Yui Mok/PA
A Reform UK candidate has sparked outrage after he claimed the country would be “far better” if it had “taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality” instead of fighting the Nazis in World War Two.
Posts from 2022 written by Ian Gribbin, the party’s candidate in Bexhill and Battle, have been unearthed by the BBC, and contain some quite shocking revelations.
Among them are claims by Gribbin that women were the “sponging gender” and should be “deprived of health care”.
He also said Winston Churchill was “abysmal”, that the UK should have been neutral on Hitler and praised Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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The comments have come to light as Nigel Farage prepares to unveil the Reform UK manifesto, with lofty spending plans included in the proposals.
It also comes hot on the heels of Rishi Sunak’s decision to leave D-Day events in France early, a decision which has led to widespread condemnation, including from Farage himself.
As such, the blogposts from Reform UK candidate Gribbin couldn’t have come to light at a worse time.
In July 2022, the candidate for Bexhill and Battle posted on the Unherd website: “Britain would be in a far better state today had we taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality…. but oh no Britain’s warped mindset values weird notions of international morality rather than looking after its own people.”
The same month he wrote: “In Britain specifically we need to exorcise the cult of Churchill and recognize that in both policy and military strategy, he was abysmal.”
The previous month he criticised women, writing on the site’s message board: “Do you think you could actually work and pay for it all too like good citizens?
“Men pay 80 per cent of tax – women spend 80 per cent of tax revenue. On aggregate as a group you only take from society.
“Less complaining please from the ‘sponging gender’.”
He added that women are “subsidised by men to merely breath (sic)”.
In January 2022 he posted: “Men pay 80 per cent of tax. Women take out 80 per cent of expenditures.
“Square that inequality first by depriving women of healthcare until their life expectancies are the same as men, Fair’s fair.”
In December 2021 he wrote female soldiers “almost made me wretch (sic)” and were a “total liability”.
In the run up to the invasion of Ukraine, he praised President Putin, writing in January 2022 that he had “shown a maturity of which we can only dream of”.
He “understands the bonds that create more stable societies; the hypocrisy of the West is preposterous as we stare in the face daily the enormous economic equalities created by our deluded neo liberal ideas”, he wrote.
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