Nigel Farage is emboldening attacks on people of colour, according to a journalist allegedly subjected to racial slurs by a Reform UK council leader who the party has been forced to expel.
The broadcaster Sangita Myska, whose long career in British journalism has included presenting shows for the BBC and LBC Radio, said she was told by the former Staffordshire council leader Ian Cooper that she was English “only in your dreams”, because of her south Asian heritage.
Cooper, a two-time Reform UK parliamentary candidate, was forced to stand down as leader of the council after the party revoked his membership on Friday.
He had also been accused of calling Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, a “narcissistic Pakistani” and of claiming migrants were “intent on colonising the UK, destroying all that has gone before”.
Cooper also allegedly attacked the British-born lawyer and women’s right activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu. In a social media post three years ago, he appears to have said: “Dr Shaga Bing-Bong…. Time she F’d off back to Nigeria. She’d feel more at home there.”
And in a post this year attacking David Lammy, the justice secretary, he allegedly wrote: “No foreign national or first generation migrant should be allowed to sit in parliament.”
Cooper, who has not responded to the allegations, was Reform’s parliamentary candidate for Tamworth in a byelection in 2023 and again in last year’s general election.
Myska was allegedly targeted by Cooper earlier this year, just weeks before he became leader of Staffordshire county council.
A post to Myska from Cooper’s X account in April, read: “You are neither ethnically, culturally or historically English. Your diaspora isn’t NW European. All you have is a piece of paper entitling you to British citizenship.”
Sarah Edwards, the Labour MP for Tamworth, said the social media posts displayed “deeply disturbing white supremacist views”.
Sangita Myska: ‘Reform UK is a private company and it’s the chief executive that will set the culture and that person is Nigel Farage.’ Photograph: Ashley Coombes/Shutterstock for Edinburgh TV Festival
Myska said she held Farage and the wider Reform UK leadership responsible for the “culture” that enabled their politicians and members to amplify racist rhetoric online.
“Without a shadow of a doubt, Nigel Farage’s track record is emboldening party members and now elected councillors and potentially those that might become MPs to express views that were once considered completely unacceptable in mainstream political discourse,” she said.
“Reform UK is a private company and it’s the chief executive that will set the culture and that person is Nigel Farage.”
Farage is under mounting pressure after 28 of his school contemporaries told the Guardian they had witnessed deeply offensive racist or antisemitic behaviour by him at Dulwich college, a public school in south-east London.
The Reform UK leader said this week he had never been racist or antisemitic with “malice”.
Myska, who left LBC earlier this year, continued: “In any normal political environment the leader of the party who have these accusations levelled at them would have at the very least stood aside and an investigation launched.
“But Nigel Farage has managed to shift what we consider normal in the UK political environment and it is dangerous. It’s dangerous because it’s setting a precedent.”
She said the position of people of colour in public life in Britain was “becoming harder by the day”, in part due to an “unbelievably toxic environment in which anything goes” that became normalised during the Brexit campaign in 2016.
“It feels like a feat for many of us to remain in the realms of public discourse on social media because of the racist abuse levelled at us on a daily basis,” she said. “The reason we have dug our heels in is because we are British. Britain is our home, it’s where we made our lives and we have no intention of going anywhere.”
Myska said the online hate had deepened in recent years as immigration – and particularly the issue of small boats – had dominated the political agenda.
There were legitimate concerns about those topics, she said, but added that they were being used as cover by people to attack anyone who was not white British.
She said: “This guy [Cooper] thinks he’s entitled to attack me in this way, to attack the mayor of London – the financial capital of Europe, to attack Dr Shola in this way and the antecedent to this can be traced right back to Brexit.
“Nigel Farage and Reform UK’s previous incarnation, Ukip, created a particular atmosphere around people of colour in Britain and despite Brexiting that hasn’t dissipated.”
Reform UK has yet to publicly condemn the posts, but said: “Following an investigation into the failure to declare social media accounts during the candidate vetting process, Cllr Ian Cooper has had his membership of Reform UK revoked.”
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