Capital punishment, the nuclear family and active discrimination: The views of North Northamptonshire’s far right councillor
Since defecting to Restore Britain last week, Cllr Jack Goncalvez has been making his views known
By Sarah Ward
Last week North Northamptonshire Council’s Reform UK administration found itself two councillors down after Cllr Darren Rance and Cllr Jack Goncalvez defected to new party Restore Britain.
For Cllr Rance it was only a fleeting departure, as two days later he did an about turn and realised he wanted to rejoin Nigel Farage’s Reform party, but Cllr Goncalvez, who was elected to NNC last May, has stayed the course, and has started to air his views on X.
Goncalvez, who at 20 is the local authority’s youngest councillor, is now a group of one, and with the far right opinions he has been expressing, it is unlikely he is going to be welcomed into any of the other political folds at NNC.
From the number of children ‘white British mothers’ are having to claiming ‘not all cultures are created equally’ and that Australian and Afghanistan immigrants are not ‘equally positioned to contribute to our country’ Goncalvez is exhibiting what is now becoming the well trodden exclusive ideology of the far right.
Restore Britain was founded as a political party by former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe this month and has been described by Hope not Hate (an organisation which opposes far right extremism) as ‘a significant threat that will have a notable effect within the far right and possibly beyond. Its policies include ‘sending home’ migrants who cannot speak English, abolishing the asylum system, ending benefits for migrants, ‘rooting out subversive elements in the education system’ and defunding the BBC.
It claims to have 60,000 members, which Hope not Hate says make it considerably larger than the former British National Party at its height.
Since joining Restore Britain Cllr Goncalevz has been regularly posting views that many people living in his Rushden Lakes ward would no doubt deem offensive.
However he is gaining traction on Elon Musk’s X, amassing more than 1.4k followers in just a couple of weeks.
Like many on the far right he seems to have concerns about how many children white women in the UK are having.
He wrote this post this morning
Which followed a post on Thursday when he called for promotion of the nuclear family and a ‘robust debate on abortion’.
He has also made a comparison between immigrants from Australia and Afghanistan saying ‘we must actively discriminate as to who stays in our country.’
And another scroll through his feed shows he is in favour of capital punishment, describes some cultures as ‘barbaric’ and promotes a ‘Christian-based way of life’.
NN Journal called Cllr Goncalvez, who said he did not want to ‘elaborate any further about his views’ and had ‘laid out everything that I believe [online].’
He said his views, such as some cultures being more equal than others, are prevalent.
He said:
“I think alot of people think that way. It is a more common position than you might think.”
Winning election at his first attempt he said:
“I stood for the same reason as everyone else stands. I think the country is not in a great state at the moment and I wanted to do something about it rather than feeling I was on the sidelines.”
As to why he quit Reform UK he said:
“Nigel Farage has reversed a lot of policies and brought in a lot of Conservatives. I on the doorstep campaigned against the Conservative party and lots of people on the doorstep said they would vote Reform because they were fed up with the Conservative Party. And now Farage is bringing in all of these Conservatives and essentially turning the party into Conservatives 2.0.
“We are now entering into a landscape where people have broken out of that dichotomy (between the Labour and Conservative parties] and people feel like they have other options now. We are not necessarily bound to that particular mindset anymore.
“Which means when situations arise, when we feel a party no longer represents our values [we can leave] and I think a lot of the people I spoke to on the doorstep would be equally disappointed that the Conservatives are being brought over.”