Reform UK’s rise poses direct threat to Britain’s Muslim communities, Hyphen investigation finds

LONDON (MNTV) — Reform U.K. has transformed from a fringe protest movement into a serious contender for local power across England, and a comprehensive report by Hyphen has mapped out what that shift could mean for the country’s nearly four million Muslims — a community that finds itself repeatedly singled out in the party’s rhetoric, policy platform, and political strategy.

The party won four million votes in the 2024 general election, a performance unmatched by any challenger party in modern British politics. It has since taken control of 10 local authorities and, according to polling by JL Partners for the Telegraph, could win as many as 69 of the 136 councils facing elections on May 7. 

Some of those authorities, including Birmingham, have large Muslim populations — meaning that for the first time, significant numbers of British Muslims may find themselves governed by Reform-led administrations.

Immigration as centrepiece

Reform has placed immigration at the core of its political identity, framing it as the root cause of what the party calls “Broken Britain.” At its conference in Dover in February, home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf — himself from a Muslim Sri Lankan background — announced plans for a “U.K. Deportation Command,” a new body tasked with carrying out mass removals of migrants who entered the country through irregular routes.

The party’s wider immigration agenda includes abolishing Indefinite Leave to Remain, replacing it with five-year visas tied to higher salary thresholds, mandatory English fluency, and stricter character requirements. 

According to Hyphen’s analysis, this would affect between 622,000 and 820,000 non-EU passport holders currently in the U.K., as well as up to four million EU citizens.

The impact on Muslim communities would be particularly acute. Census data shows that nationals of Muslim-majority countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan accounted for at least 12.4 per cent of the U.K.’s migrant population as of 2021. 

A further 11.7 per cent came from Nigeria and India, both countries with substantial Muslim populations. Roughly a quarter of Muslims in Britain do not hold a British passport. Reform has also pledged to deport more than half a million people who crossed the Channel on small boats — and according to Hyphen, 85 per cent of asylum seekers arriving by that route since 2018 have come from Muslim-majority countries.

Islam singled out by name

What distinguishes Reform from previous iterations of right-wing populism in Britain is the directness with which its leadership targets Islam specifically. Party leader Nigel Farage has referred to British Muslims as the country’s “fifth column,” claimed that nearly half support Hamas and reject British values, and described public Eid prayers organised in Trafalgar Square as an attempt to “overtake, intimidate and dominate our way of life.”

The party’s policy platform includes a proposal to ban the conversion of disused churches into mosques — a practice Yusuf has called “incendiary.” 

Hyphen’s reporting found, however, that only two Church of England properties have been converted into other places of worship since the late 1960s, both into Sikh gurdwaras, with no confirmed record of any Anglican church being turned into a mosque.

The party’s vetting processes have repeatedly failed to screen out overtly bigoted candidates. During the 2024 election, several Reform candidates were found to hold racist and Islamophobic views, including one who described himself as “a proud Islamophobe.” 

Councillors elected that year were discovered to have shared content from the far-right Britain First movement. Ahead of this year’s local elections, further candidates have been found to have called Islam “a cancer” on social media.

Tahir Abbas, a criminology and global justice professor at Aston University, told Hyphen that while Farage deploys recognisable Islamophobic tropes, he is careful to stay within certain rhetorical limits — operating in a political landscape where hostility toward Muslims has already become deeply normalised.

Diversity strategy

Reform has made visible efforts to diversify its leadership ranks. Yusuf, a millionaire businessman, was credited with professionalising the party during his tenure as chair. Laila Cunningham has been announced as the party’s London mayoral candidate for 2028. The party has also absorbed high-profile Conservative defectors, including former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi. More than eight per cent of Reform’s 2024 voters did not identify as white British — a notable improvement on Farage’s previous vehicle, UKIP.

Abbas and co-author Parveen Akhtar, a politics lecturer at Aston University, argued in their analysis that the visibility of figures like Yusuf and Cunningham helps Farage deflect accusations of racism while the party works to broaden its appeal among ethnic minority voters and wavering white voters who might be repelled by overt bigotry.

But the strategy has generated its own tensions. Yusuf’s appointment provoked denunciations from the far-right fringe, with disgraced former actor Laurence Fox declaring that “a Britain-focused party cannot have a Mohammedan as the chair.” Some members publicly cancelled their memberships in protest. 

Yusuf himself briefly resigned in 2025 after criticising a Reform MP who called for a burqa ban — a departure Farage attributed to “a tirade of racist attacks” against his own chairman.

Healthcare and local services

Beyond immigration, Reform’s agenda carries implications for Muslim communities through its approach to public services. Hyphen’s report notes that healthcare was a top priority for Muslim voters in 2024, and that research by the National Aids Trust found more than a quarter of Muslims over 50 reported poor or very poor health. A large proportion of Britain’s Muslim population lives in deprived areas already hit hard by cuts to public health funding.

Reform’s manifesto pledged to keep the NHS free at the point of delivery, but the party’s plans would channel billions in public money toward private healthcare providers. Farage has repeatedly questioned whether the NHS funding model — based on general taxation and national insurance — is sustainable, and has not ruled out a shift toward insurance-based healthcare. 

The issue has already caused internal splits, with the party’s Welsh leader ruling out privatisation while a London MP said he would be “open to anything.”

If Reform takes control of dozens of councils in May, its influence over schools, libraries, waste management, and other local services would bring its politics into the daily lives of communities that have been the primary target of its rhetoric.

What May means

Abbas counselled caution about reading too much into a strong local election result. Reform’s existing councils have already attracted attention for the inexperience of many of their councillors, and he noted that ideology and ambition have so far appeared to outstrip capability and competence. How electoral success translates into effective governance remains an open question.

But the symbolic significance is harder to dismiss. A party whose leader calls Muslims a fifth column, whose candidates have called Islam a cancer, and whose flagship policy is a mass deportation apparatus that would disproportionately affect Muslim migrants — that party standing on the threshold of controlling dozens of English councils represents a political reality that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. 

For Britain’s Muslims, the May elections are not an abstract exercise in local democracy. They are a measure of how far the country’s political centre has shifted — and how close the consequences now are to home.