It is not a vote. It is a suspension. Jason Powell, a Reform UK activist who said he had passed vetting to become a parliamentary candidate, has been taken out of the party pending an internal inquiry. The Guardian wrote it on Sunday. ITV filmed it over a year, undercover. The documentary “Undercover: A Year in Reform” was due on screen on Sunday at 10.20pm. Powell, at a thank-you event for volunteers who re-elected Nigel Farage in Clacton, was recorded: “you cannot be a Muslim and British … it’s like oil and water.” He also named Zia Yusuf, the party’s home-affairs spokesman, a Muslim.

The same tape: concentration camps, in the first week after an election, for anyone coming across the Channel. “Rounded up, every last one. An ultimatum. Where are you from. You go back. If you don’t say, you stay there for life.” Powell told the ITV reporter his views were those of British people in general, not extremism. That is his defence. It is not a court sentence.

On the same tape, two Reform councillors from Hounslow. Adam Parkins: Sunday-morning executions in the Downing Street rose garden, if he were prime minister. David Kerr: “a few thousand” grooming-gang members, lined against a wall, machine-gunned. Parkins told the BBC that the death penalty for systematic rape was a legitimate opinion. The Guardian noted, at one point, that the party said the two were not under investigation. The BBC, the other way: Reform is investigating them. ITV: inquiries opened, internal process, no comment on individual cases. We stay with the contradiction, not with a single version.

Farage, earlier in the week: vetting cannot catch “a future comment”. The party statement: procedures have improved; from time to time someone who does not share the values gets through; “there is no room for racism in Reform UK.” The Muslim Council of Britain said suspensions mean little if some people slip back in quietly. That is an accusation about culture. It is not a published internal audit.

ITV had already shown, on Wednesday, councillors and candidates with racist and misogynist language. Reform announced resignations and suspensions. The party told the BBC it is suing ITV and the production house over the undercover method. That is their counterweight. The documentary, in the end, is a tape. Powell’s suspension is a party act. Neither is a law.

Image: Malcolm Rayment, Pier Avenue, Clacton-on-Sea, 13 January 2018, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The photograph shows Farage’s town, not the filmed event and not Powell.

Sources consulted: Aspiring Reform MP who said ‘you cannot be Muslim and British’ suspended — The Guardian; Inside Reform: Aspiring Reform MP calls for concentration camps for migrants — ITV News.