John Major says Reform are ‘ragbag’ scapegoating Muslims and migrants

John Major, the former Conservative British prime minister, has launched a scathing criticism of right-wing party Reform UK, accusing it of scapegoating Muslims and migrants.

He made the comments last week in an interview with The Independent. 

“What is Reform? It’s a ragbag really. What’s its philosophy? What’s its purpose? What are its convictions? I don’t know. Nobody knows. Nobody talks about it. I don’t hear lectures about the convictions and philosophy of Reform,” he said. 

Major was leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister between 1990 and 1997. 

He said that Reform had “nothing good to offer” and were gaining “wholly negative votes” because successive Labour and Conservative governments had failed people. 

“But what positivity is there about Reform? What is their unique selling brand? It’s that they are opposed to Muslims and migrants,” Major added. 

“And when that wears out, because that is the way they operate, they’ll find somebody else in order to be a scapegoat.

“They are certainly narrow in concept, nationalist in instinct, and hostile to those, in a quite crude way, who don’t actually agree with them.”

In the local elections held across England, Scotland and Wales last month, Nigel Farage's Reform UK won over 1,300 council seats and 13 councils.

Reform received the biggest jump in vote share of any party. Many projections and opinion polls in recent months have them as likely to be the largest party in the next general election. 

Middle East Eye reported last month that there were several alleged cases of racist comments made by newly elected councillors. 

A councillor for Chelmsley Wood, Phil Tierney, was featured in an article by the Daily Mail in the run-up to the elections for alleged Islamophobic social media posts, including one on X in which he wrote "I am Islamophobic". 

In one case, a man who initially stood as a Reform UK candidate for Clayton and Fairweather Green in Bradford before standing down due to backlash over re-surfaced racist posts, won the seat anyway.

Daniel Devaney apologised for a post in which he said he would "blast [Muslims] off the face of the earth," referring to them as "pure scum".