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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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201conly in your dreams\u201d, because of her south Asian heritage.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He had also been accused of calling Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, a \u201cnarcissistic Pakistani\u201d and of claiming migrants were \u201cintent on colonising the UK, destroying all that has gone before\u201d.<\/p>\n
Cooper also allegedly attacked the British-born lawyer and women\u2019s right activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu. In a social media post three years ago, he appears to have said: \u201cDr Shaga Bing-Bong\u2026. Time she F\u2019d off back to Nigeria. She\u2019d feel more at home there.\u201d<\/p>\n
And in a post this year attacking David Lammy, the justice secretary, he allegedly wrote: \u201cNo foreign national or first generation migrant should be allowed to sit in parliament.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cooper, who has not responded to the allegations, was Reform\u2019s parliamentary candidate for Tamworth in a byelection in 2023 and again in last year\u2019s general election.<\/p>\n
Myska was allegedly targeted by Cooper earlier this year, just weeks before he became leader of Staffordshire county council.<\/p>\n
A post to Myska from Cooper\u2019s X account in April, read: \u201cYou are neither ethnically, culturally or historically English. Your diaspora isn\u2019t NW European. All you have is a piece of paper entitling you to British citizenship.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sarah Edwards, the Labour MP for Tamworth, said the social media posts displayed \u201cdeeply disturbing white supremacist views\u201d.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Sangita Myska: \u2018Reform UK is a private company and it\u2019s the chief executive that will set the culture and that person is Nigel Farage.\u2019<\/span> Photograph: Ashley Coombes\/Shutterstock for Edinburgh TV Festival<\/p>\n Myska said she held Farage and the wider Reform UK leadership responsible for the \u201cculture\u201d that enabled their politicians and members to amplify racist rhetoric online.<\/p>\n \u201cWithout a shadow of a doubt, Nigel Farage\u2019s 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cReform UK is a private company and it\u2019s the chief executive that will set the culture and that person is Nigel Farage.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The Reform UK leader said this week he had never been racist or antisemitic with \u201cmalice\u201d.<\/p>\n Myska, who left LBC earlier this year, continued: \u201cIn 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.<\/p>\n \u201cBut Nigel Farage has managed to shift what we consider normal in the UK political environment and it is dangerous. It\u2019s dangerous because it\u2019s setting a precedent.\u201d<\/p>\n She said the position of people of colour in public life in Britain was \u201cbecoming harder by the day\u201d, in part due to an \u201cunbelievably toxic environment in which anything goes\u201d that became normalised during the Brexit campaign in 2016.<\/p>\n \u201cIt 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,\u201d she said. \u201cThe reason we have dug our heels in is because we are British. Britain is our home, it\u2019s where we made our lives and we have no intention of going anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n Myska said the online hate had deepened in recent years as immigration \u2013 and particularly the issue of small boats \u2013 had dominated the political agenda.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n She said: \u201cThis guy [Cooper] thinks he\u2019s entitled to attack me in this way, to attack the mayor of London \u2013 the financial capital of Europe, to attack Dr Shola in this way and the antecedent to this can be traced right back to Brexit.<\/p>\n \u201cNigel Farage and Reform UK\u2019s previous incarnation, Ukip, created a particular atmosphere around people of colour in Britain and despite Brexiting that hasn\u2019t dissipated.\u201d<\/p>\n Reform UK has yet to publicly condemn the posts, but said: \u201cFollowing 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Quick Guide<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>Show<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know.<\/p>\n If you have something to share on this subject, you can contact us confidentially using the following methods.<\/p>\n Secure Messaging in the Guardian app<\/strong><\/p>\n The Guardian app has a tool to send tips about stories. Messages are end to end encrypted and concealed within the routine activity that every Guardian mobile app performs. This prevents an observer from knowing that you are communicating with us at all, let alone what is being said.<\/p>\n If you don’t already have the Guardian app, download it (iOS\/Android) and go to the menu. Select \u2018Secure Messaging\u2019. <\/p>\n SecureDrop, instant messengers, email, telephone and post<\/strong><\/p>\n If you can safely use the Tor network without being observed or monitored, you can send messages and documents to the Guardian via our SecureDrop platform.<\/p>\n Finally, our guide at theguardian.com\/tips\u00a0lists several ways to contact us securely, and discusses the pros and cons of each.\u00a0<\/p>\n Illustration: Guardian Design \/ Rich Cousins<\/p>\n Thank you for your feedback.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[6536,20277,10559,872,3132,3131,1186,4458,9168,2464,1577],"class_list":{"0":"post-36248","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-accuses","9":"tag-broadcaster","10":"tag-emboldening","11":"tag-environment","12":"tag-farage","13":"tag-nigel","14":"tag-online","15":"tag-racist","16":"tag-slurs","17":"tag-targeted","18":"tag-toxic"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Contact us about this story<\/h4>\n