A Reform UK party activist recorded using a racist slur about Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and suggesting migrants arriving in the country by boat should be shot is a property developer from Bishop’s Stortford.
Andrew Parker was recorded by an undercover Channel 4 news team describing Mr Sunak as a “f****** p*** and suggested getting young army recruits to use migrants arriving on the Kent coast as “target practice” adding, “f****** just shoot them”.
Mr Parker, also described as a part-time actor, was being filmed while campaigning for the far right, populist party in Clacton, Essex, where Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is standing and is favourite to win, in his eighth attempt at becoming an MP.
A director of Clearwater Estates Ltd, a company he set up in 2018, Mr Parker is seen knocking on doors at a caravan park in the constituency and advising residents of the Reform UK party’s policies.
He suggested Reform UK would turn all mosques into Wetherspoons pubs and while chatting to a paramedic the 63-year-old told him to “do us a favour, any of that f***** lot you get in your ambulance, just don’t put oxygen on the b******, use something else. You know where I’m coming from.”
John Burmicz, Reform UK’s candidate for Hertford and Stortford told the Indie on Monday he has never heard of Mr Parker and he didn’t know anybody who had.
He insisted Mr Parker’s views had nothing to do with his or that of the party and said all the Reform candidates and party canvassers in Hertfordshire he had met were “reasonable, straight down the middle people”.
He stressed: “Those sort of ideas [those of Mr Parker] have no place in Reform. ”
Mr Burmicz, who was a Sawbridgeworth town councillor and mayor, is proud of his Polish roots and often speaks of his father who fled Poland during the Second World War to join the RAF as a fighter pilot. But he disputes that Reform UK are anti-immigration.
“If people are coming here to do jobs and making a contribution there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said.
Mr Burmicz didn’t believe Mr Parker’s comments and the outcry caused by those and others expressed in the Channel 4 news item had caused the party damage.
“You can get nutters anywhere,” he said. “If you get somebody like that making wild statements I think people are intelligent enough to see through it.”
“I think people are sensible enough to know where this guy’s coming from.”
Following the backlash from the news exposé Mr Parker issued the following statement: “I’d like to make it clear that neither Nigel Farage personally or the Reform Party are aware of my personal views on immigration...I would like therefore to apologise to them if my personal views have reflected badly on them and brought them into disrepute.”
Mr Farage initially called Mr Parker’s comments “horrible” and said he was “dismayed”, but later said the Channel 4 exposé was “a total and utter set-up”. He further suggested that Mr Parker was acting, an accusation the property developer denied but he also said he had been “set up”.
An emotional and visibly shocked Mr Sunak was interviewed after the revelations saying “racism stings” and he repeated the words used by Mr Parker.
“To know my girls may have heard their dad be called a “f****** p***” by someone campaigning for Reform is shocking. We are better than that as a country.”
Labour leader Keir Starmer said he was “shocked” by the footage, describing it as “clearly racist” and added of Mr Farage: “I think this is a test of leadership.”
The Indie left a message for Mr Parker, giving him the opportunity to speak to us but as yet he has not taken up the offer.
