Nigel Farage has reported the leader of Britain’s Green Party to the police after he shared an image appearing to threaten the Reform UK leader with execution.
Zack Polanski shared a photograph of a man wearing a T-shirt featuring a guillotine alongside the words “We’re only making plans for Nigel”—a reference to the 1979 song by the British band XTC.
The Telegraph reports that the image appeared in a collection of photographs from a Green Party rally in Bristol and was shared with Polanski’s 700,000 Instagram followers. It was originally uploaded by another account, which invited the Green leader to become a co-author of the post.
Farage reported the image to London’s Metropolitan Police and the London Assembly, of which Polanski is a member.
“It is beyond belief. It is inciteful, and I will be demanding that Mr Polanski is arrested,” Farage said. “If I had done that, I would have been arrested, and I would deserve to be.”
Police confirmed that they had received a third-party report concerning an image shared online and were investigating.
The controversy comes less than three weeks after the murder of senior Reform politician Ann Widdecombe, who was struck repeatedly with a hammer at her home in southwest England. A 28-year-old man has been charged with her murder.
Reform’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf said sharing the guillotine image so soon after Widdecombe’s death was “staggering.”
“This is incitement to murder, and it should be treated as such by the police,” he said.
Reform has introduced round-the-clock protection for its most prominent politicians following Widdecombe’s killing. The party says its representatives have increasingly been followed, harassed and threatened, while Farage has reported receiving almost 600 death threats this year alone.
The row came a day after Labour MP Kate Osborne blamed Reform and the right-wing broadcaster GB News for contributing to an “escalation of hate” across Europe following an Islamist terrorist attack on a Pride event in Berlin.
Abdul Ballout, 21, drove into a crowd before attacking people with a machete, killing one person and injuring dozens. He was shot dead by police.
Osborne argued that online rhetoric against LGBT people could act as “a catalyst for real-world physical violence,” linking the Berlin attack to Reform’s rise in Britain.
Farage described her comments as “dangerous, inciteful and deeply ignorant,” arguing that they promoted “false and dangerous ideas about Reform” that could put the party’s politicians at risk.
A spokesman for Polanski said he had accepted a request to collaborate on a multi-image post without noticing the offending photograph.
“Once this image was brought to his attention, he immediately unshared the post,” the spokesman said. “He unequivocally does not support this type of dangerous message.”
Green Party deputy leader Rachel Millward also defended Polanski, saying he had removed the post immediately and did not find the image amusing. Asked why he had not apologised, she replied: “I mean, has he not? He took it down.”
Lord Walney, a former UK government adviser on political violence, called for “serious consequences” for Polanski, accusing him of sharing material that implied the assassination of another politician.
“This would be sickening and unacceptable at any time, but it is even more serious in the present environment in which a senior Reform member has been brutally killed,” he said.
Nick Hallett is an assistant news editor for europeanconservative.com. He has previously worked as a journalist for Breitbart and as the online editor for The Catholic Herald.
