Reform UK partially boycotted the Senedd in protest after Joe Martin, a Senedd member, was banned from speaking. The ban followed Martin's claim that white people are being "replaced".
Helen Jenner, Reform UK's Welsh leader, stated that the ban was due to "undue pressure" from Plaid Cymru and represented an "infringement on freedom of speech". Martin had been informed he could not speak in the Senedd's chamber until he apologised for his remarks, which Presiding Officer Huw Irranca-Davies described as "unnecessarily provocative and deliberately offensive".
Reform members, the Senedd's largest opposition party, withdrew from most of the day's proceedings but returned to vote later in the evening. Martin confirmed he would not apologise, stating his voters sent him to speak on their behalf. When asked if he believed white people were being "replaced" in the UK, Martin responded, "That's obviously a fact."
Aliya Mohammed, chief executive of Race Equality First, said the idea of white people being "replaced" is linked to a conspiracy theory that creates division. She added that language fueling fear and hostility has no place in public discourse. In the 2021 census, 93.8% of people in Wales identified as white, a decrease from 95.6% a decade earlier, while the country's overall population grew by 1.4% to 3,107,500.