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Instead of thanking @ITV for exposing several more vile foul-mouthed racists and sexists among those elected as Reform UK councillors, Richard Tice, aware that ITV was about to broadcast its findings, attacked the broadcaster in advance, saying: “You’ll find people say some stuff that I wouldn’t say, agree with, or condone. That’s life. It’s called the real world.” Here’s “some stuff” said by seven different Reform UK councillors, some of whom have since resigned from the party: A councillor appointed deputy mayor, who has since resigned from Reform citing “personal reasons” and now sits as an Independent: - On Asian homeowners in the area: The area was “infested” with Asian families; “They’re parasites, absolute parasites... This is just what we’re infested with” - “When a house comes up for sale, white people need to be in there. You almost need to fucking out-Muslim the Muslims.” - “I’d be saying no more than one percent of British population can be non-white… You’d need a proper nuclear option, like literally drag them at their homes, stick them on planes and fuck them off to Pakistan. Which you’ll never do in a month of Sundays.” - On Muslims: “They’re in our judiciary, they’re in our schools, they’re in our healthcare, they’re everywhere, and they are not working on our side, they’re against us.” - “I’ve seen comments from some people in the Asian community… talking about things like ‘Yeah, but we gave you curry.’ I was like, ‘I didn’t realise curry was an exchange that you could then rape all our kids’.” - Remark about a female Reform candidate: “That’s reminded me, I need to buy an orange in a sock.” Another Reform councillor: - On speculation a mosque might be built: “There’s got to be a way of stopping that, like go and buy some pork chops. We’ll bury it in the ground.” A councillor who has since resigned from Reform, citing “personal and health reasons”: - On a female Reform candidate: “If she was my daughter, it would still be bath night on a Thursday. I’ll wash you properly this time.” - On another female Reform candidate: He “would have been sniffing that seat as soon as she got up. If she’d have given me a hug I’d have fucking fingered her.” - On a moderated online comment: “Once one was mouthing off at me, some Asian lad, and I just put — it was struck off almost immediately — ‘I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve never been put on my arse by a fucking paki.’” Another councillor who has since resigned from Reform (this one claimed to ITV that he was heavily medicated at the time due to a chronic pain condition): - “We’ve been ethnically cleansed out of London… Because you never used to get any blacks over in Bromley, and now Bromley [has] massive Nigerian communities there.” - On local children he claimed were committing vandalism: “Like all the ethnic fucking kids, they’re not white, they’re all fucking black, and they’re like fucking animals. It’s horrible to say it. I’m not racist.” - On King Charles: “Apparently King Charles is a fucking Muslim. Someone from the inside saw a fucking prayer mat and all that in one of his fucking rooms. I think that’s fucking traitorous. Cut the cunt’s head off, sorry.” - On Channel migrants/illegal immigrants: “I’d get nicked for saying what I would do… I’ll take them out bruv, I don’t care… the way I see it, you’ve got to kill or you’re going to be killed… These fuckers have come to rape and pillage and fucking kill us. There’s no doubt about it.” A Reform councillor and aspiring MP: - “So first of all, I’d deport every other motherfucker in this country that doesn’t deserve to be here and their children as well. First thing, you’re fucking gone, bang… And then I’ll pick up the pieces after that.” - On legal migrants: “Even the legal ones, because there’s nothing wrong with legal immigration as long as it’s done right, but there are certain people who have been granted permission to stay in this country who shouldn’t [have]. 18-30 year old young lads, train them up in the army in insurgency tactics, so they can go street-by-street, house-by-house picking the cunts up.” (He also indicated he is “so, so far-right.”) - “But we are a far-right party, and our policies are to fucking kick these traitorous bastards out… how can you be a far-right fucking party when you got your fucking troops fucking mingling with the fucking enemy? They should be shot against the wall, that’s what I’d do.” Another Reform councillor: - “We’re not fucking stupid enough to piss off the entire woke south or centrist south really of the country… You need to seem palatable to everyone to get them, to get [the majority].” Another Reform councillor: - “The stuff that people feel uncomfortable with, don’t even announce it, just do it… We just need to get fucking elected, that’s