Swansea Council leader Rob Stewart has launched a stinging public attack on Reform UK Senedd candidate Francesca O’Brien, accusing her of demonstrating a “pattern” of behaviour “sustained over years, written and acted upon by someone who never imagined being held to account for it.”
Stewart, who is Labour’s second-placed candidate in the Gŵyr Abertawe constituency behind current Swansea West MS Mike Hedges, made the intervention in response to a published interview with O’Brien in which she was asked about her links to far-right activist Tommy Robinson — whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — and Shoaib Sohail, a man who has said he was dismissed by Swansea Council due to his links to Lennon.
O’Brien denied being either far-right or anti-Islam. “Prove that I’m far right, prove I’m anti-Islamic, because it’s not true,” she said. “I’ve got my own vision, my own agenda, and that is aligned with Reform.”
The intervention comes as both candidates compete in a constituency where polling puts them on very different trajectories. According to both the More in Common MRP and the YouGov MRP we have reported, O’Brien is projected to win a seat in the Senedd. Stewart’s own chances depend on whether Labour win one seat or two — the More in Common model gives Labour two seats in Gŵyr Abertawe, which would see him elected; the YouGov model gives Labour one, which would not.
In his statement Stewart drew on O’Brien’s 2014 social media posts about the TV show Benefits Street, in which she wrote that people on benefits “need putting down.” O’Brien apologised for the comments when they were first reported by The Guardian during her 2019 Conservative general election campaign, describing them as “off the cuff.”
He also cited what he described as her associations and the conduct of meetings she had chaired about a Swansea primary school, which the council publicly said contained “inaccurate and untrue” information.
Stewart said he had “thought about that a great deal” since reading media reporting on “the social media history and conduct of the Reform UK candidate now standing for Gŵyr Abertawe.” He added: “I do not propose to repeat the worst of what was posted. The record is in the public domain, and readers can look at it for themselves. I will say this. People on benefits do not need, in her words, to be ‘put down’. Homeless people are not there to be punchbags. Teachers doing their jobs in our schools are not enemies of the public.”
He described the record as “not a slip of the tongue, nor a single misjudgement, nor a bit of late-night posting” but “a pattern, sustained over years.”
Stewart went on to contrast O’Brien’s record with what he described as Swansea’s civic character, citing partnerships with organisations including The Wallich, Matthew’s House and the city’s foodbank network. “A politics that begins by deciding which human beings are disposable does not stop there,” he said. “It moves on to the language of dismissal, then blame, then division. Our grandparents and great-grandparents knew exactly where that kind of talk leads. It is the oldest cruelty in a borrowed suit.”
O’Brien responded with a direct attack on Labour’s record in Swansea. “It beggars belief that Labour have the temerity to campaign in Swansea and Gower,” she said. “The Labour-run Swansea Council, just like the Labour government in Cardiff Bay, are on borrowed time. Our communities have been systematically failed by a council obsessed with vanity projects, a Senedd obsessed with reducing speed limits, and a Labour Party in Westminster in disarray.”
“Reform will put the people of Swansea and Gower first, and the people of Wales first,” she added. “That’s why Swansea and Gower is rejecting Labour, rejecting Plaid, rejecting the Tories, and backing Reform’s common sense candidates.”
O’Brien, who represents Mumbles ward on Swansea Council, defected from the Welsh Conservatives to Reform UK last August. She is Reform UK’s first-placed candidate in Gŵyr Abertawe.
