Sangita Myska ‘Targeted With Racist Slurs’ by Reform Council Leader

Nigel Farage is being accused of emboldening racist attacks against people of colour, according to journalist Sangita Myska, who was allegedly targeted with racial abuse by a Reform UK council leader.

Myska said she was told by former Staffordshire council leader Ian Cooper that she was English “only in your dreams” because of her South Asian heritage”.

The journalist claimed she was targeted earlier in 2025, just weeks before Cooper became leader of Staffordshire County Council.

Cooper, a two-time Reform UK parliamentary candidate, was forced to stand down after the party revoked his membership on Friday.

In a post sent from Cooper’s X account in April, he allegedly wrote: “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 has also been accused of calling London mayor Sadiq Khan a “narcissistic Pakistani” and of accusing migrants of being “intent on colonising the UK, destroying all that has gone before”.

He allegedly attacked British-born lawyer and women’s rights activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu in a social media post three years ago, writing:

“Dr Shaga Bing-Bong…. Time she F’d off back to Nigeria. She’d feel more at home there.”

In another post this year attacking justice secretary David Lammy, he allegedly wrote:

“No foreign national or first generation migrant should be allowed to sit in parliament.”

Cooper stood as Reform’s parliamentary candidate for Tamworth in a 2023 byelection and again in last year’s general election.

Sarah Edwards, the Labour MP for Tamworth, said the posts displayed “deeply disturbing white supremacist views”.

Myska said Nigel Farage and the wider Reform UK leadership were responsible for creating a political culture that enabled such rhetoric to flourish online.

She said: “Without a shadow of a doubt, Nigel Farage’s track record is emboldening party members and now elected councillors and potentially those that might become MPs to express views that were once considered completely unacceptable in mainstream political discourse.

“Reform UK is a private company and it’s the chief executive that will set the culture and that person is Nigel Farage.”

Farage is under increasing pressure after 28 former school contemporaries said they had witnessed deeply offensive racist or antisemitic behaviour by him at Dulwich College in south-east London.

The Reform UK leader said he had never been racist or antisemitic with “malice”.

Myska said the situation would normally trigger serious consequences for party leadership.

She continued: “In any normal political environment, the leader of the party who have these accusations levelled at them would have at the very least stood aside and an investigation launched.

“But Nigel Farage has managed to shift what we consider normal in the UK political environment and it is dangerous.”

“It’s dangerous because it’s setting a precedent.”

She said life for people of colour in public life was becoming increasingly difficult, driven by a toxic political climate.

The former LBC presenter said the position of people of colour in public life in Britain was “becoming harder by the day”, in part due to an “unbelievably toxic environment in which anything goes” that became normalised during the Brexit campaign in 2016.

She added: “It feels like a feat for many of us to remain in the realms of public discourse on social media because of the racist abuse levelled at us on a daily basis.

“The reason we have dug our heels in is because we are British. Britain is our home, it’s where we made our lives and we have no intention of going anywhere.”

Myska added that online abuse had intensified as immigration and small boat crossings dominated the political agenda. She said legitimate public concerns were being exploited as cover for racial attacks.

Reform UK has yet to publicly condemn the posts, however, a party spokesperson said:

“Following an investigation into the failure to declare social media accounts during the candidate vetting process, Cllr Ian Cooper has had his membership of Reform UK revoked.”