Reform council leader accused of racism after alleged remarks about Sadiq Khan
A Reform UK council leader has been accused of racism after allegedly describing Sadiq Khan as a “narcissistic Pakistani” and saying a black British lawyer should have “F’d off back to Nigeria”.Ian Cooper, the leader of Staffordshire county council, is also said to have attacked the justice secretary, David Lammy, in a social media post that said: “No foreign national or first generation migrant should be allowed to sit in parliament.”In another post, Cooper allegedly claimed migrants were “intent on colonising the UK, destroying all that has gone before”.Nigel Farage’s party said it was undertaking an “urgent internal investigation over Councillor Cooper’s non-disclosure of social media accounts”.Two other Reform UK politicians were suspended last month over offensive messages.
Laura Anne Jones, the sole Reform UK member of the Senedd, used a racial slur in a discussion about the potential threat of China utilising TikTok for espionage.In Lancashire, the councillor Tom Pickup was suspended for calling Keir Starmer a “dicktaker” in a post to a WhatsApp group where members allegedly called for “mass Islam genocide”.Cooper, who was elected in May as Reform UK won swaths of council seats across England, was Farage’s parliamentary candidate for Tamworth in a byelection in 2023 and again in last year’s general election.He is listed as the interim chair of the party’s Tamworth branch.In one message in February, seen by the anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate and shared with the Guardian, Cooper allegedly called Khan, the London mayor, a “narcissistic Pakistani” and described London as “a 3rd world shit hole”.
In a post directed at the broadcaster Sangita Myska in April, the council leader appears to have said she was English “only in your dreams”, adding: “You are neither ethnically, culturally or historically English.Your diaspora isn’t NW European.All you have is a piece of paper entitling you to British citizenship.”Cooper also allegedly attacked the British-born lawyer and women’s right activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu.In a post three years ago, he appears to have said: “Dr Shaga Bing-Bong….
Time she F’d off back to Nigeria.She’d feel more at home there.”In another alleged post a year ago, he said it was “a lie” that diversity was Britain’s strength and claimed that migrants from the “global majority south” were “intent on colonising the UK, destroying all that has gone before”.He is also alleged to have said diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) schemes were disguising “oppression” and enabling a situation “where indigenous people are actively removed or excluded, and not allowed to complain”.Sign up to First EditionOur morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it mattersafter newsletter promotionIt emerged last month that Cooper had defended his fellow Reform UK councillor Peter Mason, who had criticised a statue of what he called a “fat arsed black woman” and described the police as “a bunch of politically indoctrinated British hating scum”.
In an email to Reform UK councillors seen by the Independent, Cooper said Mason was under “targeted political attack” by the party’s opponents.He said: “Peter’s comment regarding a statue of a black woman was a critique of public art, not a personal attack on an individual.His views on policing also reflect concerns shared by many, including recent reporting that the Metropolitan police is expanding its ‘woke’ workforce while facing a £250m funding gap and cutting thousands of frontline jobs.”Gregory Davis, a senior researcher at Hope Not Hate, said: “The picture painted by Ian Cooper’s social media posts is of a man who is deeply bigoted and tapped into far-right media and terminology.“Cooper joins a long list of Reform UK councillors who have been exposed for their extreme views.
It’s particularly shocking that someone in a leadership position has not been vetted sufficiently – or perhaps Farage and his party think this is an acceptable way to behave?”
