Reform UK's Zia Yusuf pulls up the ladder on Britain's immigrants

Reform UK's Zia Yusuf pulls up the ladder on Britain's immigrants Submitted by Soumaya Ghannoushi on Mon, 09/07/2026 - 18:51 In attacking Somali-born Camden Council leader Sagal Abdi-Wali, Reform UK is once again using the children of immigrants to sell its prejudice Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, right, and Zia Yusuf, left, now the party's shadow home secretary, pose after a press conference in London, on 3 August 2026 (Toby Shepheard/AFP) Off There is something almost exquisite about the hypocrisy of Zia Yusuf. Last week, the Reform UK politician surveyed possible Labour candidates for the by-election in Holborn and St Pancras, to fill the MP seat previously held by former Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and apparently discovered something terrifying. One of them was born in Somalia. "The frontrunner being foisted on the people of Holborn by Labour... was born in Somalia," Yusuf announced darkly. Then came the sinister little flourish: "Do you understand what's happening?" Yes, Yusuf, we do. A woman came to Britain as a child refugee, grew up there, built her life there, entered public service there, became a councillor there and eventually became leader of Camden Council. Now she may stand for election to the British Parliament. Terrifying stuff. Someone alert the authorities! At what precise point does a brown immigrant cease to represent the terrifying transformation of Britain and become Zia Yusuf? Except, of course, Yusuf himself is hardly the blond, blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon guardian of some ancient native tribe. He is the son of Sri Lankan Muslim immigrants, which makes the performance all the more comical. It is the politics of pulling up the ladder after you have climbed it - then standing at the top shouting that everyone still below is an invader. Sagal Abdi-Wali has lived in Camden for 35 years - "the place that gave my family sanctuary", in her own words. She leads the council of the very borough containing the constituency she may seek to represent. So what exactly is the problem? That she was not born there? Perhaps Reform could publish the number of years an immigrant must reside in Britain before Yusuf permits them to become fully British. Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Forty? Or perhaps there are other qualifications. Must their parents come from Sri Lanka rather than Somalia? Must they become millionaires? Must they join Reform? At what precise point does a brown immigrant cease to represent the terrifying transformation of Britain and become Zia Yusuf? That is the question his little dog whistle cannot answer. The convenient messenger Yusuf is hardly alone - even if Reform's London mayoral candidate, Laila Cunningham, distanced herself from this particular attack, saying she did not understand it. The daughter of Egyptian -Muslim immigrants, Cunningham has built her own political profile by portraying the visibility of other Muslims as vaguely menacing. A few women in niqab become evidence that London feels like a " Muslim city "; foreign-language signs become symptoms of cultural surrender; and Muslim clothing in a market becomes a national problem requiring state intervention. Reform's Laila Cunningham claimed Shabana Mahmood protects Pakistani vote base Read More » Cunningham even wants police empowered to stop women in face coverings on suspicion that they may be concealing their identities to commit crimes. It is a particularly cheap form of politics: find some of the most conspicuous and vulnerable women in society, turn their clothes into evidence against them, magnify them into a civilisational threat, and invite everyone else to be suspicious. The oldest trick in the anti-Muslim right's repertoire - only this time, delivered by the daughter of Muslim immigrants. The innovation is not the message. It is, conveniently, the messenger. And while Yusuf was worrying about whether a Somali-born woman represented some existential threat to British public life, Channel 4 broadcast an undercover investigation into people rather closer to home. Senior Reform figures were secretly filmed discussing arrangements around foreign-funded polling and a possible £500,000 ($676,000) donation from an American source channelled through a UK-based intermediary. Two senior aides subsequently stepped aside while Reform launched an investigation. Ah, British values. Apparently the danger to Britain is the Somali woman serving the people of Camden, not the questions about foreign money swirling around the party that spends half its time telling everyone else how fiercely it intends to defend British sovereignty. Perhaps this is the "one civic culture" Cunningham keeps talking about. Cues from America Of course, Reform is taking its cues from across the Atlantic. US President Donald Trump spent years shamelessly singling out Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born congresswoman, before widening his invective to Somalis more generally . The irony is almost too obvious to require explanation. Trump