Don’t be shocked by Makerfield candidate’s sexism. This is Reform

“Abortion is the cowardly act of murdering a defenceless baby,” reads one post on the now-deleted X account of Robert Kenyon, Reform UK’s candidate for the Makerfield by-election.

“Don’t dole out the ‘what if someone is raped by their brother’ arguement [sic],” the post, dated June 2022, continues. “Life begins at conception. [...] They don’t want babies? Use contreception! [sic]”

The revelations about Kenyon’s alleged anti-abortion social media activity, published in the Observer, come after openDemocracy and the Fuller Project revealed Reform’s growing antagonism towards abortion rights.

We found a 40% increase in abortion mentions by nearly 80 Reform politicians, supporters, hard-right news websites and far-right influencers over the past two years, as well as an uptick in pro-Reform accounts sharing anti-abortion disinformation and emotive language.

In one such instance, Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, took to X to describe Labour’s vote to decriminalise abortion as “abortion carnage”. His colleague, the mayor of Lincolnshire Andrea Jenkyns, called it a “tragedy for unborn babies”. Former Conservative home secretary and now Reform MP Suella Braverman committed the party to reversing decriminalisation, which she called “repulsive”.

In total, the posts we analysed were shared around 153,000 times and received more than 800,000 likes. Much of the rhetoric, such as referring to “abortion up to birth” to describe the law change that decriminalises abortion, originates in US anti-abortion campaigns.

Since the 2024 election, Reform has attracted leading anti-abortion politicians into its ranks, including former and current Conservative MPs Nadine Dorries, Maria Caulfield, Danny Kruger and Braverman. Dorries called Labour the “party of death” for decriminalising abortion, while Caulfield reposted an opposition to the amendment by far-right X account Basil The Great.

The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, has also appointed anti-abortion academic James Orr as his head of policy, and the party fielded anti-abortion candidates in recent local elections.

Our investigation, combined with the content of posts on Kenyon’s social media accounts, exposes the misogyny running through Reform UK – and shows how, like all far-right movements, this is a political party that seeks to undermine women’s rights and entrench male supremacy. It offers a glimpse into the ways in which women’s rights would suffer if the party came to power.

Protecting women?

Like much of the far right, Reform has attempted to cloak its misogyny via a narrative that the party defends and protects women.

It uses shoddy data to falsely claim that migrant men are disproportionately responsible for sexual violence, justifying its anti-migration policies as a way to protect British women from this outside threat. In doing so, Reform has positioned itself as the only party that ‘cares’ about women’s safety.

This disinformation, which is often amplified by anti-migrant and pro-Reform think tanks, caused 100 women’s rights organisations to write to the UK government last year, urging it to “stop the weaponisation of violence against women and girls by far-right groups and politicians to promote racist, anti-migrant agendas.”

On the same lines, Reform has weaponised the “grooming gangs” scandal – where majority white working-class girls were groomed and sexually abused by primarily British-Pakistani gangs in a range of towns throughout the 2000s and 2010s – to suggest that left-wing parties such as Labour do not care about white rape victims. In fact, in his previous role as director of public prosecutions, Labour prime minister Keir Starmer brought in multiple reforms to prevent a repeat of the scandal.

But it’s noticeable that Reform has nothing to say about men’s violence against women outside the arguments against migration and trans-inclusion. Nor does it have anything to say about the drivers of male violence: namely, patriarchy and male sexual entitlement.

Abortion is becoming a new front in Reform UK’s culture warFollowing abortion decriminalisation, analysis from openDemocracy and the Fuller Project reveals the UK far right is pushing anti-abortion talking points into mainstream political debate.openDemocracySian Norris

Indeed, Farage has praised misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate, saying he is an “important voice” for men. Since December 2022, Tate has faced charges in Romania of human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women, all of which he denies. In a video about how to respond to a woman who accuses a man of cheating, Tate said: “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch.”

And while purporting to be defenders of women, Reform councillors have faced multiple allegations of sexism. This includes Peter York, a councillor in West Northamptonshire, who said: “Some women should have never left the kitchen.” Stuart Prior, elected earlier this month and already forced to resign, allegedly celebrated men raping a Sikh woman in the Midlands on his social media accounts.

Farage himself has a history of sexist comments, defending Donald Trump’s notorious “grab them by the pussy” remarks as “banter” and “alpha-male boasting”. He said breastfeeding mothers should “sit in the corner” in order not to be “openly ostentatious” and claimed that, in banking, women were “worth far less” than men if they chose to have a family.

Now, his colleagues in Reform are having to defend their Makerfield by-election candidate for allegedly posting grossly sexualised comments about TV personality Carol Vorderman. Reform MP Danny Kruger told the BBC’s Today show that they were the “private” comments of “an ordinary man”. So much for defending women.

Women and the far right

Reform’s anti-women policies go beyond debates over tightening abortion access and reversing decriminalisation. The party has created an enemy of equalities legislation, which protects women and minority groups from discrimination. It wants to cut funding to public services, which women tend to use more than men. And it wants to cut benefits, which again women are more likely to claim than men, and instigate pro-natalist policies that would only provide child support, such as tax credits, to British families.

None of this is a surprise. Far-right and authoritarian political movements are built on male supremacy – they target women’s rights, intending to control their bodies and reproduction – and are fearful of white “replacement”, expressed by the focus on “foreign-born” men raping British women, which they perceive as an existential or “genocidal” attack.

Even the language of protecting and defending women is one rooted in male supremacy. It positions women as the property of a patriarchal authority – the husband or father – that he needs to keep safe from outside threats and influences. At the same time, far-right political parties and leaders, from Vox in Spain to Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin and Trump in the White House, remove protections for women from gender-based violence. They do this precisely because they view women as needing to be under male control, with no state intervention.

What’s more, the modern far right is motivated by an ideology that sees abortion, combined with immigration, as destroying the West. It is anti-feminist, precisely because feminism liberates women from patriarchal control. And it only cares about sexual violence as an attack on Britishness, not because of the harm it causes to women.

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that Reform is increasingly anti-abortion. But if the party comes to power, the misogyny won’t be confined to deleted X accounts. It will reverse abortion decriminalisation, reduce the abortion upper time limit, scrap protections for women and minorities, and undermine women’s economic and social security. This is not a party that wants to protect women. Just look at what Farage’s friend in the White House has done.