Reform UK’s Caerphilly candidate has opened up on GB News about the abuse he endured in the Welsh town leading up to the crunch Senedd contest.
Llyr Powell secured 12,113 votes, with his party missing out on snatching the once-safe Labour seat by 3,848 ballots to Plaid Cymru’s Lindsay Whittle.
In the days after, Reform’s campaign office, located on Caerphilly’s Cardiff Road, had an expletive message emblazoned across its shutters.
“Now you can f**k off home,” the vandals wrote.
Now, opening up about his political battle fending off a hurl of abuse, Mr Powell sat down for a candid interview with GB News’ Martin Daubney, sharing how he feared not only for himself but his family and campaign colleagues as well.
“It was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done in my life,” the Reform candidate told the GB News presenter.
“From the attacks on the campaign office to glue in the doors, to preventing us getting in, to then actually escalating where I had death threats on a regular basis.
“It just became the norm in the campaign,” he told Martin.
Abuse ‘became the norm in the campaign’, he told Martin
|
GB
He further detailed instances where his home was “attacked”, as well as attacks launched on the family homes of fellow campaigners, recalling the “panic” that afflicted him.
“My family had to be kept away. It was an unbearable experience,” Mr Powell said.
He continued: “I feared for whether it was my own safety, my family, my friends, or even activists that were just giving up their time to campaign for what they believe in. And I was spat on.
“I was attacked in the street outside my office. Security would actually walk me in the morning to get my morning breakfast just because they were concerned about my well-being.”
But he expressed concern that he had only seen a mere “fraction” of what his fellow Reform campaigners go through daily.
“I couldn’t even imagine how Nigel and the rest of the MPs do this on a day-to-day basis,” the Welsh candidate admitted.
Reform UK campaigners up and down Britain have reported instances of abuse, leading Martin to ask whether Mr Powell was concerned about the “toxic rhetoric” surrounding Nigel Farage’s party spouted by top Labour figures.
Previously, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood accused Mr Farage of “blowing a very loud dog whistle” by flirting with an immigration policy that was “worse than racist”.
Llyr Powell became a target for political abuse during the Caerphilly by-election
|
GB NEWS
Issuing a stark warning, Mr Powell said: “It’s going to have huge consequences, because by branding someone a racist and making that word become such a norm in society where if you disagree with someone now you’ve simply called them a racist, it loses its meaning.”
“Someone who is racist, who discriminates based on nothing else but just out of pure prejudice, that is dangerous. We’re belittling that.”
On a more positive note, Mr Powell declared: “Despite people telling us to go home, they’re in for disappointment because Reform UK is going absolutely nowhere.
“We’re going to stand up for the people of Wales and what we believe in. I wonder, actually, if the people who call others fascists are sometimes the precise thing they accuse others of,” he added.