The real story of the Russell Brand conviction? Immigration, says Reform MP

When Russell Brand was sentenced to more than a decade in prison after he was convicted of raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others, surely it was beyond even perhaps Reform’s maddest MP to claim that the real nub of the story was immigration?

No, it wasn’t.

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Sarah Pochin, the Runcorn MP who has previously praised Donald Trump for threatening to annex Greenland, claimed digital ID cards would stop people buying airline tickets and falsely reported that Wales was banning dog walking to appease foreigners, turned up on GB News on Tuesday to contrast the jailed comedian’s sentence with lesser ones handed out to immigrant sex offenders.

“It’s an absolute disgrace,” she told presenter Dawn Neesom. “There is [sic] many, many examples of illegal asylum seekers who have got much lower sentences, three years for rape in some cases.

“Listen – I’m not even sure that 10 years is enough for rape, but when you hear that people have even got less than that, and the man that I just mentioned, the vile individual that is Shabir Ahmed, he got… I think he got 14 years, he served – he was raping young girls as young as 12 years old. How is he even out on the streets? It’s an absolute disgrace.”

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Ahmed did not get 14 years – he was was jailed for 22 years in 2012 after being convicted of rape and sexual abuse charges, but was released on licence in July after serving 14. He was also not an illegal asylum seeker, coming to the UK from Pakistan in 1967 at the age of 14 as a citizen of a Commonwealth nation (citizens from Commonwealth countries were subject to different entry rules than modern asylum seekers).

But both these apart, it is quite something for Reform to seek to make Brand’s conviction first and foremost a story about asylum. “Reform will always prioritise the safety of our women and children” was the headline of a social media post by the party just last week – unless they are the victims of a white, British man with right wing views, in which case there are probably no votes in it.