Reform UK candidate exposed for racist posts wins Sunderland council seat

A Reform UK candidate exposed days before polling for Facebook posts urging that Nigerians in his town be “melted down” to fill potholes was elected to Sunderland City Council on Thursday, taking one of three Hylton Castle ward seats on the party’s wider sweep of the authority.

Glenn Gibbins won 1,295 votes in the three-member ward, finishing third on the slate behind Reform UK running mates Ian Robert Jones, who polled 1,383, and David Laing, on 1,302. The top Labour finisher in the ward, Denny Wilson, took 792. The full result was published by Sunderland City Council on 8 May.

Reform UK won 58 of 75 council seats overall, ending a 52-year Labour majority. Labour fell from 49 seats to five, the Liberal Democrats held 12, and the Conservatives lost every seat they had defended. The collapse cost Michael Mordey, the Labour leader of the council, his place in the chamber. It also added to the pressure on Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership after a brutal local-government cycle for his party.

The Gibbins posts were first reported on 1 May by HOPE not hate, an anti-fascist research group, and amplified by The Canary on 6 May. In a Facebook post dated by HOPE not hate to March 2024, Gibbins wrote: “Carnt believe amount of nigerians in town……should melt them all down and fill in the pot holes!!” The campaign group also surfaced posts in which Gibbins called the BBC presenters Mel and Sue “unfunniest fat repulsive lesbian hosts ever” and said female sports commentators should “stick to cooking…sewing …and home making”.

Reform UK printed Gibbins’ name as “Glen Gibbons” on its campaign leaflets, a misspelling HOPE not hate cited as evidence of slack vetting. The party did not withdraw the candidate after the posts surfaced and did not issue a public statement on Gibbins specifically before the count.

What Reform won

Reform UK had held a single Sunderland seat going into Thursday’s vote, gained at a 2025 by-election. The party fielded a full slate across the city and added 57 seats in a single night, the largest swing the authority has recorded since its modern creation. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said his party had “absolutely walked it” in the North East, where Reform also took control of Gateshead and South Tyneside.

Sunderland, a North East port city of around 277,000 people, voted 61 per cent to leave the European Union in 2016 and was one of the first counts to declare on referendum night. The city’s political profile has tilted toward Reform since the 2024 general election, when the party finished second in both Sunderland Central and Houghton and Sunderland South. Thursday’s local result confirms the trend at council level.

The Sunderland count is the most dramatic in a sequence of local-government routs that ended Labour’s regional dominance. The prime minister has brought Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman back into Downing Street to shore up the operation after the losses.

Hylton Castle ward

The three Hylton Castle seats had been held by Labour at the previous full council election. The ward sits on the western edge of Sunderland, taking in the Hylton Castle and Town End Farm estates, and had been on Labour benches since the 1990s. All three Reform candidates polled above 1,290 votes; the closest Labour challenger, Wilson, finished 503 votes behind Gibbins.

The Liberal Democrat slate finished a distant fourth, with William Douglas on 174 votes, Angela Smith on 178 and Miriam Townsend on 150. The Local Conservative line-up polled in the low hundreds across the same ward.

Other Reform candidates flagged

Gibbins is one of dozens of Reform UK local-government candidates whose social-media histories have been catalogued by HOPE not hate and other monitoring outfits this cycle. The list includes Glenda Hall, who stood in the Tunstall and Humbledon ward of Sunderland on a record of COVID-conspiracy and anti-Afghan posts, Linda McFarlane, a Gateshead candidate flagged for asking on social media for a “white Britain”, and Stuart Prior, who stood in Essex and had described white people as the “master race”. Several were elected. A separate compendium published by Mark Pack, the Liberal Democrat strategist, lists more than 50 Reform candidates with similarly contested social-media records.

What happens next

Gibbins is expected to be sworn in alongside his Reform colleagues at the authority’s first post-election meeting later in May. HOPE not hate said it would write to the council standards committee asking that the comments be referred for review. Under the Localism Act regime in England, a standards committee can investigate elected members for breaches of a council’s code of conduct, but it cannot remove a councillor from office; suspension and formal censure are the strongest sanctions available. A spokesperson for Reform UK did not respond to questions on Friday about whether Gibbins remained in good standing with the party or whether the comments would be referred to its internal disciplinary process.