Reform retracts grim attack ad following legal challenge

On 30 May, Reform UK posted a grim AI slop post which depicted refugees holding ‘Vote Andy‘ banners. Now, the party has been forced to take down the post following a legal challenge from the creator of the banner image:

🚨 NEW: Nigel Farage has deleted a post using Andy Burnham's portrait after the artist launched legal action for using it to push "anti-immigration" messaging

Stanley Chow: "My work has been used without permission to share a message that I fundamentally disagree with" pic.twitter.com/76wuglQq8K

— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) June 6, 2026

Stanley Chow VS Reform

Stanley Chow is the artist who created the now-familiar cartoon of a dour-looking Burnham with a red background. Chow is a Mancunian and a second-generation immigrant, and has said that Reform’s AI monstrosity “misrepresents what the image stands for and what I believe in”.

He added:

For me, this is straightforward – my work has been used without permission to share a message that I fundamentally disagree with. To see my portrait, created to represent something positive about Manchester and Andy’s vision for the city, being used without my permission to push agendas, including an anti-immigration message, is fundamentally unfair and wrong.

Chow sent a letter to Reform HQ requesting at least £5,000 in damages and an apology. Reform claimed in response that its post was fair use, and that the party has:

removed the posts in good faith and without any admission of liability on our part

Reform also claimed the legal action was “politically motivated”. Given that Reform is a political party, it can argue any action against itself is ‘politically motivated’. In other words, its spokespeople shouldn’t get away with using it as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Dehumanisation

Regardless of whether the post ends up being legally sound or not, it was clearly disgusting. The people who travel by small boats to the UK are human beings who face tremendous risks. Turning them into a sick joke like this demonstrates that Farage & co put very little value on human life.

If you think they don’t have a similarly low opinion of British lives, by the way, you’re going to be in for a shock should they ever take power.

Featured image via Carl Court (Getty Images)

Tags: Reform UK

Comments 1

Elaine Bulmer says:

18 hours ago

Reform UK Ltd. Is becoming increasingly more openly racist – not only in its rhetoric but in its core values, if they can be called values. The sustained campaign for halting the illegal boats full mainly of economic immigrants, has been successful only because of Reform’s dogged insistence that migrants of colour are using £millions of taxpayers’ money and that they are forever assaulting British citizens, particularly women. No facts or statistics are ever published about this but sadly it has resonated widely amongst Britain’s unemployed, undereducated and low-paid. These are the people who believe what they read in far right newspapers, at Reform rallies or on politicised clips online but rarely “ read”. They cannot think critically or without bias and believe that the what they have been “fed “ is the gospel truth. This aspect of the Reform UK Ltd.’s propaganda has uncovered the inherent racism in these people – they are intolerant of other cultures; they are wary of people of colour; they do not understand religious or cultural diversity. These easily-influenced supporters are brainwashed by the same racialist mantra by far-right fascist politics- though do not know anything about the other aspects of Reform’s 2026 manifesto which, being brutally honest, is rarely publicised , sidelined or sugar-coated immediately by any Reform spokesman and generally swept back under the carpet. This is happening because Reform know that many of their “other plans” for the UK are or would be particularly damaging to the very people who support them.
There are supposed to be laws in Britain which make racist rhetoric a crime, as is homophobic rhetoric. Why are Reform UK Ltd. able to escape culpability and arrest for constantly spreading racialist hatred and inciting violence – even though Farage is careful to avoid explicit threats and gives more nuanced utterances, as in “ pure cold fury” when he disgracefully attacked police on the scene of the tragic Henry Nowak murder recently.
There are more and more incidents of British people of colour, citizens born here, living quiet lives, working and paying taxes as white people are, being treated appallingly and threatened daily in towns and cities due to the spread of racist bravado condoned by Reform UK Ltd.
This is unacceptable in our liberal, multicultural society which was, on the whole, much more harmonious before Farage and UKIP then Reform UK Ltd. came into being.
The government must revise laws on overt racism or clamp down using existing jurisdiction on those nowadays weaponising racism for political gain. If this is ignored, then there will be more right-wing riots and unrest as well as more racial attacks on innocent British citizens of colour peacefully going about their day-to-day lives.
The time to curtail the illegality of many aspects of Reform UK Ltd. Is here and to educate the general public politically about the dangers of right-wing, fascist rhetoric as well as the proposed dangers to our democracy if Farage gains power and implements the Trump playbook which he so obviously adores.