Asim Hamid

The multi-racial working-class coalition that took Donald Trump to the White House astonished America. That’s because they were not paying attention. Ann Coulter’s 2016 book ‘Adios America - The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole’ was based on a thesis that proved spectacularly wrong. But both left and right believed the cliché: that because America was becoming less white, the future would be more liberal on border control - the newcomers would vote left. Instead, the non-whites and immigrants moved towards Trump in numbers that took him back to the White House.

 

One pollster who saw it coming was Patrick Ruffini. There’s no paradox, he said. Immigrants buy into a vision of a country which they think is undermined by mass immigration, of a threat to what they regard as a culture they proudly conform to. My friend Lukas Degutis, a Lithuanian who has lived in London all his life, told me that many Lithuanians he knows in Dagenham are voting Reform for the same reason. They came here for opportunity; now they see a quagmire. So they vote to drain the quagmire and bring back what they always wanted: the ladder. And the chance to climb it.

 

That’s why it ought not to be too much of a surprise to see Asim in Hamilton: son of a Pakistani immigrant, a proud Farage supporter, a Union Flag tattoo on one chest and the St George’s cross on the other. 

 

“It is easy just to say the word racist. Most people who watch the news, mainstream media, jump on board. But I mean, you're looking at one today: I'm canvassing for Nigel Farage. You can't be that racist if I'm here today trying to help the campaign. And we've got... our own chairman, Zia Yusuf, you know he's a Muslim himself. I'm grateful for the country that let my father in back in the 60s, and I owe that much, if anything, to this country, and even regardless from that, I feel I'm English, born and raised in Manchester.” 

 

What did his dad think about that tattoo? “I think he was a bit surprised and a bit set back when he saw that, but my father and my mother weren't too happy, but they have to understand that this is what I'm passionate about and this is why I keep fighting for.”

 

He said he has lived for 36 years in Salford. “I've got my own business, property maintenance, and also I do corporate security, and I'm a landlord and property investor as well. So you can say I've gotten my fingers in a few different pies. I'd say the crime rate [in Salford] is still pretty high. There's no community feel anymore because mostly foreigners have moved in, and, the whites have mainly moved out, into different parts of Greater Manchester. 

 

“The whole grooming scandal, the Rotherham grooming scandal was a big eye-opener. It’s that type of crime. You see: this is what we're doing, we are importing people. The other side of the world that are bringing their way of life and their habits here, and it doesn't belong here, it doesn't belong in the western world.”

 

Asim’s father is not from the Western world, but moved here for a reason. And Asim says he is proud of his native country and (most of all) its values that are driving him to help campaign to take Nigel Farage to No.10.

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On the day the film aired a Muslim mum of seven, Laila Cunningham, defected to Reform (she had been a Tory councillor). She speaks here about why she sees no anti-Islamic aspect to Reform and how she handles accusations that Reform is racist.

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