ITV broadcast an undercover documentary on Sunday night exposing widespread racism and misogyny among Reform councillors. The party's response on Monday morning was conspicuous absence — not a single Reform MP appeared on broadcast media to defend the party. Nigel Farage said nothing. Robert Jenrick, who days earlier had tried to normalise the problem by comparing Reform's racism to the BBC's paedophile scandal, also stayed silent. The only party figure deployed was Matt Goodwin, the failed candidate for the Gorton and Denton byelection, whose own public statements have attracted accusations of borderline racism. His defence, offered on Times Radio, was that Farage functioned as a buffer zone against racism — that without him, the racists would have nowhere to go. Goodwin also insisted ITV had merely found 'a few bad apples.' The maths tells a different story: of roughly 10 councillors filmed, approximately seven expressed views including extreme racist and violent rhetoric. That is a 70% hit rate, not an outlier problem. Meanwhile, the only Reform MP to post publicly was Richard Tice, who had just married Isabel Oakeshott. His social media complaint was about British Airways losing his luggage — a grievance that read as tone-deaf given the timing. The party's communications strategy appeared to be: say nothing about the documentary and hope Monday's news cycle moves on. In the Commons, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting fielded questions that exposed a different kind of institutional silence. Streeting expressed no concern about Donald Trump toggling Starlink satellite coverage in Ukraine, enabling Russian drone strikes. He described it as standard procedure. He was equally relaxed about Trump lowering US pump prices by importing Russian diesel — fuel that Russia had itself imported from Iran, a country with which the US is currently at war. Streeting cited a personal meeting with US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth as reassurance, during which Hegseth reportedly reiterated that Washington backed Ukraine 'just so long as Russia won the war.' Shadow Defence Secretary James Cartlidge notably avoided mentioning the Conservatives' 'Britannia shield' — the four-drone nuclear defence proposal announced at party conference — suggesting even the Tories recognise it as a policy that was designed to evaporate. Tory peer Sharron Davies, the former swimmer, demanded to know why Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham hadn't 'invaded France' to stop rioting there. The structural pattern across both stories is the same: institutions declining to defend indefensible positions by simply refusing to show up. Reform cannot mount a public defence because the statistical evidence from ITV's own footage is devastating. The government cannot mount a serious challenge to Trump's Starlink and diesel moves because the UK's defence dependency on the US makes confrontation unthinkable. In both cases, silence is the strategy — and silence is what normalisation looks like. John Crace and Pippa Crerar will host a Guardian year-in-review event on Tuesday 1 December, covering the biggest Westminster stories of 2026. Tickets are available at theguardian.live.
