A Reform UK candidate has said “girls should be aware promiscuity is not attractive” and that women cannot “behave in the same way” as men, in the latest controversial comments from Nigel Farage’s party.
In an interview with i, James Gunn, who is standing in Oxford West and Abingdon, also repeated contentious claims around Covid-19, including a suggestion, without evidence, that vaccines could “get something really nasty into a body”.
Asked about comments made by Mr Farage, in which the Reform leader praised misogynist influencer Andrew Tate for being an “important voice” for the “emasculated”, and for giving boys “perhaps a bit of confidence at school”, Mr Gunn said Tate “is not my role model” and he “didn’t know much about him”.
But when questioned over remarks Tate had made, including that women who are not virgins are “used goods”, Mr Gunn replied: “I think girls should be aware promiscuity is not attractive to young men, or even old men. They’ve been taught by feminism that men and women can behave in the same way and I’m sorry but it ain’t true.”
Since December 2022, Tate has been facing charges in Romania of human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. He denies all the allegations.
Mr Farage has previously praised the British-American kickboxer, who poses with fast cars, guns and cigars, for defending “male culture”, although he has also acknowledged that the influencer had gone “over the top” and said some “pretty horrible” things.
Responding to Mr Gunn’s comments, Reform chairman Richard Tice told i: “That’s just childish nonsense. No one’s interested in that for heaven’s sake.
“On the thousands of doors I have knock on, no one is talking about how much sex women have compared to men. They’re talking about immigration, the cost of living crisis and the need for something new in politics.”
Discussing the Covid pandemic, Mr Gunn backed former Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, who was expelled from his party after he compared Covid-19 vaccines to the Holocaust.
In December 2022, Mr Bridgen called for a “complete suspension” of Covid jabs based on what he described as “robust data of significant harms and little ongoing benefit”. This went against the overwhelming weight of evidence, from a number of different independent teams of researchers, that found the benefits far outweighed any known harms.
For example, two new but exceptionally rare Covid-19 vaccine side effects – a neurological disorder and inflammation of the spinal cord – were detected by researchers in the largest vaccine safety study to date. The study of more than 99 million people from Australia, Argentina, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, New Zealand and Scotland confirmed how rare known vaccine complications are, with researchers confirming that the benefits of Covid-19 vaccines still “vastly outweigh the risks”.
Mr Gunn said he backed the former Tory MP’s efforts to open up the Covid vaccine debate, saying he was deeply worried about the Government’s “absolute determination to ignore excess deaths and ostracise Andrew Bridgen and discredit him as far as they can”.
He added: “I think he [Mr Bridgen] can be immensely proud of his work an MP and I’m saddened that the other MPs did not support him.”
Discussing how he thought the NHS had “overreacted” to lockdown, Mr Gunn said: “We have a lot of people who are having some sort of unexplained increase in cancers and cardiac problems, which the Government refuses to investigate.
“I’m with Andrew Bridgen on this, it’s time to look into it. I think I know where it came from but I have no evidence because the Government doesn’t want me to have any evidence.
“I’m very concerned about that. I’m very concerned the Government isn’t taking responsibility for that.”
Mr Gunn said he believed that healthy people should not have been quarantined during lockdown, adding: “It’s much easier to get something really nasty into a body, past the immune system through a hypodermic than it is for some random virus, if it indeed was a random virus.”
The Reform candidate went on to suggest that the US was involved in the creation of the Covid virus. He claimed that Dr Anthony Fauci – who was a chief medical adviser to the US president during the pandemic – had admitted the virus was created as a result of “gain of function” research sanctioned by him and subcontracted to the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan.
Gain of function research is a process in which an organism, cell or microbe is genetically altered to acquire a new function.
Dr Fauci has rejected the theory that the Covid virus leaked as a result of work funded by the US at the Wuhan Institute of Virolog. He told Congress in June: “I have always said, and will say now, I keep an open mind as to what the origin [of Covid-19] is.
“But the one thing I know for sure is that the viruses that were funded by the NIH [National Institutes of Health], phylogenetically, could not be the precursor of SARS-CoV-2.”
Mr Gunn claimed “There’s lots of evidence claiming it was a gain of function lab leak from Wuhan.”
Mr Tice backed Mr Gunn’s claims over Covid vaccines, saying: “He’s talking about serious stuff here. About lockdowns, excess deaths, about vaccine harms.
“We believe there should be a full public inquiry into the vaccines, but it is all being covered up. Cancer diagnoses have gone through the roof since the pandemic.”
However, experts have pointed out that many cancers went undiagnosed during the pandemic, because of disuption to healthcare and testing during that period – leading to a spike in late diagnoses once the pandemic was over.
Mr Tice claimed: “Most people now accept that this was a lab leak from Wuhan and that it was essentially a man-made virus. It was an conspiracy stitch-up that it was from the wet markets.”
Asked if he also backed Mr Gunn’s claims that the Wuhan lab research was funded by the US, Mr Tice claimed: “That statement is not denied by the US. That’s out there in the public domain. The US was funding gain of function research in Wuhan, basically to try and keep it at arms’ length.”
The Reform party was embroiled in a fresh row on Thursday night after Channel 4 released footage of campaigners using a racial slur and suggesting migrants should be used as “target practice”.
Mr Farage has sought to distance himself from the comments, which included a campaigner using a racist term to describe the Prime Minister, saying he was “dismayed” by the “appalling sentiments” expressed.
The Reform party did not respond to a request for comment.