Welsh far-right activist quits Reform UK as senior figures row about ‘Tommy Robinson’

Martin Shipton

One of Wales’ most prominent far-right activists has left Reform UK as part of a split in the party over senior figures’ attitudes towards the jailed criminal who calls himself “Tommy Robinson”.

Richard Taylor, who has previously stood for Westminster and the Senedd for the Brexit Party and the Abolish The Welsh Assembly Party, 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.

Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party

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.

The anti-fascist group Far Right Watch Wales said 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. And following his abandonment of Reform, and if the rumours are true that his recent move to Llanelli will see him stand for the Kippers [UKIP] in the area in the 2026 Senedd elections, it’ll mean he’ll have represented 4 different political parties in just a few years.

“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.”

London rally

Meanwhile the other half of “Voice of Wales” – Stan Robinson (no relation) was a speaker at last week’s London rally which was originally intended to be led by “Tommy Robinson”, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

Yaxley-Lennon was unable to attend the rally because he was in custody awaiting sentence on a contempt of court charge. He was jailed for 18 months after pleading guilty to contempt by showing a film at a previous rally in which he repeated defamatory comments about a Syrian schoolboy refugee that had been disproved in a court case.

Taylor’s support for “Tommy Robinson” is matched by that of some senior figures in Reform, although the party’s deputy leader Richard Tice MP said this week that Reform “want nothing to do with” [Tommy] Robinson and “all of that lot”.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform, also said after the summer riots that he had never had anything to do with “the Tommy Robinsons and those who genuinely do stir up hatred”.

The Guardian reported: “Two high-profile 2024 candidates, Howard Cox and Ben Habib, took a different position, saying those attending the rally were some of Reform’s own people.

“After the sentencing, Cox, who stood as Reform’s London mayoral candidate and as a parliamentary candidate in Dover and Deal, said Robinson should not be in jail and Tice had been wrong to distance the party from those who attended the rally.

“Speaking on Dan Wootton’s Outspoken show, Cox agreed with his host that Robinson should not be in jail and said he, too, was one of ‘that lot’ – a reference to Tice’s comments. He added that Farage had told him Tice had gone ‘over the top’ in his criticism. ‘This week, unfortunately, Richard … said I want nothing to do with Tommy Robinson or his lot. It’s a bit sad because I’m a good friend of Richard and we are close but that was wrong … I am one of that lot. Nigel actually did contact me privately and he just simply said Richard went over the top,’ Cox told Wootton.

“He added: “I love him to death, but I think Richard has got to come out and clarify what he really meant. He was actually saying he was against thuggery and violence. Most of the people there, 99% of the people at all of these things, are just concerned about getting our country back.”

Stood up

Habib, until recently the co-deputy leader of Reform, also stood up for those who had attended the rally to support Robinson.

Speaking to Paul Thorpe, a watch dealer turned YouTuber and founder of a “patriotic movement” called Unite UK, Habib said: “Those of us who care about this country, who want to stand against the uniparty of the Tories and Labour, have to stick together. We are one group.

“I don’t know Tommy Robinson, I’m not going to venture an opinion on Tommy Robinson. But certainly, I’m not going to throw him under a bus. What I do know is the thousands, tens of thousands of people who congregated in Whitehall, I know many people who told me they were there. They are our friends, they are Reform voters and we need to stand firmly behind them.”