James O’Brien has nailed Reform and Nigel Farage’s for their rank hypocrisy over a social media post that appeared on Zack Polanski’s Instagram account.
On Sunday, Polanski accepted a collaborator request on an Instagram post which featured several images from a Green Party event in Bristol.
One of the images showed a man wearing a T-shirt featuring a guillotine alongside the lyrics “we’re only making plans for Nigel” from the 1979 XTC song, a slogan widely interpreted as a reference to the Reform UK leader.
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The Green Party said he had simply accepted an invitation to collaborate on it and had not created the original content.
A party spokesperson said the image was removed as soon as it was brought to his attention.
Farage and Reform reported Polanski to the police over the post, with Farage writing in a post on X: “If I was to post anything as inciteful then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski.”
However, some have accused Reform of hypocrisy over their reaction to the image, pointing to occasions when figures within their party have also made comments on that could be labelled as inciteful.
One of those to make this observation was LBC presenter James O’Brien. He highlighted how different Reform’s reaction to the image was to their reaction to the social media posts from convicted criminal Lucy Connolly in which she called for migrant hotels to be set on fire.
Connolly has been portrayed as a martyr and political prisoner by many in Reform circles, and even appeared at the party’s conference last year.
O’Brien pointed out how ludicrous it was to treat the two incidents so differently.
“There are some things that everybody has to agree on and this should be one of them,” he said. “Unfortunately you’ve got someone who routinely talks about picking up rifles or knifing civil servants claiming that a t-shirt is profoundly offensive and Lucy Connolly is some sort of folk hero.
“You’ve got hypocrisy on a scale that is almost impossible to process.”