Burqas, Billionaires and a Broken Party: The Ugly Heart of Reform UK

There’s a phrase that gets tossed around every time Reform UK lurches into its next act of self-immolation: serious party of government. That was the spin, wasn’t it? A new force to shake up Westminster, unshackled from the Tory corpse, unafraid to speak its mind. But this week’s fiasco. An ill-considered attack on Muslim women, the resignation of Zia Yusuf, and the collapse of their much-trumpeted “efficiency” unit. Reveals what Reform UK really is: a chaos engine powered by racial panic, vanity hires and an authoritarian impulse disguised as straight talk.

Let’s not pretend there’s a serious policy debate here. The call to ban the burqa wasn’t a contribution to some Enlightenment café of ideas; it was a dog whistle blasted at full volume, a panic-button press designed to provoke. The party’s newest MP, Sarah Pochin, stood up in Parliament to ask if the Prime Minister would ban a religious garment. No pretext. No context. Just a crass attempt to rebrand Islamophobia as cultural critique.

Zia Yusuf, one of the few grown-ups in the room, had the gall to call it what it was: dumb. And for this moment of honesty, for recognising that governing a multiracial, pluralist democracy requires something more than bad-faith culture war stunts, he’s now gone. Along with the technocratic wunderkind Nathaniel Fried, whose Elon Musk–inspired “DOGE” unit was meant to usher in a new era of ruthless efficiency and council cuts. One week in, it’s fallen apart. Yes, you read that correctly, one week! Everything Reform touches falls apart once the cameras stop rolling.

Tice, loyal as ever to the grift, says it’s “right” to have this debate, citing countries like France and Belgium as models, as if the creeping authoritarianism of Fortress Europe is something to emulate. He talks of Christianity and equality, as if those are neutral concepts rather than historically exclusionary tools of statecraft. “Let’s ask women who wear the burqa,” he says, disingenuously. Ignoring the vast literature of Muslim women explaining, again and again, that their choices aren’t his to adjudicate.

But we know the script. Reform doesn’t care about women’s rights. It isn’t interested in religious freedom. This is about visibility. About marking a target, about letting voters in white English suburbs know that the enemy is recognisable, veiled, foreign, Other.

Then there’s the hypocrisy. So flagrant it almost dares you to notice. Richard Tice, the man demanding a “debate” on whether Muslim women in Britain should be allowed to wear what they choose, lives part-time in a Muslim country. His partner and children reside in Dubai, a state governed by Islamic law, where burqas and niqabs are not just permitted but commonplace. Tice jets back and forth between Reform UK’s culture war circus and a Gulf tax haven that would be anathema to the very values he pretends to defend. Is the burqa only oppressive when worn in Barking, but not in the shadow of the Burj Khalifa? This isn’t conviction politics. It’s theatre, drenched in double standards.

Yusuf’s resignation exposes something deeper than another falling-out in Farage’s long line of loyalists-turned-castoffs. It reveals the impossible contradiction at the heart of Reform UK: a party desperate to appear competent, modern and technocratic, while indulging every paranoid fantasy of the Daily Mail comment section. It wants to be Goldman Sachs and Musk’s X, Eton and GB News. It cannot be both. And it is tearing itself apart trying.

Meanwhile, in Kent, council meetings are being cancelled, services are in disarray, and their “efficiency” unit has been exposed as a PR stunt with a shelf life shorter than a TikTok trend. Polly Billington’s¹ intervention may be party-political, but she’s right: this isn’t just chaotic, it’s dangerous. Who would trust these people with roads, buses, or children’s services?

Farage says Yusuf “had enough”. Of course he did. Who wouldn’t? The party he helped build into a credible electoral force has revealed its true self: not a challenge to the establishment, but its fairground mirror—reactionary, erratic, and uninterested in governance beyond headlines and scapegoats.

Let’s be clear: this is not an isolated misstep. It is the logical outcome of a politics built on division, run by charlatans, and held together by cults of personality. This is what Reform UK is built to do. Pick a fight, then fall apart.

If we don’t stop treating this as performance politics and start recognising it for what it is—a slow march towards authoritarian cultural revanchism in a Union Jack cloak—then the damage will not just be to Reform UK. It will be to the body politic itself.

Footnotes

1. Labour MP for East Thanet ↩︎

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