Comedian Judi Love: ‘I’m a big girl, the boss, and you love it’
Judi Love was 17 when she was kidnapped, though she adds a couple of years on when reliving it on stage. It was only the anecdote’s second to-audience outing when I watched her recite it, peppered with punchlines, at a late-October work-in-progress gig. The bones of her new show – All About the Love, embarking on a 23-date tour next year – are very much still evolving, but this Wednesday night in Bedford is a sell out, such is the pull of Love’s telly star power.She starts by twerking her way into the spotlight, before riffing on her career as a social worker and trading “chicken and chips for champagne and ceviche”. Interspersed are opening bouts of sharp crowd work – Love at her free-wheeling best
Fran Lebowitz: ‘Hiking is the most stupid thing I could ever imagine’
I would like to ask your opinion on five things. First of all, leaf blowers.A horrible, horrible invention. I didn’t even know about them until like 20 years ago when I rented a house in the country. I was shocked! I live in New York City, we don’t have leaf problems
My cultural awakening: Thelma & Louise made me realise I was stuck in an unhappy marriage
It was 1991, I was in my early 40s, living in the south of England and trapped in a marriage that had long since curdled into something quietly suffocating. My husband had become controlling, first with money, then with almost everything else: what I wore, who I saw, what I said. It crept up so slowly that I didn’t quite realise what was happening.We had met as students in the early 1970s, both from working-class, northern families and feeling slightly out of place at a university full of public school accents. We shared politics, music and a sense of being outsiders together
The Guide #219: Don’t panic! Revisiting the millennium’s wildest cultural predictions
I love revisiting articles from around the turn of the millennium, a fascinatingly febrile period when everyone – but journalists especially – briefly lost the run of themselves. It seems strange now to think that the ticking over of a clock from 23:59 to 00:00 would prompt such big feelings, of excitement, terror, of end-of-days abandon, but it really did (I can remember feeling them myself as a teenager, especially the end-of-days-abandon bit.)Of course, some of that feeling came from the ticking over of the clock itself: the fears over the Y2K bug might seem quite silly today, but its potential ramifications – planes falling out of the sky, power grids failing, entire life savings being deleted in a stroke – would have sent anyone a bit loopy. There’s a very good podcast, Surviving Y2K, about some of the people who responded particularly drastically to the bug’s threat, including a bloke who planned to sit out the apocalypse by farming and eating hamsters.It does seem funny – and fitting – in the UK, column inches about this existential threat were equalled, perhaps even outmatched, by those about a big tarpaulin in Greenwich
From Christy to Neil Young: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead
ChristyOut now Based on the life of the American boxer Christy Martin (nickname: the Coal Miner’s Daughter), this sports drama sees Sydney Sweeney Set aside her conventionally feminine America’s sweetheart aesthetic and don the mouth guard and gloves of a professional fighter.Blue MoonOut now Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise) reteams with one of his favourite actors, Ethan Hawke, for a film about Lorenz Hart, the songwriter who – in addition to My Funny Valentine and The Lady Is a Tramp – also penned the lyrics to the eponymous lunar classic. Also starring Andrew Scott and Margaret Qualley.PillionOut now Harry Melling plays the naive sub to Alexander Skarsgård’s biker dom in this kinky romance based on the 1970s-set novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, here updated to a modern-day setting, and with some success: it bagged the screenplay prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.Laura Mulvey’s Big Screen ClassicsThroughout DecemberRecent recipient of a BFI Fellowship, the film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term “the male gaze” in a seminal 1975 essay, and thus transformed film criticism
Susan Loppert obituary
My partner Susan Loppert, who has died aged 81, was the moving force behind the development of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Arts in the 1990s. This pioneering programme, which Susan directed for 10 years (1993-2003), was a hugely innovative and imaginative project to bring the visual and performing arts into the heart of London’s newest teaching hospital.As Susan wrote in an article for the Guardian in 2006, this was not about “the odd Monet reproduction or carols at Christmas … but 2,000 original works of art hung in the vast spaces of the stunning atrial building” as well as in clinics, wards and treatment areas – many of them specially commissioned. And on top of this, full-length operas, an annual music festival, Indian dancers in residence, and workshops by artists from poets to puppeteers.Susan was born in Grahamstown, South Africa, to Phyllis (nee Orkin, and known as “Inkey” because of her dark hair), a lawyer and anti-apartheid activist, and her husband Eric Loppert, a manager
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