‘We have got to document illegal migrants' says Reform UK mayor
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New Statesman
25 minutes ago
- New Statesman
Mothin Ali: 'There's a lot of racism on the left'
Leeds councillor Mothin Ali is set to run for deputy leader of the Green Party. Photograph by Craig Gent, courtesy of Mothin Ali Within weeks of being elected as a Green Party councillor in May 2024, Mothin Ali was criticised for saying Allahu Akhbar ('God is great') in his victory speech, faced down rioters and was targeted by far-right disinformation. It was a very public and literal baptism of fire for the accountant and permaculture gardener who knows that in his garden he can be alone and away from online and offline hassle. Now he wants to become deputy leader of the Green Party. Ali and I speak via Zoom straight after his councillor surgery at the Compton Community Centre in Harehills, West Yorkshire. He seemed weighed down by some of the problems he had heard about, but quickly became energised when talking about the issues. 'Housing's the biggest problem,' he said. Among the people who have been to see him this morning are a family of five living in a two-bed home. It's a common problem, along with disrepair and the long wait for social housing. 'It's just unbelievable,' he said. Ali, 43, represents Gipton and Harehills, a working-class, racially mixed community in the north-east of Leeds. It's where he grew up and first stood as a 'paper' candidate (without a chance of being elected) in 2022. It took Ali two years to turn a meagre 22 per cent of the vote into 52 per cent and a majority of 750 votes driven by a grassroots campaign. 'One thing I think that's missing is that connection between the grassroots activists and the leaders,' Ali said. What he wants for the Greens is to connect their local strength to a 'presence on a national scale in the mainstream media'. He contrasts his party's action-orientated approach to Reform, which is, 'getting the votes from media hype'. 'Inner-city areas feel let down, but for a long time it's been the Labour Party who've had free rein over these areas. And no one's really challenged them,' he said. He dismisses any idea that British people are apathetic: 'People are disenfranchised,' he observed. Ali has recently come under scrutiny for deciding not to sign any internal pledges from the party's various interest groups, particularly the LGBTIQA+ Greens. His reasoning was, firstly, that politicians regularly sign and break these types of pledge so they are not an effective way to effect change and, secondly, that pledges can subvert the party's member-led policy process. This stance prompted criticism and praise from inside and outside the party, much of which incorrectly assumed that he was unsupportive of LGBT rights when he is on the record expressing support for these communities. Amid the discussion online, Adnan Hussain, independent MP for Blackburn asked on X, 'Is there space on the left to create a broad enough church to allow Muslims an authentic space, just as it does all other minority groups?' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'First and foremost, I've got to say I'm an unapologetic Muslim. I make no apology for who I am,' Ali said when I asked him if there is a place for practising Muslims in progressive spaces. 'A lot of our [Islamic] mindset, a lot of our thinking is predominantly left wing. It's predominantly socialist based,' he responded, 'we've got a lot of natural home here. 'But, just as the racists exist on the right, they exist on the left – and that's a conversation that's very rarely had.' Ali said that one prominent Green Party member described him of being 'sinister' while another said it was right to be 'suspicious' of Muslims. These are, frankly, not uncommon attitudes in British society, but Ali highlights how the Green Party does not yet have an anti-racism policy – something that he and others hope to change at the Party's autumn conference. 'There's a lot of that [racism] that goes on in left-wing spheres that, because it's done with a level of politeness and a level of niceness, it's not that visceral hate that you get on the right,' he said. At a protest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Leeds earlier this month, Ali encountered some of that visceral hate when was challenged on camera by far-right activists. It's a compelling watch as he calmly engages with the 'auditor' and puts across his points defending asylum seekers, migrants and refugees. 'Someone was actually swearing at me while I was having the conversation,' he remembered. 'I think it's important to be empathetic,' Ali said. 'They're looking for answers, looking for hope as well. And what they've found or what they've been fed is a narrative where immigrants are to blame or Muslims are to blame.' Ali believes the far right can be countered through dialogue. 'We've got to create a safe space where people can discuss things,' he said. 'So people can have robust discussions. They don't have to agree on everything. We can't all think the same.' In the aftermath of the riots in his ward last year, sparked by the removal into foster care of four Roma children, Ali organised a series of meetings to help the different communities hear and understand each other and the challenges they had. 'We created a space where there was understanding, where we're going to have some positives out of it,' he said. It's an approach Ali has used recently to gather opinion on the more quotidian local issue of roadworks, but reflects his belief that people have to be more directly involved in the decisions that affect them. His other method to bridge divides is doing the practical work of community activism. Ali recounts knocking on the door of a man who swiftly dismissed him, using the P-word for good measure. Instead of walking away, Ali pressed for the reasons why this person was so unhappy. 'His problem was fly-tipping and some anti-social behaviour,' Ali explained. The councillor got the fly-tipping cleared and went back to see him, but he was 'still very angry'. Months went by and Ali went back for another chat to see how things were going. This time the conversation was more 'civilised', Ali recalled. After election day the man told Ali that he had voted for him. 'That's how we change hearts and minds,' Ali said. [See also: Visions of an English civil war] Related
