There will be a surge in British expats returning to the country if Reform wins the next general election, according to Zia Yusuf, the party’s ludicrously titled “shadow home secretary”, with an “outreach” programme being launched.
Yusuf said today that the programme would be launched in expat communities overseas and encourage British citizens in countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Australia and Singapore to return to the UK by pledging lower taxes and a tougher approach on law and order.
Might Yusuf have anyone specific in mind? Like, say, Isabel Oakeshott, the partner of deputy leader Richard Tice, who moved to Dubai with her children in early 2025, citing Labour’s tax on private school fees as her reason (along with discovering a place “without striking train drivers, aggressive pro-Hamas marches and endless rain”)? Or perhaps Tice himself, who splits his time not just between his Skegness constituency and the House of Commons, but also 3,500 miles away in the UAE?
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Yusuf also said his first act as home secretary would be to grant immediate and automatic listed status to churches across the UK, to stop them from being converted into mosques, making the unlikely claim that, despite not being an MP and being largely unknown among the public, he regularly received emails from “anxious residents” across the UK about such developments going through planning permission.
In doing so, he pointed to a list of “at least 40 confirmed conversions in recent years”. It is not clear where this list comes from, but the figure would suggest it has simply been taken from a Wikimedia Commons article titled “Churches converted to mosques in the United Kingdom” and which includes 41 converted churches.
And what is Yusuf’s definition of “in recent years”? Some, such as Jalalabad Mosque in Selly Oak, Birmingham, were converted from little-used churches to mosques as far back as the 1980s, around about the time Yusuf was born.
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