Far right activist calls for ‘all forms of Islam’ to be expelled from Britain

Martin Shipton

A prominent far right Welsh activist who dislikes being described as far right has stated that “all forms of Islam” should be expelled from Britain and has defended the right of a Reform Mayoral candidate to tell Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy to “go back to the Caribbean”.

Richard Taylor is currently the leader of the Advance UK party in Wales. The party is led by Reform UK’s former deputy leader Ben Habib, although its best known member is the serial criminal Stephen Yaxley Lennon, better known by his alias ‘Tommy Robinson’.

Taylor has previously stood for Westminster and the Senedd for the Brexit Party and the Abolish The Welsh Assembly Party respectively, and became known across the UK through his previously frequent appearances as a pundit on GB News.

A self-confessed teenage criminal, burglar and drug user originally from Llanelli, he wrote an autobiography about how he found Jesus in prison.

Subsequently he became a pastor at an evangelical church in Cwmbran, but he left suddenly following a financial dispute and – as he put it in a podcast – after he “committed adultery against [his] wife”.

In the 2019 general election he stood as the Brexit Party’s candidate in Blaenau Gwent, coming second to re-elected Labour MP Nick Smith, who was 8,647 votes ahead of him.

By 2021 he had defected to the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party. He stood for the Senedd, also in Blaenau Gwent, coming fifth with 1,364 votes (6.6% of the total vote). Sitting Labour MS Alun Davies was re-elected.

Subsequently he joined Reform, but left earlier this year after party leader Nigel Farage distanced himself from Robinson.

The anti-fascist group Far Right Watch Wales said at the time in a statement circulated to its supporters: “The feelgood factor that Reform party bosses apparently felt after the UK general election, when the right wing populist party saw five MPs elected, must have evaporated when news reached them that they’d suffered a seismic defection in Wales with the announcement from Richard Taylor on his Facebook page that he was leaving the party in protest at its refusal to support Taylor’s political hero the far right grifter in-chief Tommy ’10 names and 10 criminal convictions’ Robinson.

“We are of course being jocular – word has reached us from inside Reform that party activists in Wales breathed a huge sigh of relief that someone with Taylor’s alarming personal history and dubious political past had publicly flounced out of the party because it isn’t extreme right wing enough for him.

“That alarming history includes Taylor’s threats to a Welsh journalist after an expose detailing claims against Taylor of the exploitation of vulnerable people at a church rehab programme he was involved in the days when he was a self styled pastor with an ‘evangelical church’ in Cwmbran. Taylor made the threat when he was standing as a candidate for the Abolish the Welsh Assembly party in the 2021 Senedd elections.

“[His] dubious political history shows a bewildering habit of swapping political parties … It wasn’t long before he was seeking new political pastures once again – jumping from the Wales haters of Abolish to Farage’s newly formed Reform party.

“It’s perhaps fitting that since moving to Llanell, Taylor has been regularly spotted ‘working out’ at a local gym with another far right felon – Dan Morgan, the Voice of Wales co-founder who received a suspended jail sentence for his part in a massive insurance scam which included defrauding elderly people out of their life savings.”

Dan Wootton

This week Taylor appeared on the YouTube channel of far right presenter Dan Wootton, who left GB News after failing to intervene when the far right actor Laurence Fox made sexually disparaging comments about journalist Ava Evans.

During a discussion about the Muslim religion, Taylor said: “We should expel all forms of Islam in this country. Now, I know people might call me far right and racist for that comment. Go ahead and do that.”

In the same programme Wootton raised the issue of Reform UK Mayoral candidate Chris Parry, who had said Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy should “go back to the Caribbean” even though he was born in Britain.

Wootton said: “I genuinely feel like David Lammy should fuck off because he called all Brexit voters Nazis. So seriously, fuck him, you know? Yeah, his cry racism shtick should just be ignored by Reform UK. It really should. And I don’t know much about this Chris Parry bloke, but I certainly know that he should not lose his political career for making that comment, because Lammy never lost his political career for calling me a Nazi, for attacking Donald Trump as a Nazi, which is way more sick and way more racist.”

‘Race card’

Taylor responded: “David Lammy has proven that time and time again. He always uses the race card. If you look at his actual performance as Foreign Secretary [sic], we’ve had people released from prison that shouldn’t be released. He wants to scrap juries, which is, you know, part of our great British justice. And when you consider he wants reparations, which in his mind is justice and slavery was ended by a white man. May I remind your viewers of that?”

Later in the programme Taylor describes Tommy Robinson as a “living legend”, says that Farage is “not the Messiah” and that Reform UK will implode. Taylor claimed that Advance UK already has 40,000 members and that more and more people will turn to it.

He was looking forward to attending a mass rally planned by Robinson to be held in central London next May.

A political source said: “Richard Taylor may have had a makeover and grown his hair to make himself appear more trendy, but he’s the same racist and charlatan that he always was.”