Labour has accused Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf of “straightforward racism” after he used the Somali birthplace of a prospective Labour candidate to question whether she belonged in the British parliament.
Sagal Abdi-Wali, the leader of Camden council, is considered an early frontrunner for Labour in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection caused by Keir Starmer’s resignation. Abdi-Wali arrived in Camden as a child refugee and has lived there for 35 years. She has spent more than a decade working with local charities, serves as a governor at two schools and was elected to Camden council in 2022.
None of that mattered to Yusuf. In a post viewed more than 8 million times, Reform’s home affairs spokesperson highlighted that Abdi-Wali had been born in Somalia before asking: “Do you understand what’s happening?”
He didn’t need to explain. The insinuation was the entire message. Abdi-Wali’s birthplace was presented as evidence that something sinister was taking place. However long she has lived here, whatever citizenship she holds and whatever connection she has to Camden, Yusuf invited his audience to see her as an alien presence being imposed upon them.
Business secretary Jonathan Reynolds accurately described the post as racism. Even several senior Reform figures recognised that Yusuf had said the quiet part rather too loudly. Nadine Dorries called it a “nasty tweet”, but immediately praised Yusuf as brilliant, a genius and an incredible communicator. Her complaint was apparently that he should stop posting, not that somebody expressing such views holds a senior position in her party.
Reform’s London mayoral candidate Laila Cunningham said she couldn’t understand what Yusuf meant, while acknowledging that Abdi-Wali was British. Yet the meaning wasn’t difficult to decipher. His post relied on the racial nationalist idea that legal citizenship, decades of residence and participation in a community can never make somebody born in an African country properly British.
This wasn’t an isolated remark detached from Reform’s politics. The party’s official programme describes refugees crossing the Channel as an “invasion” and promises to deploy the armed forces against them. It proposes leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act, constructing detention centres with space for 24,000 people and operating as many as five deportation flights every day.
Reform also wants to abolish indefinite leave to remain and retrospectively remove it from people who have already been granted permanent residence. Foreign nationals would be denied access to benefits, while part of its proposed housing programme would be reserved exclusively for “British-born” workers. The party’s leaders may retreat from openly saying that a British citizen born elsewhere isn’t British, but their programme constantly divides the population according to nationality, birthplace and immigration status.
Racism serves a definite class purpose. Britain’s housing crisis wasn’t created by refugees. Migrants didn’t privatise essential services, impose austerity, suppress wages or hand public wealth to landlords and financial institutions. Reform takes the anger produced by capitalist decline and redirects it towards people with even less power than the workers it claims to represent.
The party says immigration allows employers to obtain cheap labour, but its answer leaves the power of those employers untouched. Reform promises to cut corporation tax and remove regulations governing business. At its Birmingham conference, Robert Jenrick proposed cutting around £50 billion from welfare and tens of billions more from government departments. He also announced an investor roadshow in London and New York to reassure financial markets.
Workers are offered national pride and a harsher border. Capitalists are offered lower taxes, weaker regulation and personal assurances that their wealth will remain safe.
The party’s funding tells the same story. Reform accepted more than £5.3 million in private donations during the second quarter of 2026, according to Electoral Commission figures. Of that, £4 million came from crypto billionaire Ben Delo, accounting for roughly three-quarters of its private donations during the quarter. Reform had already accepted more than £9.2 million in private donations during the first three months of the year.
A party’s class character isn’t determined by whether some workers vote for it. Bourgeois parties can build mass followings among people whose living standards have been wrecked by capitalism. Their class character is shown by whose property they defend, whose power they leave untouched and who benefits from their programme. Reform’s wealthy leadership and donors fund a party promising welfare cuts, business tax cuts and the repression of migrants.
Nor is Reform’s nationalism anti-imperialist. Its programme promises to expand Britain’s armed forces against Russia and China so that Britain will once again be feared by its adversaries. It wants a more aggressive capitalist state abroad and a more coercive one at home. Refugees displaced by war, poverty and the international inequalities created by imperialism are then presented as invaders when they arrive at the borders of the imperial core.
Labour can’t wash its hands of this politics simply by condemning Yusuf’s language. The party boasts of removing or deporting almost 60,000 people since entering government and has made tougher border enforcement one of its selling points. When Labour accepts the claim that immigration is a central threat and competes with the right over who can police it more effectively, it strengthens the political machinery that Reform pushes further.
Labour is expected to announce its Holborn and St Pancras candidate by Wednesday. It is likely to face Green leader Zack Polanski in what could become a closely fought byelection.
Yusuf’s post matters because it stripped Reform’s politics of its usual euphemisms. Its promise to put “British people first” inevitably raises the question of who it considers British. The boundary moves from undocumented migrants, to permanent residents, to refugees who became citizens decades ago. Meanwhile, the financiers, landlords and corporate donors responsible for Britain’s social decay remain safely inside Reform’s vision of the nation.
Under Reform, a billionaire’s cheque buys a place in the supposed people’s revolt, while 35 years in Camden still leave a Somali refugee under suspicion. That tells us which class the party’s nationalism serves.
