Richard Tice's excuses for Reform's latest Nazi are incredible

Reform's deputy leader Richard Tice is making a habit of finding extraordinary excuses for racists and Nazis in the Reform ranks

Last week Richard Tice went on the BBC to make utterly absurd excuses about the Sunderland Reform councillor who said that Nigerian people should be melted down and used to fill potholes.

Millions of people saw Tice demonstrating the hierarchy of racism by pivoting from the anti-black racism of one of his own party’s members, into allegations of antisemitism against others.

This hierarchy of racism pivot would have been marginally less disgraceful if Reform wasn’t itself infested with antisemites; Holocaust deniers; and Nazis.

This week the Sheffield Star revealed a load of depraved extreme-right social media posts by the new Reform councillor for Woodhouse in Sheffield, Nathanial Menday,

Menday posed with swastika flags; Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf; and the fascist sonnenrad.

He stated that "dictatorship with the right man in charge will always be a better way of governing than democracy" and described the Nazis as "visionaries".

He referred to himself as an "ethnonationalist" and claimed that Jewish people in the west are responsible for the antisemitic abuse they suffer because they "overwhelmingly favour open borders".

When ITV asked Menday about whether he wanted to "clear up that Nazi stuff" on the day he was elected as a Reform councillor, he responded "no, no I don’t". The Sheffield Star’s revelations demonstrate why he was so keen to avoid the subject.

It would obviously have been difficult for Tice to try and shut down criticism of this Reform Nazi fanboy by pivoting to antisemitism again, because even Reform voters would probably be able to spot the hypocrisy of blurting "but antisemitism" when the guy they’re trying to defend is a Nazi-enthusiast who spread antisemitic conspiracies.

So what did Richard Tice say when confronted about Menday’s disturbing social media history?

"Have many people in their private lives [have] occasionally sworn, thought something dark, said something dark? Yes, we're all human."

To be clear, Menday didn’t say any of these things in his "private life", he posted them all publicly on social media.

It’s more than a bit insulting to compare sharing Nazi material and spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories to swearing or having dark private thoughts.

Is me saying "Richard Tice is a fucking arsehole" really comparably offensive to Menday’s public glorification of the Nazis and his recycling of the antisemitic great replacement theory?

The conclusion of Tice’s defence seems to be that 'Nazis and antisemites are human too'.

Nobody is disputing that they’re human. Humanity produces terrible people who are capable of appalling atrocities, like Nazis.

What people are complaining about is that Reform keeps getting terrible humans like Menday elected.

Menday has now been suspended from Reform, and the suspicion is that it’s actually got more to do with his decision to retweet an Elon Musk post that said Farage should be replaced as Reform leader because "he doesn’t have what it takes", than the Nazism and antisemitism stuff.

Whenever Reform announce that their latest Nazi; antisemite; anti-black racist; violent criminal thug; ex-BNP; or whatever has been "suspended" it’s important to know what that means.

It doesn’t mean they’ve been thrown out of the council, it just means they’ve been dropped from the Reform group in the local council.

It means that Reform; and Reform activists; and Reform voters worked to get a Nazi or whatever elected, and that Nazi or whatever is remaining a local councillor.

It’s quite something to see a party that repeatedly tries to paint itself as a patriotic outfit (despite being almost entirely bankrolled by an overseas crypto billionaire), working to get Nazi fanboys elected, and making excuses for them when they get found out.

Our forefathers made enormous sacrifices during WWII in the fight against fascism, and it’s a grave insult to all of them that Reform don’t just get swastika-displaying Nazis elected into local government, but that they then try to downplay the seriousness by claiming that parading Nazism and antisemitism on social media is akin to merely "swearing" or having "dark thoughts".