A clip has emerged on social media of Reform leader Nigel Farage proudly explaining that his party has put forward a Muslim candidate for the London mayoral election in order to court the Muslim vote.
In the video, Farage — apparently answering an interviewer’s question — states that:
We’ve got a Muslim woman who’s gonna stand for us for the mayor of London contest against Sadiq Khan. So no, there are plenty of members of the Muslim community who will vote for Reform, support Reform. The difference here of course is that, for many many years, the Muslim vote was viewed by Labour as being a bloc vote. They turned out and voted for Labour in their droves. That has changed a lot.
The hypocrisy on display is quite breathtaking, even for Farage. ‘We’ve got a Muslim woman, so of course Muslims will vote for us — also, Labour made the mistake of thinking Muslims all vote together’.
It sounds an awful lot like the Reform leader is fine with playing identity politics when it suits him, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately for him, Farage also mistakenly seems to think that UK Muslims are completely uninformed.
You see, that Muslim woman that Reform have got would be Laila Cunningham, a UK-born Muslim of Egyptian descent. Cunningham formerly worked as a prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service before making the move into politics.
Like most Reformers, she’s also a Tory washout. The Reform candidate was previously elected as a Westminster City Council member in 2022 for the Conservative Party. And, also like most Reformers, Cunningham also happens to have dabbled in Islamophobia.
In an interview on the Standard podcast, Cunningham argued that Muslims wearing the burqa should be stopped and searched by the police. As her reasoning, the newly-minted Reformer stated:
It has to be assumed that if you’re hiding your face, you’re hiding it for a criminal reason.
She also asserted that “there should be one civic culture, which “should be British”, and went on to say:
If you go to parts of London, it does feel like a Muslim city. The signs are written in a different language. You’ve got burqas being sold in markets.
For her comments, Shaista Gohir — crossbench peer and CEO of the Muslim Women’s Network UK — accused Cunningham of helping to endanger UK Muslims. Gohir said that the Reform candidate was:
sending a message to Muslims that they do not belong [and] emboldening people who already abuse Muslims and influencing those people who are reading this misinformation.
As such, Cunningham hardly seems like a shining light to sway London Muslims to vote for the far right. But, then again, who else would we expect as a choice from noted Islamophobe Nigel Farage, who once told Sky News that:
We have a growing number of young people in this country who do not subscribe to British values, [who] in fact loathe much of what we stand for.
When questioned on whether he was referring to Muslims, the Reform leader responded:
We are. … And I’m afraid I found some of the recent surveys saying that 46% of British Muslims support Hamas – support a terrorist organisation that is proscribed in this country.
This is a blatant misrepresentation of a study from the Henry Jackson Society — a neoconservative think tank. It asked whether British Muslims feel more sympathy with Hamas or Israel [p22].
Apparently British Muslims are just expected to forget Farage dog-whistling that they, as a whole, are terrorist sympathisers. Likewise, Reform clearly reckons that London Muslims are just waiting to vote for a woman who wants them accosted by police.
Reform chose Cunningham, as a minoritised woman, to lend an acceptable face to racist policies. Far from being the breath of fresh air in UK politics they pretend to be, Reform are pulling the same old establishment stunts.
See also: Priti Patel, Shabana Mahmood, Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman, etc etc etc.
Featured image via the Australian