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07-06-2025
LONDON: The Muslim chairman of the United Kingdom’s radical right-wing Reform UK party has quit after denouncing a call from within party ranks to ban the burqa as “dumb”.
“I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time and hereby resign the office,” Zia Yusuf announced on social media on Thursday, hours after hitting out at Reform UK lawmaker Sarah Pochin for asking Prime Minister Keir Starmer whether his government would consider banning the burqa.
Pochin won her seat in a by-election last month that saw the anti-immigration party, some of whose members have been accused of Islamophobia, make significant gains in a political landscape traditionally dominated by the governing Labour Party and the opposition Conservatives.
The new lawmaker had urged Labour’s Starmer during her debut appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday if he would consider the move “in the interests of public safety”, according to media.
“I do think it’s dumb for a party to ask the PM if they would do something the party itself wouldn’t do,” Yusuf said on social media amid an ensuing flare-up over whether banning the burqa should be party policy.
Yusuf, a former banker and self-described “proud British Muslim patriot”, became Reform UK chairman after last year’s general election, having jumped ship from the Conservative Party.
Reform UK, led by Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, won four parliamentary seats in a breakthrough result last year, going on to gain a fifth parliamentary seat, its first mayoralty and a number of council seats in local elections last month.
It currently leads national opinion polls, ahead of the Labour Party.
Farage said on social media that Yusuf was “a huge factor in our success on May 1st and is an enormously talented person”.
Divisions in the party’s upper ranks have been made public before.
In March, Reform referred one of its lawmakers, Rupert Lowe, to police over a number of allegations including threats of physical violence against Yusuf.
Prosecutors later said they would not bring charges against Lowe, who was suspended by the party.
The turmoil in Reform comes on a crucial day for the party in Scotland, where it is hoping to make headway against the Scottish National party and Labor in the Hamilton Scottish parliament by-election.
Only on Monday, Farage had held up Yusuf as an example of why Reform should not be accused of racism, as he spoke at a press conference in Aberdeen.
“I would remind everybody that the chairman of the party is Scottish-born but comes from parents who come from the Indian subcontinent but we don’t talk about race at all. We think everybody should be treated equally. We object very strongly to the segmentation of people into different types.”
Some of Reform’s membership had already turned against Yusuf over his role in the departure of one of the party’s most rightwing MPs, Rupert Lowe. Yusuf clashed with Lowe earlier this year. This led to Lowe’s suspension amid allegations of threats towards Yusuf, which were reported to the police. A decision was later taken not to charge the MP.
Farage said he would “rather eat razor blades” than let Lowe back in the party.
Yusuf is widely credited within Reform for having professionalized the party, hiring new people, setting up more branches and making it run in a more corporate way.
However, he also rubbed some of the Reform old guard up the wrong way with his management style. (Int’l News Desk)
