrimination while fielding candidates who express discriminatory views, and whose internal processes treat those views as warranting a written warning.
Gibbins won a seat. He has been returned to it. The Nigerians he said should be melted down live in his ward.
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