Has Andrew RT Davies gone too far (again)?

Ethan Jones 

Has the former Welsh Tory leader finally gone too far? The combative culture warrior has spent the last week and a half being very active on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X (formerly Twitter).

The furore and misinformation swirling around our political discourse due to Mr Musk discovering the grooming gangs scandal, which has been in the public eye for at-least the last 15 years, has dominated.

Unsurprisingly, to anyone familiar with his social media output, Mr Davies has been in the thick of the controversial online action.

Sunday evening, I was sent a screenshot of Mr Davies’ latest controversial post on X. It shocked me, even for him it was really extreme. I had to double check whether it was real, it was…

Video

Cast your mind back to 2022, when people were voicing their support for Ukraine and welcoming Ukrainian refugees into their communities. Many of us will remember the news items on Ukrainian children thriving in Welsh schools, some even becoming fluent in Cymraeg.

In December of 2023, one such initiative by some secondary school children was to make a video welcoming Ukrainian child refugees to Wales. Which did the rounds online at the time, to a degree.

The video signposted refugees to the Welsh Refugee Council, who wrote an article about the school kids’ project. Nothing controversial about this, I’m sure most people would agree…

That is until Andrew RT Davies decided to weaponise the video this last weekend.

‘Propaganda’

Davies shared an edited version of the video which had cut all male school children from the footage and references to the Ukrainian refugees. Mr Davies shared the video from another X account which alleged that the Welsh Refugee Council were using 12 year-old girls “to entice migrant men to come to Wales.”

Davies alleged that schoolchildren were being used by the Welsh Government for “propaganda” purposes and repeated long debunked misinformation, claiming that Labour wants to pay illegal immigrants £1,600 per month.

It wasn’t long until Andrew RT Davies was fact-checked and called out for sharing misleading content – territory he must be very familiar in by now. Davies has since acknowledged that the video had been edited, then dismissed concerns around the consequences of sharing it. The combative culture warrior even doubling down on some of the points he’d made.

The edited video has since been latched upon by prominent right wing commentators, in both the UK and USA, and has gone viral as a result; being viewed millions of times on X alone.

In the context of the grooming gangs discourse this innocent video, filmed to welcome Ukrainian child refugees to a school in Bridgend, has been corrupted and weaponised by some of the most despicable racist grifters there are.

The claims being made by some commentators on X is that the Welsh Refugee Council is using white school girls essentially as meat to entice predatory men to Wales from “alien” cultures.

It is the worst, most disgusting political tactic deployed into Welsh political discourse in recent times. And right at the centre of it is the man who, just over a month ago, was the official leader of the opposition and the Conservative Party in Wales.

Sewer

Davies has joined his party’s Westminster leader, Kemi Badenoch, and the failed leadership candidate, Robert Jenrick, in the political sewer parroting Elon Musk’s far-right disinformation campaign.

Let me be clear, calling for an inquiry is not far-right. Echoing Musk’s misinformation linking it to culture and the great replacement theory *is* far-right. It isn’t hard to argue that Davies and much of the frontbench of the Tory Party are now in a place on the political spectrum’s extremes once occupied by the BNP.

It is important to remember that Andrew RT Davies was leader of the Conservatives in the Senedd just a few weeks ago, until almost half is MSs told him he had to resign.

His resignation was forced, in part, by his behaviour throughout 2024 which had seen him accused of Islamophobic race-baiting by the Muslim Council of Wales and reprimanded by the Senedd standards commissioner for misleading the public. Unfortunately, what he says still matters due to his platform and his actions have consequences.

Complaint

Part of those consequences is that following this incident the safety of the children in the video has been put at risk. On top of that threats have been made to staff at the Welsh Refugee Council, who are now following up a complaint against Mr Davies with the Senedd.

Davies has clearly learnt nothing from the incidents he was involved in last year and his extremist online behaviour seems to be escalating rapidly. No doubt the defence will be “free-speech.” Which simply seems to be the defence deployed in attempts to justify outrageous statements these days.

A strong argument can be made that there is no way back from this and that he should be decisively dealt with by both the Senedd and his new boss, Darren Millar.

Is he daring Millar to discipline him so he can jump to Reform, with whom his rhetoric is rapidly aligning, or is he simply out for social media clicks?

Has Andrew RT Davies gone too far? I think he has.