Media target green candidate for ‘refusing to shake fascist’s hand’

The rattled media’s campaign of attacks on Green party candidates has continued this week with a smear against a Cornwall council candidate who refused to shake hands with a far-right opponent.

Abigail Hubbucks lost the local election by just over a hundred votes to Reform UK’s Lyndon Harrison. After the results were announced, she told Harrison she wouldn’t be shaking hands with him. This was immediately spun up by the press and the far right as ‘woke leftie is a bad loser’. This spin was, of course, quickly pounced on by her far-right opponent, who called it “divisive and unprofessional”.

Yeah, right. Reform’s whole reason for existing is to incite division and hate. Harrison himself has posted a ‘call-sign’ acronym used by white-supremacist ‘QAnon’ supporters:

Lyndon Harrison is Reform UK’s candidate in Newquay.

Harrison posted on his Facebook: “My kind of people! WWG1WGA”, the call sign of far-right conspiracy theory movement QAnon that were instrumental in the US Capitol attack in January 2021.

How many of their conspiracy theories… pic.twitter.com/AZEl9ndXps

— Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 (@reformexposed) April 21, 2026

As a source close to Hubbucks said:

Not shaking hands with a fascist is just correct for someone with Abigail’s politics.

Green Party surge

In fact, the real story of the night was how close the Greens came to taking the seat, which was held by Reform until its incumbent died, triggering the by-election. When Kevin Towill won the seat for Reform in 2025, he received considerably more votes that Harrison did in the by-election to replace him. Not just in absolute numbers despite a considerably higher turnout in 2026, but in percentage terms too. The Green Party didn’t even feature in the results.

Harrison won only 30% of the vote compared to Towill’s 38% in 2025 — despite riding on the wave of sentiment generated by Towill’s untimely death from a brain tumour. From zero just a year ago, the Greens’ Hubbucks won 25%. This was yet another example of the Green surge — at Reform’s expense as well as Labour’s — that has rattled Farage and co.

The other big story of the night was another utter failure by Keir Starmer’s ‘Labour’. His hollowed-out shell of a party managed just six percent, despite all four of Labour’s Cornwall MPs campaigning intensively. It gets clearer by the day that the Greens are currently the only prospect for stopping the march of the fascists — and are increasingly showing how it’s done.

Featured image via CornwallGreenParty