himself is married to an immigrant. But apparently immigration ceases to be immigration when the immigrant happens to be a blonde Slovenian former glamour model who is married to the US president. The same contradiction runs through US Vice President JD Vance's politics. His wife, Usha, is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was raised Hindu. His own family is a living product of precisely the ethnically and religiously plural America that his politics repeatedly treats as a source of suspicion. Vance recently turned on Abdul El-Sayed, the Muslim Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, declaring there was something about him that was " very, very evil ". It was a textbook dog whistle, a piece of Islamophobia that has trailed El-Sayed throughout his campaign. His response punctured the trick by dragging the conversation back from demonisation to politics. Evil, El-Sayed countered, is starting wars when there is peace. It is stripping away people's healthcare when they have no other option. It is corrupting yourself for a little more power, to fund tax breaks for billionaires. There lies the difference between politics and prejudice. One talks about what governments do to people. The other tells people whom to fear. The Palestine test And that brings us to the central fallacy behind this grubby brand of identity politics. Your name tells us almost nothing about your political worth. Neither does your birthplace. Nor your religion. Nor your ethnicity. Take perhaps the most morally charged political question of our time: Palestine . Mexico's Claudia Sheinbaum is the country's first woman president and its first president of Jewish background. She has formally received the credentials of Palestine's ambassador to Mexico, and her country has intervened in South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice . How race-baiting against Zohran Mamdani continues an American political tradition Read More » Mexico also declined a seat on Trump's "Board of Peace" because Palestine was excluded , while Sheinbaum herself has spoken explicitly of the " genocide in Gaza ". Meanwhile, Latin America has produced leaders of Palestinian ancestry whose politics could hardly be more different. El Salvador's far-right populist president Nayib Bukele comes from a Palestinian family, yet has aligned himself closely with Trump and maintained strong pro-Israel positions. Honduras's Nasry Asfura is also of Palestinian descent, yet is a committed ally of Israel. Europe supplies its own example. Simona Mohamsson , leader of Sweden's Liberal Party and the daughter of a Palestinian father from Haifa and a Lebanese mother, recently appeared in a televised election debate wearing a Star of David necklace, and has made warnings about "political Islam" - that increasingly convenient smokescreen for repackaging anti-Muslim rhetoric as opposition to "Islamism" - a prominent part of her politics. A Jewish woman can stand forcefully for Palestinian rights. People of Palestinian ancestry can do the reverse, choosing proximity to power over solidarity with the vulnerable and dispossessed. Ancestry confers neither conscience nor principle. Identity is no guarantee of character or morality. Back to Holborn In Holborn and St Pancras, Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, intends to seek his party's nomination for the upcoming by-election. Sagal Abdi-Wali is being discussed as a leading contender for Labour. Polanski is Jewish. Abdi-Wali is Muslim and wears a hijab. So what? I am Muslim. I wear a hijab myself. And yet, if I were voting in Holborn and St Pancras today, I might well vote for Polanski. Why? Because I know considerably more about what he stands for. Over the past three years, I have admired his willingness to describe what Israel has done in Gaza as genocide, demand sanctions, oppose British complicity and stand against racism and Islamophobia. We are watching a man expose not only the absurdity of his own politics, but the grubby little fraud at the heart of Reform His Jewishness neither adds to nor subtracts from that. It is irrelevant. I know much less about Abdi-Wali's politics. I would want to know what she thinks, what she has done, and what she intends to do before deciding whether she deserves my vote. Her being Muslim does not inherently earn it. Her wearing a hijab does not automatically earn it. And her being Somali-born most certainly does not disqualify her from it. I wish her well, particularly after the disgraceful attempt to turn her birthplace into an accusation. But votes should be earned by what politicians do and what they promise to accomplish. Which brings us, finally, to Yusuf. "Do you understand what's happening?" he asked. Perfectly. We are watching a man expose not only the absurdity of his own politics, but the grubby little fraud at the heart of Reform: dress prejudice up as patriotism, find a brown man - or woman - to sell it, and hope nobody notices the joke. Unfortunately for Yusuf, he is the joke. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. UK Politics Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0