A recently elected Reform UK council leader has suggested that there is a link between circumcision and transgenderism in children.
In a now-deleted post on social media, Sean Matthews, who earlier this month became leader of Lincolnshire County council, said: “It's no surprise that children want to remove their penises and become girls.
"Most of their parents started the process shortly after birth, by chopping their foreskin off in the name of (insert deity).”
The comments were condemned by the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), with a spokesperson telling the JC: "Circumcision is a vital part of Jewish life and an essential link to our religion and heritage. This is also a practice shared with many of the Muslim faith.”
"For a council leader to use this to attack transgender people is both absurd and disgraceful”, they added.
They also said that Matthews “and Reform UK must consider the impact of his comments".
His comments on social media, originally made in 2022, had previously been flagged by radio station LBC in January last year, when Matthews was Reform’s candidate for the Lincolnshire seat of Louth and Horncastle, where he came second.
Reform UK’s Richard Tice told the broadcaster at the time “if anyone says or writes anything which is daft or inappropriate we will look at it".
Matthews, a former royal protection officer in the Metropolitan Police, was chosen as Reform UK’s group leader in Lincolnshire after Nigel Farage’s party won 44 out of 70 seats on the council at the local council elections earlier this month.
Reform UK took control of several other councils, including: Lancashire, Durham, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Kent.
The party also won mayoral elections Greater Lincolnshire and Hull and East Yorkshire.
Last week, the JC reported that a Reform UK candidate in Doncaster who shared a meme on Facebook praising Hitler was one of a number of candidates with history of sharing controversial content on social media elected to office.
Others re-posted material from a neo-Nazi group and pushed conspiracies about the Rothschilds and other Jewish banking families.
Earlier this year, Reform UK’s leader Nigel Farage vowed that the party wouldn’t see a repetition of the scandals that rocked his party during the general election.
Reform candidates had posted links to antisemitic videos by the conspiracy theorist David Icke, shared claims that Israel was behind 9/11 and suggested Greta Thunberg is “controlled” by “Rothschild handlers”.
Farage told a Westminster press gallery lunch in March that his party had “applied much, much stricter vetting criteria for local election candidates than under the Conservatives and Labour Party.”
“And will you find someone who tweeted something at some point? You will. But will you find somebody who persistently has said things that you find fundamentally offensive? No, you won't you absolutely.”
“Because we’ve worked blooming hard at this and because we know you'll [the media] hold us to a higher standard than everybody else. And that's fine.”
Reform UK and Sean Matthews have been contacted for comment.