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Routinely disclosing the asylum status of suspects is a very dangerous step to take
The National Police Chiefs' Council and the College of Policing have backed plans to offer greater 'transparency' on the ethnicity, and potentially the immigration status, of police suspects. But in a world where rumours travel faster than facts, this new approach will have profound consequences for justice – and for the people who will live with the consequences. The new national guidance says that 'police forces should consider disclosing the ethnicity and nationality of suspects when they are charged in high profile and sensitive investigations and operations'. It comes after Reform UK accused police of a 'cover-up' over two men who have been charged in connection with the alleged rape of a child in Nuneaton. Prior to this, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, had expressed her view that guidance should change to allow 'more transparency'. She was joined in this opinion by the chief inspector of constabulary, who warned that withholding such details could feed 'two-tier policing' claims (the allegation that the state polices majorities more harshly than minorities, contrary to the overwhelming body of evidence that shows otherwise). The idea that identity characteristics should feature, after arrest, in what information is publicly released during police investigations has been circling for years. Until very recently, officials and criminal justice practitioners had mostly resisted. Their concern was simple: routine publication of these details would invite the public to see suspects as examples of a group rather than as individuals in a case. The current approach is embedded in force policies that explicitly root decisions over what to share with the media in 'policing purpose' – releasing only what is necessary to protect life, prevent and detect crime, bring offenders to justice and maintain public confidence, rather than what satisfies curiosity or advances a political argument. It is reinforced by national professional guidance designed to prevent pre-trial publicity from straying into prejudice, including the longstanding norm that suspects should not be identified before they have been charged, except in clearly justified circumstances. This sits alongside the press regulator's rule, established after histories of press stereotyping playing a role in public incitement, that race or ethnicity should not be mentioned in reporting unless it is 'genuinely relevant to the story' (there is not even a public interest override to that clause). Together, these norms made early disclosure of ethnicity and immigration status the exception rather than the default. Now the explicit decision has been made to alter this in standard police disclosures and reporting. So, what has changed? The answer, simply put, is that there is a perception that the politics and the information environment is now different. The impact of the online falsehoods about the Southport killings in late July and early August 2024 – that the attacker was an asylum seeker who had recently arrived by boat – ricocheted through social media and spilled into street violence. In this instance, the police could not initially name the suspect because he was under 18. Subsequently, parliamentary committees, researchers and reporters have traced how rumour and identity claims fuelled disorder, while newsrooms and police forces were left firefighting conspiracy theories at speed. That crisis has bolstered the argument that withholding details such as nationality or asylum status can create a vacuum in which malign actors thrive, and that more routine disclosure will puncture misinformation. The problems with this argument are profound. First, conspiracies thrive on distortion, not on the careful absorption of official communications. A parliamentary committee concluded that social media's business models incentivise the spread of misinformation, which helped trigger last summer's violent disorder. In this climate, baking identity into the first telling of crime stories – before a suspect has been charged – is not transparency, it is kindling. Second, once an identity is put at the front of an update, the search for evidence gives way to the hunt for a 'type' ahead of the facts. It steers attention from what happened and what can be proved to who the person is said to be and what that is taken to mean. In that climate, each new detail is read through the label, and the space for careful judgment shrinks. The history of policing and ethnic minorities in this country has illustrated this in numerous moral panics. Third, the new disclosure regime lands in a political and media environment that routinely associates migrants and Black and ethnic minorities with illegality. The Runnymede Trust's recent analyses of millions of words in news articles and parliamentary debates documents how such groups are persistently paired with words about illegality. That pattern helps normalise