Following the May 2025 local elections, elected Reform candidate Luke Shingler has technically switched to “Independents”. Luke Shingler, was elected as a Reform UK candidate for Galley Common ward, Warwickshire but his employer prevents him standing as a Party representative so due to his current employment conditions, he will be serving Galley Common as your County Councillor as an Independent for the next 18 months when he is due to leave his employment at which time he will cross the Chamber to rejoin Reform. He said that he had still appeared on teh ballot paper for Reform UK Party as it was too late to change this when he found out about the employment conditions.
He is employed by the Royal Air Force (RAF) who as part of the UK armed forces do not permit members “to join a trade union or a political organisation, to speak to the media or in public without permission or to stand for elected office”.
Luke Shingler may well not be the last councillor to have slipped through the vetting processes that Nigel Farage has imposed. Reform is already the only party to carry a detailed vetting process on all candidates and determined to maintain the integrity of vetting.
“This is typical of a new vetting process, where the occasional prohibition will slip through the first time that the vetting process is used for a large number of people. Reform vetted over 2,500 potential candidates and will have added ‘membership of armed forces’ into it’s alert system in their vetting process” said Dr Nick Lockett, a barrister and solicitor specialising in Election Law and who has advised previous Governments on vetting.
It is expected that Reform UK will also expand its candidate awareness training programme to cover areas to be especially careful about, as was demonstrated by the criticism of a cartoon reposted by Reform’s Joel Tetlow in Lancashire which resulted in 2 disgruntled and humourless Labour MPs complaining about a cartoon critical of Labour’s failure to stop the boats parodying a cartoon of Adolf Hitler looking at maps with his generals and saying “invade by small boats a few at a time, it’ll never work!”