Nigel Farage’s ‘Reform UK’ has received the ‘RUSTY RAZOR’ for the “most prolific promotion of pseudoscience”

It has been reported that Nigel Farage’s ‘Reform UK’ has received an award for being the organisation that engaged in the “most prolific promotion of pseudoscience” during 2025.  Each year the UK’s The Skeptic magazine, names their pseudoscientist of the year, and awards them the ‘Rusty Razor’ prize. This year it went to Reform UK in recognition of the party’s “widespread embrace of climate change denialism and antivaccine misinformation.”

In this post, I will exclude the important issue about climate and focus on the misinformation related to health. At Reform UK’s party conference last month, controversial doctor Aseem Malhotra gave a speech claiming that “mRNA jabs have likely killed or seriously harmed millions of people”, that the World Health Organisation had been “captured” by Bill Gates, and that Covid vaccines were “highly likely” a significant factor in cancer diagnoses amongst members of the royal family. The year before, Richard Tice called for a full inquiry into the “serious problem” of thousands of people dying from Covid vaccine side-effects, a claim which is of course unfounded. In a September interview, Nigel Farage parrotted comments from Donald Trump linking autism to paracetamol use. Farage even compared it to the thalidomide scandal. In addition, he claimed that migrants were kidnapping and eating swans from London parks.

Michael Marshall, Editor of  The Sceptic, said: “Whilst the political positions Reform UK put forward are outside of the scope and remit of The Skeptic and our awards, their positions on science are not. On current polling, Reform UK is the party with the most support in the country, yet they have shown that they have no problem with spreading pseudoscientific misinformation that aligns with the interests of their donors, no interest in vetting their members and candidates for holding dangerously misguided views about science and health, and no issue with fostering and indulging all manner of conspiracy theories if they think there’s a vote in it.” Marshall branded Reform “a threat to science and reason, and deserving of being singled out as winners of our 2025 Rusty Razor award.”

I ask myself, why do Farage and company do it?

Why do they make overtly false health claims?

Don’t they know that these endanger the health of their followers?

The way I see it, there are several possibilities:

• They are too stupid to realize that the claims are wrong.
• They blindly repeat every BS Trump proclaims.
• They think they can win votes by misleading the public.
• They don’t care a toss.

I find it hard to decide – what do you think?