all that really matters. We won’t necessarily say what we are doing, part of the point is to not [say].” Reform UK released the video statement featuring Tice about an ITV Exposure undercover investigation into Reform UK two days before ITV published any of the recordings. Reform clearly knew the investigation was coming and that it involved its councillors, though how much it knew of the precise content is unclear. Most of Tice’s four-minute statement attacks the investigation’s methods, which he called “probable criminal activity”. It ends with a call for Reform’s MPs, councillors and members to refuse to speak to ITV “in any capacity whatsoever” until it apologises. Shortly before that, Tice turned to the recordings themselves: “If you record hundreds of conversations undercover over a 12-month period using dozens of people, you’ll find people say some stuff that I wouldn’t say, agree with, or condone. That’s life. It’s called the real world. But it’s a reflection of people’s anger at what’s gone on.” As noted above, “some stuff” turned out to include elected Reform UK councillors calling Asian families “parasites”, describing black children as “animals”, saying non-white residents should be dragged out of their homes, and calling for the King to be beheaded. The phrase it’s called the real world sounds like a shrug, but rhetorically, its timing gave it a specific job. Viewers who heard Tice first were told the remarks were “life” and “the real world” before they could hear what had been said, and so before they could judge whether that description fitted. This is what the social psychologist William McGuire called “inoculation”: good research suggests an audience given a dismissal in advance is more likely to resist the evidence when it arrives. The phrase it’s called the real world also accepts that something was said while refusing what follows from it. Stan Cohen’s States of Denial separates literal denial (it didn’t happen), interpretive denial (it means something else) and implicatory denial (it happened, but nothing need follow). Tice moves straight to the last two. No speaker is named, nothing is described beyond “stuff”, and no consequence is offered. That shrug only works as long as the content stays vague. Try saying this out loud: “A councillor called for the King to be beheaded. It’s called the real world.” And Reform has never shown the same indulgence to words aimed at its own people. After Ann Widdecombe’s killing, Zia Yusuf told a press conference that past remarks by Labour politicians, including David Lammy’s call to “stand up to them before it’s too late”, were part of a narrative “so relentless it constitutes incitement”. When the words are about Reform, they are incitement. When one Reform councillor calls for the King to be beheaded and another for migrants to be picked up “house-by-house”, they are “the real world”. The phrase “that’s life” also naturalises. It places the remarks alongside the weather, as something that simply happens. Roland Barthes argued that myth works by making what is chosen and historical look natural, and Theo van Leeuwen identifies naturalisation as a common way of legitimating conduct. Things that ‘just happen’ have no authors, so the questions of who said what, and what should follow, quietly fall away. The register matters too. “It’s called...” is how people explain the obvious to the naive. It casts anyone troubled by the recordings as an innocent who hasn’t learned how the world works, and the speaker as the worldly adult. It’s also hard to answer without sounding sanctimonious, which appears to confirm the point. The surrounding sentences follow a familiar pattern. Gresham Sykes and David Matza described how people who break norms often accept those norms in principle while explaining why they don’t apply in this particular case. “I wouldn’t condone” accepts the norm. “But it’s a reflection of people’s anger” is what they called denial of responsibility, relocating the cause to immigration “imposed on Britain without consent”. Tice then says the comments “are for nothing compared to the security risks” Reform faces. William Benoit’s image repair theory names the same moves as ways of reducing offensiveness: differentiation, minimisation, transcendence and attacking the accuser. A “real world” implies an unreal one, and Tice names it: the “Westminster bubble”, its “politically correct language”, and a “terrified establishment”. Cas Mudde defines populism as dividing society into a pure people and a corrupt elite, and the phrase sorts the audience in exactly that way. In Teun van Dijk’s ideological square, Reform’s negative acts are played down as ordinary speech, while a negative quality (detachment from ordinary life) is attributed to its critics. The “real world” frame is already familiar to Reform’s audience. GB