It is quite difficult these days to keep up with the comings and goings among the highest echelons of the British political party which now goes by the name of Reform UK, but until recently the chairman was Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf, a multi-millionaire son of South Asian immigrants, and a self-declared British Muslim patriot.
Mr Yusuf was born in 1986 in the Glasgow area of Scotland. His parents had migrated from Sri Lanka to the UK in the 1980s; both of them worked for the NHS, his father as a doctor and his mother as a nurse.
Mr Yusuf was educated at a single-sex fee-paying school in south-west London, and went on to get a BSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics in 2009.
He speaks English fluently, and apparently natively, but he has recently been quoted as saying that it was “dumb” for his party’s newest MP to call on the British prime minister to ban the burqa. During her Prime Minister’s Questions debut in the House of Commons, Sarah Pochin – who had won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election in May 2025 – urged Sir Keir Starmer to ban the wearing of the burqa “in the interests of public safety”. Mr Yusuf was not the only one who seemed rather puzzled about how exactly a burqa could be dangerous.
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All the reports in newspapers and other print media about what Zia Yusuf said in reply to Ms Pochin printed his word “dumb” in inverted commas. This would presumably have been because there was something unusual or unexpected about him using that particular word. The point is that dumb is most usually employed by people in Britain to mean “unable to speak”.
Clearly, Mr Yusuf’s intended meaning on this occasion was “foolish” or “stupid”, which was at least until very recently an overwhelmingly American usage. Putting inverted commas around that word has the force of indicating to a British readership that, believe it or not, that really was what he actually said, even though he is not American.
Dumb first occurred in print in English in the meaning of “stupid” in 1823, in the writings of an American novelist. The chronology and geography of this first appearance of dumb meaning “stupid” in 19th-century American English both testify to the influence on American English of the German language, where the word dumm means “stupid”; and Dummkopf, literally “stupid head”, translates into English as “idiot”.
This German influence on American English – if not necessarily on Mr Yusuf’s own usage – is easy to understand when we note that during the 19th century, millions of immigrants, maybe as many as seven million, arrived in North America from Germany and other German-speaking polities, with the numbers only tailing off after the beginning of the first world war in 1914. The surname Trump is just one of hundreds of American family names which betray the German-speaking ancestry of their bearers; Eisenhower is another, and so is Hoover. It is also significant that hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the USA were speakers of Yiddish, which is historically a variety of German.
Runcorn
Runcorn is a town on the south bank of the River Mersey in north-west England. Its name is probably a spelling mistake. One of the earliest known forms of the name was Rumcova, which meant “wide cove” in Old English. No one has any explanation for where the -rn ending of the current form of the name came from, except that at some point a scribe copying out the place-name must just have got it wrong.
