An aspiring Reform UK MP was filmed calling for asylum seekers arriving by boat to be detained in concentration camps, in the latest undercover reporting to expose the party's internal culture, published on 17 October 2026. Jason Powell, who told an ITV journalist he had passed the party's vetting checks to stand for parliament, also claimed that Muslims cannot be British.
The revelations come from ITV's year-long investigation, Undercover: A Year in Reform, broadcast on 18 October, and reported by Metro and The Guardian. Powell made the remarks at a rally in Clacton after the August by-election, an event attended by hundreds of party activists and, according to ITV News, not covered by an event licence.
What the recordings reveal
According to Metro, Powell told the undercover reporter: 'Anyone who comes across on a boat, as an example, in the first week of the election, build concentration camps, and everyone who comes across on the channel, you're in there.' He added that people seeking asylum should be 'rounded up, every single last one of them', and given an ultimatum: name your country of origin or be detained indefinitely.
Powell also targeted Muslims. 'You cannot be a Muslim and British... It's like oil and water,' he said, adding that he would only accept Muslims who 'de-convert'. He told ITV his views are not extremist and claimed they reflect the general opinion of the British public.
The Guardian, which corroborated the footage, reports that Powell is one of several candidates and councillors captured expressing extreme and racist views. Earlier disclosures from the same investigation included Bromley councillor Dean Miller, who has since resigned, describing Black children as 'animals', and MP Sarah Pochin calling her own party 'chauvinistic', as the BBC reported.
Executions, machine guns and the language of elimination
The reporting goes beyond rhetoric of detention. Hounslow councillors Adam Parkins and David Kerr, who stood as a Reform candidate in 2024, were recorded discussing what the party might do in power. Parkins said that if he were prime minister he would 'quite happily do Sunday morning Rose Garden executions' of people accused of grooming, describing shooting them without a second thought. Kerr agreed that perpetrators should be 'machine gunned down' and said a 'tenable solution' on immigration could not be discussed openly 'without being called a Nazi'.
This is not dog-whistle politics. It is the explicit vocabulary of elimination, spoken by people seeking elected office, and it draws directly on the far-right playbook of racialized scapegoating. The framing of Muslim communities as inherently foreign, of migrants as detainable en masse, of 'grooming gangs' as a racial category rather than a legal one, reproduces the Islamophobic structures that organizations like Hope Not Hate have documented for years. When Kerr says the quiet part aloud, that the barrier is merely being 'called a Nazi', he confirms what abolitionist and anti-racist campaigners have long argued: the far right does not consider its positions beyond the pale, only beyond PR.
Vetting as theatre
Nigel Farage has insisted that 'there is no room for racism in Reform UK'. The party's statement in response to ITV claims it has 'improved and prioritised its vetting procedures' and that 'one cannot vet a future comment'.
The footage undermines that defence from within. Welsh councillor Karl Lewis, previously criticized for sharing extremist material including a post titled 'Sweden Raped to Death by Muslim Migrants', was given media training by the party itself, in a mock interview conducted by board member Darren Grimes. Lewis rehearsed a denial of extremism, was applauded for it, and then told the undercover journalist he had been lying and was 'ahead of his time'. The party did not expel him; it trained him to deflect scrutiny.
This is institutional complicity, not a vetting failure. The party's response, noting that 'not all individuals covertly recorded by ITV are members', functions as damage control rather than accountability. As reporting on police culture has repeatedly shown, including in cases such as the