Zia Yusuf threatens Reform will put migrant detention centres in Green areas

Reform UK‘s Zia Yusuf has threatened that the racist far-right party will put immigration detention centres in Green Party-run areas.

Yusuf was appointed Reform UK’s shadow home secretary in February. Of course, being a party with just eight MPs, Reform is nowhere near the official opposition for the Labour government, so it can’t appoint shadow secretaries. But that didn’t stop Yusuf from playing make-believe.

Zia Yusuf, as vile as ever

As an official shadow home secretary would, Yusuf announced Reform UK’s latest policy at 9.17pm on a Sunday night on X.

He tweeted that to achieve Farage’s wet dream of deporting “all illegal migrants” from Britain, Reform would detain tens of thousands at a time.

Don’t worry if this sounds fucking abhorrent, Yusuf informs us it’s actually much worse than it sounds.

Migrants will not be able to leave these detention centres, and each will be held there a couple of weeks before being deported.

In order to enact this, thankfully still imaginary plan, Reform would need to build them all over the country. And here’s where it gets even more sinister:

A Reform government will not put any migrant detention facilities in any constituency with a Reform MP.

Nor will we put them where Reform controls the council.

So where would Reform put them? We’ll give you one guess.

And of the remaining areas, we will prioritise Green controlled parliamentary constituencies and Green controlled councils to locate the detention centres.

Put simply, if you vote in a Reform council or Reform MP, we guarantee you won’t have a detention centre near you.

If you vote Green, there’s a good chance you will.

Yep that’s right, these vile bastards are saying, if you vote Green, they’ll put a migrant detention centre in your backyard.

Yusuf finished:

This is an important exercise in democratic consent, not just for our mass deportation policy, but for where the detention centres are placed.

Given Zack Polanski openly advocates for open borders, I look forward to their warm embrace of this policy.

Yusuf might say this is “democratic consent”, but it’s clearly not freely given consent if you’ve got to threaten someone. By threatening their voters with the current big bad wolf of immigrants on their doorstep, Reform is breaking election rules.

The Electoral Commission’s guidelines for campaigning clearly state that candidates must not put undue influence on any voters.

The guidelines state:

A person is guilty of undue influence if they carry out an activity on account of:

• a person having voted in a particular way or refrained from voting

• assuming a person to have voted in a particular way or to have refrained from voting

Included in the activities that will lead to committing this offence are:

• Using or threatening to use violence against a person
• Causing spiritual injury to, or placing undue spiritual pressure on, a person
• Doing any other act designed to intimidate a person
• Doing any act designed to deceive a person in relation to the administration of an election

Reform is running on hatred and fear

Now, to many of us this X diarrhoea will sound absolutely ridiculous, but think of the most scared person you know who’s been easily swayed by Farage’s racist bile. They’d fall for not wanting a detention centre next to them in a heartbeat.

And let’s be honest, many Reform voters would relish putting one in a Green area. If you’ve ever expressed disgust at Reform, or support for another party online as a woman, you’ve probably been met with horrendous racist threats from white men about what they’d let Muslim men do to you. That’s what Reform is betting on here.

Reform knows the Green Party is making waves this local election season because its politicians are from the communities they want to serve and are getting out into their local areas to give them real plans for change. Whereas Reform’s entire campaign hinges on the fears of those who’ve lost everything at the hands of millionaires and billionaires like them, and those who the racist bile has worked on.

Whilst Reform plays on people’s ill informed fears, it’s obvious the party is running scared and clutching at whatever straws it has left.

Featured image via the Canary