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Zia Yusuf has issued a warning, and people should take it seriously. “Serco employees endangering British women and girls will be prosecuted under a Reform government,” he wrote on X. His accompanying letter goes further. Serco employees are being put “on notice”. Some, he says, “deserve to be prosecuted”. Reform would create a dedicated police taskforce to investigate them.

Zia Yusuf@ZiaYusufUK

🚨 Serco employees endangering British women and girls will be prosecuted under a Reform government. This week a Serco employee was charged with the criminal offence of Misconduct in Public Office. This creates a clear precedent. Serco is placing foreign sexual predators into

6:21 PM · Aug 22, 2026 · 51.9K Views

192 Replies · 754 Reposts · 3.5K Likes

This is not normal opposition politics. Yusuf is not saying that Reform would tighten asylum rules, renegotiate contracts or change the law. He is identifying a category of people whom a future government intends to investigate and potentially prosecute. The politician has decided who should be under suspicion before the police have investigated anything.

Which raises an immediate question for Nigel Farage and Reform UK. Is this Reform policy, or is Yusuf freelancing? He does not present the threat as a personal opinion. He says these employees “will be prosecuted under a Reform government”. If this is party policy, Reform should explain when it was agreed, what offence it believes has been committed and on what basis a future government would establish a dedicated police taskforce to pursue it. If it is not party policy, why is one of Reform’s most senior figures publicly threatening private citizens with prosecution in the name of a government that does not yet exist?

There is something very Rupert Lowe about it. Lowe has made this politics of threat almost his signature: identify an enemy, announce what should happen to them, then work backwards towards whatever law or state machinery might make it possible. Yusuf’s “we put every Serco employee involved on notice” belongs to the same political grammar. It is less we will change this policy than when we have power, you will answer to us.

It is also strikingly Trumpian. Trump made political retribution part of the everyday language of power, naming enemies, promising investigations and treating prosecutors and state agencies as instruments that could be pointed at them. Yusuf is importing something similar into British politics. Name the target, promise the punishment, worry about the legal mechanism afterwards.

Britain has no shortage of its own history of state repression, so there is little point pretending this country possesses some uniquely gentle political tradition. But this is not the normal language of British parliamentary opposition. Politicians have traditionally promised to repeal legislation, change policy or investigate wrongdoing. Yusuf is publicly warning individual workers that a future government may come for them. That is a significant shift.

The legal basis is remarkably thin. Yusuf points to the recent prosecution of a Serco employee for misconduct in public office and declares that it “creates a clear precedent”. His own letter then acknowledges that the charge was discontinued. There was no conviction and no judicial ruling establishing the principle he claims. A prosecution that collapsed has somehow become the foundation for a future programme of criminal investigation.

The larger leap is worse. Yusuf takes crimes committed by individual migrants and works backwards towards the people who arranged their accommodation. If a migrant later commits rape or murder, he suggests that the employee who helped house that person may themselves have committed misconduct in public office. What did the employee know? Did they control the placement? Could they refuse it? Was the individual known to present a particular danger? Yusuf establishes none of this. The crime committed afterwards becomes the justification for investigating the administrator beforehand.

This also exposes the fraud at the centre of Reform’s small-state rhetoric. Yusuf wants a dedicated police taskforce, more investigators and the retrospective examination of decisions made by employees and contractors carrying out government policy. Lowe repeatedly reaches for the same solution. The state is apparently intolerably large when it provides housing, welfare or public services, but there can never be quite enough of it when somebody needs to be detained, deported, investigated or punished.

Yusuf ends by declaring that under Reform “nobody will be above the law”. But his argument suggests something more troubling: identify the people to be punished first, then ask the state to find a legal route to punish them.

People should not dismiss this as another overheated social-media intervention. Yusuf is showing us what he thinks political power is for. So is Lowe. It is increasingly Trump-like, increasingly punitive and increasingly comfortable with the idea that winning an election gives you the right not merely to change policy, but to settle scores with the people who implemented the policies you opposed. Reform now needs to tell us whether Yusuf is speaking for the party or simply making threats in its name. Either answer should concern us.

The Prosecution List

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