Reform by-election candidate said it was ‘insane’ to jail man who said ‘burn asylum hotels’

The Reform candidate in an upcoming Westminster by-election is under scrutiny after saying it was “insane” a man was jailed for 18 months for social media posts calling for people to burn asylum hotels to the ground.

Matt Goodwin responded to a Daily Mail report from December that Luke Yarwood, from Christchurch, Dorset, was jailed inciting racial hatred. He said in a post on X: “Welcome to the UK. Where you go to prison for 18 months for anti-immigration tweets. This is insane.”

Yarwood had reportedly called on Brits to “gang together, hit the streets and start the slaughter” in a series of anti-Muslim and anti-immigration posts from 21 December 2024 to 29 January 2025.

open image in gallery

“Violence and murder is the only way now. Start off burning every migrant hotel then head off to MPs' houses and Parliament, we need to take over by FORCE”, he said, following a car attack in Germany which killed six people, as misinformation spread on social media suggesting it was linked to Islamic extremism.”

While his lawyer reportedly defended him by pointing out that only 33 people had read the post, he was still jailed for 18 months.

Reform UK hit back at criticism around Mr Goodwin’s tweet, claiming it was “desperate stuff” from Labour after The i reported about his post and the party’s deputy leader Lucy Powell called on the Denton and Gorton candidate to reject support from members of his campaign team that have been accused of racism.

A Reform UK spokesman said: “This is desperate stuff from a Labour Party that has also just been revealed to have been smearing journalists. Criticising the fact that people are being jailed for what they write on social media is clearly not the same as defending those views.

open image in gallery

“The fact that our political opponents are conflating these two things is outrageous and a sign of how desperate they have become. Vote Reform, vote for common sense.”

Mr Goodwin hit the headlines last week after The Independent revealed he had called for women and young girls to be given a “biological reality” check as he warned of an impending “fertility crisis”.

This publication also revealed that he had previously suggested people who don’t have children should be taxed extra as punishment and warned that “many women in Britain are having children much too late in life”.

The polling cited by Mr Goodwin, who is standing for Reform UK in the Gorton and Denton by-election at the end of this month, also showed more than 50 per cent of the public wanted taxes and spending to increase, while 40 per cent wanted them to remain the same.

He also once described his party’s economic plans as an “utterly toxic combination”, explaining that he “cannot stress enough how UNPOPULAR slashing taxes and cutting spending on public services is” in a post on LinkedIn three years ago.

open image in gallery

The former academic was pointing to polling from the highly respected British Social Attitudes survey which showed that reducing both was backed by just 6 per cent of the public.

In November, Nigel Farage said his party “will cut spending” and “we want to cut taxes”. And last month he doubled down, saying: “We are going to reduce excessive government spending.”

In a speech last year, Mr Farage said “substantial tax cuts” were not realistic at the current moment “given the dire state” of the country’s finances but said that his party would raise the threshold at which workers start to pay tax and scrap Labour’s ‘family farm’ inheritance tax changes.

However, he rowed back from his party’s 2024 election promise to cut £90bn of taxes, which leading economic think tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said Reform had failed to set out how they would achieve.

open image in gallery

Last month Mr Farage also told an event in Davos that he thought “the one big lesson of the Liz Truss-Kwasi Kwarteng Budget is that they did not propose to cut spending. So for our programme to work, what we absolutely have to tell people that we are going to reduce welfare spending, we are going to reduce excessive government spending.”

A Labour Party spokesperson said: “Matt Goodwin’s comments show that it’s not just Labour saying Reform’s economic plans are ludicrous – their own candidate thinks so too.

“Reform UK offers nothing but a return to austerity, enacted by a party stuffed full of the same Tories that broke our public services in the first place.”

A Reform spokesperson told The Independent: “Labour’s campaign in Gorton and Denton truly must be on the ropes if they have had to resort to polling analysis by Matt from three years ago when the economy was in a much different place.

“We will take no lectures from a party under whose watch the economy has tanked. By voting Reform the voters of Gorton and Denton can get Keir Starmer out and help bring an end to this failed Labour government.”