Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, has been likened to Donald Trump by the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams, who said his comments on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme were ‘disconnected, cliche-riddled and unremittingly stupid’.
In her Guardian opinion column, Williams writes that the party had announced its intention to suspend the asylum system for an entire parliamentary term, and that Yusuf had used the broadcast to promise a British version of ICE.
She writes that she would ordinarily have paid no attention to either proposal, arguing that even responding to the party’s policy platform means entering what she describes as its alternate universe, in which it is preparing for government. Williams says she prefers the reality in which Reform hangs by a thread pending the outcome of a parliamentary inquiry into a £5m gift to Nigel Farage from a well-wisher.
Williams adds that even a pledge of a British version of ICE would have passed without comment, had Yusuf stopped there — a silence she attributes to despair that anyone would look at the US’s shadow militia, which she describes as performing staged acts of violence and inhumanity, and see political capital in it.
She goes on to challenge the examples Yusuf cited during the interview. According to her account, he said an elderly woman waited 23 hours for an ambulance and that a coroner found this contributed to her death; that a Welsh 15-year-old’s educational attainment is below the OECD average; and that many young people must live with their parents into their 30s and 40s because they cannot afford rent.
Williams asks how any of those claims relate to asylum seekers. She notes that high private rents are not driven by asylum seekers, who have no right to work even if they arrive through a formal route. She also observes that Welsh 15-year-olds underperform compared with English 15-year-olds, whom she places above the OECD average and above every other European nation apart from Estonia and Ireland, and asks why Ireland manages to thrive given its very low number of asylum seekers.
According to Williams, Yusuf’s remarks are aimed at what she calls a half-asleep mind dreaming of a whites-only yesteryear, punctuated by soothing mantras such as ‘Charity begins at home’, a phrase she says he repeated. She compares the style to a Trump rally while arguing it lacks his pizzazz, and writes that Reform cannot even get neo-fascist mimicry right.
The column introduces the term ‘agnotology’, which Williams defines as the deliberate creation of ignorance, confusion and doubt. She says it can be produced through misinformation and fake news, or through half-truths pouring out of bot factories, or simply by talking nonsense — a phenomenon she says has been visible during party conference season and its aftermath.
Among the examples she cites are a pledge to build an impenetrable and state-of-the-art defence dome for £10bn under the name Britannia Shield, which she notes is already the name of an Oxfordshire roofing company, and a promise to stop all refugees arriving from everywhere until conditions for every Briton at every conceivable stage of life have improved. She attributes the latter to a party whose only discernible allegiance, she writes, is to its billionaire donors.
Williams concludes that the policies themselves do not matter. She describes the approach as florid, premeditated stupidity pursued as an end in itself, designed to clog the collective consciousness with nonsense and to drain the confidence of any citizen who wakes up in a good mood. The only defence, she writes, is to hold your line, insist on the difference between truth and untruth, and guard your mojo.
The column also carries a promotion for The Guardian’s year in review 2026 event, scheduled for Tuesday 1 December 2026, featuring Zoe Williams, John Crace, Pippa Crerar, Jonathan Liew and Lucy Mangan.
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