Reform UK Senedd candidate ‘pushed crazy conspiracy theories and said the late Queen should be overthrown’

Martin Shipton

A Reform UK candidate has been exposed as a peddler of bizarre conspiracy theories by the anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate.

Emma Clatworthy, the party’s number four candidate in Pen-y-bont Bro Morgannwg, used the Telegram messaging app to call the late Queen “a fraud” who needed to be overthrown, claimed that “the government are actors”, and suggested people only took the Covid vaccine as they were “brainwashed and programmed”.

In what Hope Not Hate described as a particularly peculiar post on February 5 2021, after declaring that “the government are actors” and “the whole system needs to be taken down and rebuilt”, Clatworthy wrote: “The Monarch needs to go she’s not our Queen never has been she’s a fraud, they’re all German decent [sic]… she’s not swearing to represent us the people, she’s swearing to trade off of us.”

Later in the same Telegram message, she wrote that: “We need to learn the correct processes to overthrow the monarch” and explained that what “needs to happen is a coordinated approach, putting the right people in the right places, such as our own Judge’s [sic], Lawyers, Sheriff, Media platforms, Doctors, Experts, and people to back them up”.

In another post, just over an hour later, Clatworthy detailed: “The problem we have is people have been brainwashed and programmed since they started school, every thing around us is programming us, so we accept this as norm, people are even rushing to get a vaccine that can kill them just to go back to the ‘norm’.”

Later that month, she also suggested creating communities outside of mainstream society in order to escape the lives of vaccinated “slaves” living in cities.

In other posts, she has called for people to “grow our own empire against the evil controlling globalists”, said that “we need to take the head off of their main weapon… the corrupt main media”, and shared the text of a friend’s Facebook post which declared that “we live in a slave system, trying to earn money to support a ponzi scheme”.

Clatworthy has also promoted medical conspiracy theories: in one Telegram message she claimed that “you can’t catch a virus” and declared that “Flu shots don’t prevent flu, they give you the flu… it’s all big pharma lies and business”.

Hope Not Hate said that those standing for Reform in other Welsh constituencies had shared far-right content and conspiracy theories on social media. Chris Brooke, for instance, one of the party’s candidates in Carmarthenshire, has responded enthusiastically to posts by the anti-Muslim extremist who calls himself Tommy Robinson, while Richard Pendry, standing in Gwynedd Maldwyn, has said Robinson “was right all along” and questioned why “the establishment” are “so frightened” by him.

Carbon

Meanwhile, Glenda Davies – up for election in Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilli Rhymni – has declared there’s “no link between CO2 and temperatures” and claimed the “obsession with Carbon has little to do with the environment and more a tool used by the left to impoverish and destroy developed countries.”

At the end of its investigation into Reform’s candidates in Wales and elsewhere, Hope Not Hate states: “After the 2024 general election, in which Reform stood candidates who praised Hitler, Putin and Jimmy Savile, Farage admitted the publicity did his party ‘enormous harm’. “Afterwards, he said Reform ‘wasn’t professionalised’ and filled with ‘at best loopy and at worst extremely racist candidates’.

“What’s new?”