As a second-generation British citizen of Indian descent, I don’t get Zia’s crazy anti migrant nationalism. According to him, all the problems facing the UK are down to migration, the failing health service, poor UK productivity, the lack of housing, the cost-of-living crisis and maybe the failure to deliver HS2 because it was Sunak who cancelled it. He resigned as the Chairman of Reform after the halfwit Sarah Pochin, now an MP for Reform, asked the Prime Minister if he would ban the burka, an issue which is not in Reform’s manifesto. He called the question dumb, which it was, and then resigned and left the party. Look, I am not convinced that those women who wear the burka are making a free choice, and even if they believe they are making a free choice, religious identity and traditions are determined with little or no agency. Don’t blame the burka, blame the bloke. However, we live in a democracy, and the right to wear whatever you want is sacrosanct. So, he rightfully resigned his role on principle and then added, helping Reform get elected was no longer” a good use of his time,” then, 48 hours later, he crawled back into Daddy’s bosom like the prodigal son. Zia is now spearheading Reform’s version of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) along the lines of Musk, which has massively overpromised and underdelivered. If you took the word migration and boats out of Zia’s vocabulary, he would have nothing to say about anything that affects working-class people’s lives and like Keir, whose father was a toolmaker, he bangs on about his mum being a nurse and his dad a doctor, I’ll send him a bone in the post.
As a successful entrepreneur, he has a net worth of more than £30 million. He was privately educated and graduated from Harvard. On that basis alone, you would expect him to understand the basics of economics. However, he has put his name to a tax-cutting agenda based on spending cuts that would make Liz Truss’s September 2023 budget look believable. This tax-cutting agenda of £80 billion would see a Reform Chancellor trying to find an equivalent £80 billion in spending cuts. The proposed tax cuts backed by Zia include that, inheritance tax would only be applied to estates over £2.0 million, and the higher income threshold increased from £50k to £70k. A man of the people, that is, the people being in the top 1%, to which most of these tax giveaways will be destined for.
He was rightly skewered on Question Time where he moaned about all the problems in the UK, which, in fairness, are many, but he, like all Populist parties, provides no solutions. He said that the people of this country are sick and tired of being gaslit, so stop gaslighting them. He talks about moralising the young, and they are being taught to hate this country. Firstly, start moralising yourself by saying clearly you will not butcher the welfare system and the health service principle that healthcare will remain free at the point of need. If teaching our young people, the good, the bad and the ugly of British history is wrong, he needs to go back and understand the British role in the slave trade, in the creation of the theory of eugenics, colonialism, and imperialism, the fight for universal suffrage, and the 2.0 million Asians and Africans that fought alongside British soldiers in the Second World War. Maybe he should also ask his dad about the partition of India and the 1.0 million killed in sectarian violence. Oh, I know your parent are Sri Lankan. In addition, of course, we should teach our kids about Brunel, Turing, Pankhurst, Bevin, Atlee, Sancho, Seacole, Wilberforce and our great wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and his key role in the defeat of fascism. However, our great wartime PM also had a darker side, for example, his role in the 1943 Bengal famine, which saw 3.0 million people starve to death and his flirting with white supremacy.
He has nothing to say about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Trump the Terrible, Putin the Great, growing income and wealth inequality and the climate crisis and like the Prime Minister and Sunak, he believes that stopping foreign aid is the cure to all the country’s problems. This guy is a publicity-seeking multi-millionaire with no political nous or understanding of the current geopolitics. Though I have to say, being a multi-millionaire does not make you a bad person, but you should understand your obligation is to the whole of society.
Zia is part of the Spitting Image party, which includes himself, Nigel, Richard Tice, Sarah Pochin and Lee Anderson. Take your own advice and spend your time and money more wisely, resign again, and this time show some integrity and don’t come back.
Suneil Sharma
18th June 2025
The Gob 
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