Councillor suspended by Tories for repost of far-Right message

A COUNCILLOR has been suspended by the Conservative Party after reposting an online message by a far-Right party.

Kevin Bulmer, who represents Goring on Oxfordshire County Council, said he had made an “unwitting mistake”.

The original post by the Britain First party on X, formerly known as Twitter, showed a picture with the words: “Another Islamist squatter in Britain says Muslims will never accept our laws. If he really wanted to live under Islamist law, he’d leave. He really wants to invade us and replace our culture with savagery.”

After Councillor Bulmer reposted it, he had the Conservative whip removed pending an investigation.

In a statement, he said: “I had no knowledge of the organisation in question when I reposted its original comment.

“I have since removed the post, which was an unwitting mistake and I hope the Conservative Party concludes the investigation promptly. A repost isn’t an agreement, it’s just what somebody said for your information. Make of it what you will.

“That’s the same for every repost I have done. It’s a video of what someone was saying and you can’t argue with what they’re saying.”

Cllr Bulmer, who is serving his third term as a county councillor and is a former member of Goring Parish Council, has since deleted his X page.

Eddie Reeves, leader of the Conservatives on the county council, said: “The Conservative Party expects the highest standards of conduct from its councillors.

“I immediately suspended the whip from Cllr Bulmer, pending further investigation of the post by the party’s independent team.” Britain First was formed in 2011 by former members of the British National Party. It campaigns primarily against multiculturalism and advocates the preservation of traditional British culture.

Cllr Bulmer caused controversy in February last year when he published tweets condemning the potential use of gender-neutral pronouns for God.

He had to apologise after posting on X: “Wonder when those woke muppets at the CofE [Church of England] will change ‘my kingdom come’ to ‘my safe space come’ — t****.”

His tweets were in response to the news that the church was to launch a project on “gendered language” and debate whether God should be referred to with they/them pronouns.

Cllr Bulmer later deleted the comment and wrote: “While I still strongly object to [the] idea of changing the Lord’s Prayer and the philosophy behind it, I’ve deleted my tweet and apologise for referring to those wanting to change the Lord’s Prayer as ‘t****’ and ‘muppets’. That was intemperate of me and rather rude.”

County council leader Liz Leffman reported Cllr Bulmer to the council’s standards monitoring officer on the grounds that his Tweets broke the councillor code of conduct.

Cllr Bulmer said he felt he was defending his religion and described the backlash to his Tweets as an example of “cancel culture”.

He said: “I considered an attempt to change the language to be an attack on the tenets of the Bible. If you can change such fundamental things so easily, why believe anything in the Bible? It turns into a house of sand.

“Changing God to have a neutral gender is not what it says in the Bible and not something the church should be doing. If people by themselves want to believe that God is gender neutral or female it’s up to them. It’s all about their faith.

“Too many things are allowed to go unchallenged because people are scared of the consequences now that we have what’s called ‘cancel culture’ and ‘wokeness’. And that’s what happened to me. People are scared to challenge what they don’t agree with because they’ll get attacked.”