LONDON: The chairman of Britain\u2019s hard-right Reform UK party quit on Thursday, saying that trying to get the upstarts elected to government was no longer \u201ca good use of my time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zia Yusuf\u2019s announcement came after he criticized the party\u2019s newest MP for asking Prime Minister Keir Starmer whether he would ban the wearing of burqas in the UK.<\/p>\n
The resignation hints at unrest in arch-Euroskeptic Nigel Farage\u2019s party, which has already lost one MP since it secured a breakthrough result at last July\u2019s general election.<\/p>\n
\u201cEleven months ago I became chairman of Reform. I\u2019ve worked full time as a volunteer to take the party from 14 to 30 percent (voter support), quadrupled its membership and delivered historic electoral results,\u201d Yusuf wrote on X.<\/p>\n
\u201cI no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time, and hereby resign the office,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Earlier, the 38-year-old had slammed Sarah Pochin, who was elected in a by-election last month, for her question to Starmer on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do think it\u2019s dumb for a party to ask the PM if they would do something the party itself wouldn\u2019t do,\u201d Yusuf wrote on X.<\/p>\n
He became chairman in July last year, shortly after Reform won 14 percent of the vote and five seats in parliament \u2014 an unprecedented haul for a hard-right group in a British general election.<\/p>\n
Yusuf was tasked with professionalizing the group\u2019s grassroots operations and training up candidates ahead of what Farage has said will be a major challenge to Starmer\u2019s Labour party at the next general election, likely in 2029.<\/p>\n
Anti-immigrant Reform has consistently led national opinion polls for several weeks now and won hundreds of councillors at local polls on May 1.<\/p>\n
Farage said he was \u201cgenuinely sorry\u201d that Yusuf had decided to stand down, but some analysts saw it as another example of the charismatic Brexit cheerleader falling out with a senior figure in his party.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like deja vu all over again,\u201d political scientist Tim Bale wrote on X, citing Farage\u2019s previous leadership of UKIP and the Brexit Party.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo-one but no-one gets to be bigger than big Nige,\u201d added the Queen Mary University of London politics professor.<\/p>\n
Last month, former Reform lawmaker Rupert Lowe called Farage a \u201cviper\u201d after his dramatic suspension from the party over claims he had threatened Yusuf.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors did not charge Lowe, citing \u201cinsufficient evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON: The chairman of Britain\u2019s hard-right Reform UK party quit on Thursday, saying that trying to get the upstarts elected to government was no longer \u201ca good use of my time.\u201d Zia Yusuf\u2019s announcement came after he criticized the party\u2019s newest MP for asking Prime Minister Keir Starmer whether he would ban the wearing of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":82137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82129"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82138,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82129\/revisions\/82138"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}