Alan Feeney: The Reform UK Councillor Who Called Asian Residents ‘Parasites’ on Camera

“I wish to offer my sincere and unreserved apologies for remarks that were wrong, offensive and completely unacceptable. They did not reflect my true beliefs. There is no excuse, and I will be undertaking intensive personal analysis.”
— Statement of Alan Feeney, Reform UK, 16 October 2026

The letter was issued at 11.43 in the morning. It was two sentences of the standard modern cadence: the passive-voiced regret, the distancing clause, the promise of an interior reckoning that would happen elsewhere and in private. By mid-afternoon, both council seats — Castle Bromwich ward on Solihull Council, Shard End ward on Birmingham City Council — had been vacated. Reform UK confirmed it. The matter, the party implied, was resolved.

Forty-eight hours earlier, an ITV documentary had shown Alan Feeney walking a street in Solihull. He was canvassing, which is to say he was doing the core work of political life: going door to door, talking to residents, building the ground operation that wins elections in the West Midlands. The people he was talking to were not residents. They were ITV journalists who had spent approximately one year embedded inside Reform UK’s Solihull and Birmingham operation. He did not know that. The cameras were hidden. The conversation was recorded.

On camera, Feeney described Asian families who had moved into areas of Solihull and Birmingham as “parasites.” He made further remarks suggesting their presence was harming the character of those communities. He said this casually, as a man who believed he was among allies, because he believed he was among allies. He was wrong about that too.

The documentary — “Undercover: A Year in Reform,” part of ITV’s Exposure investigative strand — aired on 14 October 2026. Feeney resigned two days later. His statement said his words did not reflect his true beliefs. His words were spoken while he was actively working to represent those same communities in two elected chambers simultaneously.

That gap between sentence and fact is the story.

What the footage showed

ITV’s Exposure team does not work quickly. The access that produced “Undercover: A Year in Reform” required approximately twelve months of embedded journalism inside a single political operation — a commitment of resources that most television news divisions no longer make. The reporters embedded in Reform UK’s Solihull and Birmingham organisation attended events, joined the canvassing operation, built trust. They recorded what was said when the cameras were not supposed to be there.

What they collected was not a single moment of indiscretion. The documentary showed a pattern of conversation between party members who believed they were speaking privately. Feeney’s remarks about Asian residents sit inside that pattern. He was not at a rally. He was not under pressure. He was doing the quiet, unglamorous work of electoral politics on a residential street, and he was describing the people who live on those streets in a way that, had those streets known, would have made his position as their representative impossible from the first day he held it.

The specific language Feeney used — “parasites” — belongs to a tradition of dehumanising rhetoric with a long and well-documented history in British politics. It is not a casual exaggeration. It is a word with a precise rhetorical function: to describe the presence of a group of people not merely as unwelcome but as intrinsically harmful to the body around them. Feeney deployed it while canvassing for a party that holds seats in both the ward he was walking and the council chamber where he was supposed to represent those same residents.

He was caught in the same documentary as two colleagues. Chris Whelan, also representing Castle Bromwich, made sexually explicit and misogynistic remarks about female political candidates. Jamie Campbell, the same ward, suggested that pork products should be buried at the site where a mosque was being constructed. These were not three separate lapses. They came from the same year, the same local operation, the same conversations among people who believed they were not being listened to. They were being listened to for a year.

The apology that didn’t answer its own question

Feeney’s resignation statement was brief. It ran to two sentences of substance. It offered sincere and unreserved apologies. It called the remarks wrong, offensive and completely unacceptable — which is the standard rhetorical move in these situations: stating, in the official document, the thing that the official document is designed to contain. Then came the clause that did the most work: “They did not reflect my true beliefs.”

This is a claim that invites a question the statement did not address. If the remarks did not reflect his true beliefs, what produced them? The word “parasites” does not emerge from a momentary loss of control. It requires a prior conception — of a group of people, of their effect on a neighbourhood — that the speaker is articulating rather than inventing on the spot. Feeney spoke it in a context of apparent safety. He spoke it to people he believed were his allies. He spoke it while canvassing, which is the act of soliciting political support from the community he was describing in those terms.

The statement offered what it called “intensive personal analysis.” There is no formal meaning to that phrase. It commits to a process without a timeline, an outcome, or an arbiter. It is language designed to close a news cycle rather than answer the question the footage had opened.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, described the behaviour caught in the ITV documentary as “chauvinistic and unacceptable.” He pointed to the party’s swift action — three resignations in two days — as evidence that the organisation policed itself. The speed is accurate. Whether it addresses what the speed was responding to is a different question.

The week of 13-17 October 2026 was not an isolated event in the history of Reform UK’s relations with the press. The same month brought a Channel 4 sting involving Reform’s James Orr and an Al Jazeera investigation into Jack Ross of the think-tank TPUK, which has overlapping personnel and ideological territory with the party. Each investigation used the same basic technique: gain access, record private conversation, broadcast. The technique works because the private conversation and the public position are different. The technique has now worked multiple times on the same political ecosystem in the same thirty-day window.

Three by-elections will now be held in seats Reform UK won on a platform of representing communities it, in some cases, held in private contempt. The voters who return to those polls know more than the voters who cast the original ballots. That knowledge is the product of a year of hidden cameras and the decision of ITV’s Exposure team to spend that year in a place most news organisations wouldn’t have bothered. The footage was simple. The canvassing street, the unguarded conversation, the word that came out. Alan Feeney’s resignation letter said it didn’t reflect his true beliefs. The camera was there when he said it, and the camera does not make interpretations. It records what it hears.