‘The fact that Reform accepted the Member’s defection following this information coming to light tells us everything you need to know about the party’
Reform’s only member of the Welsh Senedd, Laura Anne Jones, is set to be suspended for two weeks for using a racist slur and making other inappropriate comments in WhatsApp chat.
The Welsh Parliament’s standards committee has proposed the ban after Jones used a racial slur to describe Chinese people in a chat with members of her team back in 2023.
In one message, Jones, who recently defected from the Tories to Reform, said “No ch***** spies for me!”.
In other messages, she called a former member of staff “a bitter, twisted, useless person”.
She added: “I tried to be so understanding. I even asked if [they] had ADHD or something and if [they] needed extra support … cos something isn’t right with [them]!?”.
Jones previously apologised for her comments, but the Senedd Committee investigation concluded that her actions “fell far below the standards expected” of a Senedd member.
The investigation also found that Jones failed to challenge offensive comments made by one of her employees.
In a WhatsApp exchange with Jones’ staff member said former Tory home secretary Suella Braverman was “correct” about the claims of two-tier policing.
It was clear over the weekend if your (sic) white working class you get hammered, if you’re an Islamist it’s all fine, spew all the hate you want,” the employee had said.
Jones was also accused of making fraudulent expenses claims for travel, but was cleared of this. The standards committee accepted her explanation that a former employee, who handled her expenses, had misunderstood her messages about which journeys to claim for.
A Plaid Cymru spokesperson said: “The language used was vile and completely unacceptable, and should never be used by anyone – especially those elected to represent our communities in our national parliament. It is only right the Member faces the consequences of her actions.
“The fact that Reform accepted the Member’s defection following this information coming to light tells us everything you need to know about the party, whose divisive rhetoric only serves to pit our communities against each other.”
A Welsh Labour spokesperson said: “This report seems to uphold the allegations against Laura Anne Jones. Her choice of language is unacceptable. This sort of divisive rhetoric has no place in Wales and stands in stark contrast to the values of the Welsh public.
“She made these comments when she was a Conservative, but we’ve seen in Caerphilly that the same sort of language is part of the Reform UK playbook.”
The spokesperson added that when Jones defected to “Nigel Farage’s rebranded Tory outfit” he said Reform was confident the allegations would “all go away”. “Well, they haven’t gone away,” the spokesperson said, “So what’s Farage going to do about it?”.
When Jones defected to Reform in July, Farage told the BBC: “Let me assure you that she would not have come to us, and we wouldn’t have accepted her, if we weren’t confident that will all go away.”
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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