hostility. These are not abstract academic points – they are the context in which the criminal justice system is brought into perpetual, manufactured culture wars that harm minorities and leave everyone less safe. Fourth, there's a very basic problem of data quality. Police forces are famously bad at this. Ethnicity can be recorded as self-defined by the person involved or as 'officer observed' using broad visual codes. Completion rates for self-defined data vary sharply between forces, and missing or mismatched records are common. National standards on ethnicity are also under review because the categories are contested and context-dependent. Now add the fact that 'ethnicity', 'nationality' and 'immigration status' are different things. Nationality may be known at the point of charging a suspect if documents are checked. Immigration status often is not – indeed, the police guidance confirms that, 'It is not the role or responsibility of the police to verify a suspect's immigration status' and that, 'It is for the Home Office to decide if it is appropriate in all the circumstances to confirm immigration status.' Turning any such labels into front-of-house communications is an open invitation to error, before a correction that is too late to catch up with the narrative. The truth is that the demand for default disclosure of ethnicity or immigration status is not about transparency but advancing a political narrative. This is why the script scarcely needs facts to run. If police hold back, it is proof of concealment; if they disclose the information and those details fit the stereotype, this is used to indict the wider group. If the details do not fit, attention moves elsewhere. The new guidance might reconcile pressure for 'transparency' with established privacy and contempt protections, and the ability to explain reasons for restraint (for instance, to safeguard a fair trial; to protect victims and witnesses; to avoid inflaming tensions). These too are a service to transparency as they tell the public that the police understand the rights of suspects and the realities of community safety. The real question, however, is not whether the public should be trusted with information. It is whether the state should normalise ethnicity and immigration status as the organising facts of crime reporting – and burden already marginalised communities with more suspicion. Nasar Meer is a professor of social and political sciences at the University of Glasgow
Glasgow Times
an hour ago
- Glasgow Times
Row breaks out after Reform politician blasts LEZ schemes
Councillor Jamie McGuire labelled the schemes as 'little more than cash cows' and said the local authority 'must have no part in this' in a blistering statement. But the elected member for Renfrew North and Braehead has been accused of 'hyperbolic word salad' on an issue that was settled almost two years ago. In September 2023, the SNP administration confirmed it was not considering the introduction of an LEZ in Paisley or any other part of Renfrewshire at a full council meeting. Councillor McGuire, who defected from Labour to Nigel Farage's Reform in June, said: 'Scotland's four main cities already have LEZs in place and their experience should be a warning. 'These schemes have acted as little more than cash cows, generating income for councils while hitting those who can least afford it. Councillor Jamie McGuire (Image: Newsquest) 'People on the lowest incomes, who are far more likely to drive older vehicles, have been penalised simply for trying to get to work, take their children to school or care for relatives. 'Renfrewshire must have no part in this. A congestion charge or LEZ in our towns would be a hammer blow to local households and businesses. 'We are a working community that depends on accessible, affordable transport. 'Many residents travel across Renfrewshire for work, education, and caring responsibilities, while small enterprises rely heavily on vans and cars to serve customers and move goods. 'Imposing extra charges on them is not just unreasonable, it risks undermining our local economy and making it harder for people to live and work here.' He added: 'The SNP-led Renfrewshire Council must act now to rule out – clearly, unequivocally and permanently – ever introducing either a congestion charge or a low emission zone in our area. Councillor Jim Paterson (Image: Newsquest) 'Residents deserve certainty, not the constant threat of new charges hanging over them.' Councillor Jim Paterson, SNP convener of the planning and climate change policy board, claimed Councillor McGuire was 'trying to raise his profile' with the comments. The elected member for Renfrew South and Gallowhill said: 'Another day, another fabricated outrage from Councillor McGuire. 'The position of the SNP administration and indeed Councillor McGuire on this issue was settled in 2023 when the Conservative group called on the council to rule out establishing any form of LEZ in Paisley and wider Renfrewshire for the duration of this council term. 'The SNP position along with a Labour amendment was agreed then by the vast majority of councillors which stated that the council would not consider the introduction of a low emission zone (LEZ/ULEZ) in Paisley or any other parts of Renfrewshire. That position remains unchanged. 'Councillor McGuire, like his newfound political hero Nigel Farage, may like to trade in misinformation but to imply that there has been any change to the agreed position of 2023 is just nonsense and to suggest there is a 'constant fear' hanging over residents is just hyperbolic word salad from a councillor desperately trying to raise his profile to secure the top spot in his party's internal list for Holyrood 2026.'
