The Reform Redcar

By-Election Fiasco

 and the State

of British Racism

Withdrawn Candidate for Redcar Council By-Election, Mike Manning

Scott Hunter

3 February 2026

Nigel Farage was asked at a recent press conference, “Do you acknowledge that your vetting in the party has been very weak? “* poor “was his reply. After a few more expletives he went on “and nothing angers me more … … [that] we haven’t put enough effort in and enough professionalism in … to establish that candidates are ‘fit and proper people” to put before the electorate. He was really quite emotional.

It is not known just how many f-words he needed to express his frustration on Thursday when, having been presented with a series of tweets sent out by Reform UK candidate for a Redcar council by-election, he felt obliged to withdraw his party’s endorsement. The candidate, one Mike Manning, has since left the party. The by-election will be held in mid-February, too late for Reform UK to install another candidate in a ward where the party stood a good chance of winning.

On the surface of it, therefore, this appears to be an example of a local party causing further embarrassment to Farage through careless candidate vetting. We put this to the Chair of Reform UK Redcar, Steve Turner. His response, in full, is here:

“Redcar branch committee accepted Mr Manning’s application to stand as a candidate subject to Party vetting requirements. Mr Manning did not declare his X account as part of that process and therefore neither the branch nor Reform UK were aware of his posts until they came to light this week. We find the comments made by him to be unacceptable and agree that the Party withdraw their support for his candidacy.
As a branch we will continue our work within the Redcar constituency to ensure our core message of delivering for family, community and country is heard.”

So, the branch chair insists that the Party’s vetting procedures were followed. Ball back in Farage’s court. The problem lies with the vetting procedures themselves, it seems.

Who’s Responsibility is the Vetting Procedure Anyway?

We spoke to someone familiar with party vetting procedures (admittedly not those of Reform UK), who informed us that a vetting panel usually consists of two people, one from the local branch of the party, the other from the party central, whose role is to ensure impartiality in the process. We were also told that the first question is always of the form “is there anything in your past that might impact negatively on your candidacy?” where ‘the past’ is understood to be both actions and social media activity.

This is where Manning appears to have misled the vetting panel. The procedure that is supposed to root out those who are not, in Farage’s words, ‘proper people’, failed in Redcar as it has failed elsewhere in recent months.  In 2024, the Party had to withdraw 12 General Election candidates over unsuitable social media posts (as reported here).

Vetting is something that everyone in the Party seems to be talking about at the moment. Jason O'Connell, the person widely expected to be announced shortly as the leader of Reform Wales, has lamented that “the party had done "everything they can" by "going through social media accounts and background checks". Lamented because he finds the process “brutal and intrusive” and has resulted in what he considers ‘genuinely good people’ being rejected as candidates.

 So, if the Party’s vetting of social media activity is ‘brutal and intrusive’, we have to ask why the vetting panel in Reform Redcar didn’t intrude on Mike Manning’s. Our source on vetting tells us that it is not unusual for members of a vetting panel to have a look at a candidate’s social media activity for themselves. And Michael Manning is not hard to find on X, and offending tweets were published there under his own name, and some of them were very recent.

Not only that, but Manning appears to be a local party activist and would therefore be known to them. He is shown here at a branch meeting in a photo taken in May 2025. Next to him is the person who would later become his election agent, Andrea Turner:

It is, of course, possible that he kept quiet about his online activity when among what others might consider to be like-minded people. But his X posts do not refer to local issues, so maybe his areas of particular interest never came up in conversation. It is, we think, significant that the offending X posts are not of the stop-the-boats-and-send-the-brown-people-home type that are the meat and two veg of contemporary British racism.

It is possible, however, that the vetting panel typed ‘Mike Manning’ into X and did not immediately recognize that this was their own Branch member. We looked through all the posts that remain on his account to find one word conspicuous by its absence: Redcar. Mike Manning’s interests clearly lie elsewhere and the vetting panel, if they did look at it, possibly thought that it couldn’t belong to their own Mike Manning (they may have noticed, for example, that he writes 'ass' instead of 'arse). Unfortunate that they didn’t ask.

On the other hand, it is difficult to believe that his party comrades didn’t notice his unfortunate sense of humour. One aspect of the offending tweets that little has been made of in press reports is that they are clearly intended to be amusing. Is his conversation equally ‘amusing’, we wonder?

The problem for Mr Manning, we think, is that a number of his tweets would have the average British racist scratching their head, which help to explain why he has relatively few followers. His account states that he has 185. In fact, only 50 names are listed.

A Selection of Offending Tweets

One of Mr Manning’s tweets refers to an event known as Kwanzaa. We headed for Wikipedia, as we’d never heard of it. There it is described as “an annual celebration of African-American culture from December 26 to January 1, culminating in a communal feast called Karamu …” This prompted the following from Mr Manning:



The problem with this is that, even if the overt racism doesn’t offend, the tweet isn’t funny. Neither is his post about male circumcision in Jewish and Muslim societies. Another refers to ‘jizya’, a tax historically levied on non-Muslims in Islamic states, a practice that had all but disappeared by the start of the twentieth century. It again had us consulting Wikipedia.

And this one, that begins with a news item from Germany:

Each of these, while manifestly racist, is also off beat. And a number of his other tweets are remote either culturally or historically. They express contempt for people but don’t address the issues that feed the outrage which is Reform UK’s stock-in-trade. One of the posts that hasn’t been taken down refers to an imagined rewriting of British history by Muslims:

But lots of Reform UK members have made incendiary comments, Farage included. In fact, some of Manning’s posts are reminiscent of Farage’s schoolboy racism that has been exercising certain sections of the press recently. Perhaps this might have something to do with Farage’s sensitivity over Manning’s comments. Or perhaps it’s simply that Manning’s racism is gratuitous.



There remains the hypothetical question of what the vetting panel might have made of Manning’s social media activity had they taken the trouble to look at it. Would they have reacted to it in the same way as Farage? Or would they have regarded it as a harmless, if unsuccessful, attempt at humour? Would those who presented the offending tweets to Farage have got the same response had they presented them instead to Steve Turner? Would he have withdrawn Manning, or would he have shrugged it off?

Perhaps Turner, unlike Farage, would not have spotted that he was dealing with an unabashed white supremacist out to defend western civilization rather than a willing volunteer with a lame sense of humour.

Either way, those running Reform Redcar have been embarrassed by this interest. A Facebook post from Steve Turner explaining what happened has been met with lots of messages of support from Reform sympathisers. It looks as if the Party Central will be much less understanding about the relaxed attitude to vetting in the branch, however.

And many of those posting on the Reform Redcar Facebook page are fuming about the fact that those who lobbied Farage about the offending tweets waited until it was too late for the Party to select another candidate. In reality, the Party was simply out manoeuvred, brought down by its own incompetence. But have we really seen the last of it? Is ‘brutal and intrusive’ vetting now going to be rolled out everywhere?

We asked Steve Turner if this incident would affect his position as chair of the local party, a position he appears to have held for around six months. He did not respond.