Brexiters peddled ‘nationalistic pish’, said Reform UK’s Makerfield candidate

Reform UK’s candidate for the Makerfield byelection has castigated Brexit as an economically self-harming project promoted by politicians who “peddled the nationalistic pish”, raising more doubts about his commitment to Nigel Farage’s signature achievement. The comments by Robert Kenyon, unearthed on a defunct rugby league forum and first reported by the Telegraph, follow the emergence of another post in which he said people would be wrong to assume he had voted for Brexit. Kenyon’s prolific online output on the rugby forum and on since-deleted X accounts has prompted a sequence of stories since he was selected to take on Labour’s Andy Burnham in the 18 June byelection. In other posts, Kenyon, a plumber local to the constituency in Greater Manchester, expressed scepticism about vaccines and the seriousness of Covid; backed Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea; interacted with far-right figures; and endorsed a lewd comment about Carol Vorderman, for which the TV presenter has asked him to apologise . The comments about Brexit , posted in the hours after the result of the 2016 referendum was called, appear to run counter to his claim that he supported leave at the time. “All Brexit means is we’ve shot our economy in the foot for the short term, things will get back to the way they were and we will still end up under the same rules and regs of the EU as we always have but with no say in the matter,” he wrote. …