News runs a weekly programme presented by the Reform MP Lee Anderson called Lee Anderson’s Real World. George Lakoff argued that frames gain their force through repetition, until they feel like ‘common sense’ rather than a (frequently ideological) position. By the time Tice reached for the phrase, his viewers had long been told whose world the “real” one is. Ruth Wodak describes a discursive strategy she calls victim-perpetrator reversal, common among far-right and populist politicians seeking to evade accountability, in which the party facing scrutiny presents itself as the injured party. The “real world” line is the turning point. Before it, Tice concedes something. After it, the statement turns to security threats, an establishment “assault”, lawyers and the boycott. “Real world” rhetoric is common in politics. During #Partygate in 2022, the new Leader of the House, Mark Spencer, said the voters he met cared about energy bills and the #NHS, and urged people to “focus on the real world here”. That version ranks priorities: the scandal matters less than other things. The construction “it’s called the real world” goes further, claiming the conduct itself is normal. Eric Trump used the exact same phrase in 2019 to dismiss complaints that the Trump Organization had not paid contractors. He gave a justification (they “didn’t do a good job”), said “it’s called the real world”, then added that “people like to take cheap shots at us”. The sequence of justification, normalisation and attack on critics is the one Tice follows. The phrase is weakest when set against Reform’s own conduct. The party told ITV that investigations had commenced, and some of those recorded have since resigned from Reform. In July 2024, Nigel Farage admitted Reform had “a few bad apples” and said they would be “long gone”, adding: “You have my 100% promise on that.” At the party’s conference in Birmingham in September 2024, he told members: “We don’t want extremists, we don’t want bigots.” Two years on, Reform has more than 2,300 councillors and an outright majority on 23 councils, and these recordings strongly suggest his promise has not been kept. This also matters because councillors hold real power over people’s lives. They can sit on planning committees, including ones that decide on places of worship like the mosque one councillor was recorded discussing how to stop. They help decide housing, schools and local services for every resident, including the Muslim, Asian and black families described here as “parasites” and “animals”. Any resident whose councillor has said these things has good reason to doubt they will be treated fairly. And the women spoken about in such degrading terms were their own party’s candidates. Councils are bound by the public sector equality duty, and councillors by codes of conduct that require them to treat people with respect. Residents can complain to their council’s monitoring officer, or in Wales to the Public Services Ombudsman. But those codes generally apply only when councillors are acting in that role, and since the Localism Act 2011 the sanctions available in England have been limited, with suspension no longer among them. In practice, the main safeguard is the party that selects and vets them, which is exactly why Farage’s promise mattered. The language of violence matters too. “Stick them on planes”, “house-by-house”, “cut the cunt’s head off”, “they should be shot against the wall”: coming from people who hold elected office, words like these don’t stay in the pub. They tell people who are already angry that their anger is shared by those with authority. Tice spent much of the Reform video on the threats facing Reform politicians, and threats against politicians should indeed be taken seriously. The same logic applies when the violent language comes from Reform’s own representatives and is aimed at their neighbours. Some of those recorded also said plainly that they meant to hide what they think until they had power. That sounds less like anger than strategy. And what woulkd Tice, a privately educated multi-millionaire property developer who splits his time between Skegness and Dubai, where his fiancée Isabel Oakeshott lives, and who has herself described young people too sick to work as “parasites”, know about the “real world” anyway? In one sense Tice is right: this is the real world of some of Reform’s elected councillors. What his phrase is designed to stop people asking is whether voters knew about it when they elected them. The phrase admits, then excuses, and then counter-attacks, and it did all three before the public could hear what had been said. The Councillor quotes above are as reported by ITV Exposure. You can watch the full documentary, Undercover: A Year in Reform, on Sunday 18 October at 10:20pm on ITV1 and @ITVX. itv.com/news/2026-10-14/insi…