Barking & Dagenham: Reform UK candidates – not as ‘White British’ as you might expect

According to Matt Goodwin, Reform UK’s chief intellectual – yes, some might quarrel with that description – people who meet his definition of “white Britons” will be “a minority in the country by the year 2063”. Goodwin’s view, expressed in a speech he made late last year, is that such a change would represent a “demographic crisis” and an “immigration crisis” that only a Reform national government would address. He argued that unless measures Reform proposes for curbing immigration are implemented “the social contract in our country will collapse” and “civil unrest” will ensue.

What might Goodwin make of the line-up of Reform candidates seeking election to Barking & Dagenham Council on 7 May?

Yesterday, very promptly after the 4pm deadline for nominations had passed, the Labour-run east London council published the full lists of people standing in its 19 electoral wards. Their residents will collectively elect 51 councillors. Here are the names of some of those contesting the elections for Reform:

• Ripon Sheikh hopes to represent Parsloes ward. I know nothing else about him except that neither Goodwin nor anyone else would describe him as “white British”.
• Then there’s Muhammad Hamza, who’s hoping to win in Chadwell Heath. I’ve yet to find a photo of him, but my hunch is that although, like Ripon Sheikh, he might very well be British, he isn’t white.
• Goresbrook ward is to be contested for Reform by Manjeet Nandra. Would Goodwin consider her to be “white British”?
• In Heath ward, Reform will be represented by Sunil Idiculla, whose proposer was Ben Suter, until recently a local Conservative but now chairman of Reform’s Barking & Dagenham branch. Sunil is popular Indian name. Candidate Idiculla might be as British as I am, but he is definitely not white.
• Then there’s Reform candidate Ramesh Babu Boddukola, who is standing in Whalebone ward. A man of that name is listed at Companies House as a director of two companies, each with the same address in Dagenham. His nationality is stated as being British. His name, though, suggests to me that he isn’t white. You may draw your own conclusions from the photograph used in the LinkedIn profile of a Dagenham resident of that name, which also tells us that its subject was educated at a university in Hyderabad.

So that’s five people standing for Reform in Barking & Dagenham of ethnicities Reform’s Matt Goodwin would like to see less of in the United Kingdom now and in the future because of the “civil unrest” he claims their numbers threaten.

Here are some more people on the Reform slate:

• There are three candidates whose forename is Ion. They are Ion Talambuta, Ion Ursachi (both running in Barking Riverside) and Ion Adam (Thames View). Talambuta and Uraschi are Romanian surnames. Ion is the Romanian equivalent of John.
• There are two candidates whose surname is Suciu: Mariana Suciu, who is standing in Beam ward, and Alexandru Suciu, who is standing in Longbridge. Suciu is a Romanian surname.
• So is Sanduleac, and a Marina Sanduleac is seeking election for Reform in Village ward. It seems likely that she is the same person who, last year, lost a court case against Barking & Dagenham Council after it refused to renew her lease on a café in one of its parks.
• Other Reform candidates with surnames (and also often foresnames) of Romanian or other east European origin or association are Nina Sontea (Beam ward), Alexandra Arnuatu (Parsloes), Paul Mateiu (Northbury), Olesea Pasat (Wahlebone), Vera Botnari (Gascoigne), Costel Filipescu (Eastbury). Perhaps Zinaida Birlea (Eastbury) also qualifies.

There is a significant population of Romanian Londoners in Barking & Dagenham, its presence apparent in the form of high street food shops and restaurants. Romanian is the borough’s most frequently-spoken non-English language (followed by Bengali). Many Romanians moved to Britain after Romania’s access to the European Union in 2007, including to Barking & Dagenham. I cannot confirm that the three Ions, the two Sucius and the others mentioned above are living in the borough because of that, though it seems quite likely.

Who else is running for Nigel Farage’s party in Barking & Dagenham?

• Well, there’s Tadas Karkauskas, seeking election for Gascoigne ward. Companies House records a person of that name as the director of TDS Decorating Ltd, which has a Dagenham correspondence address. Karkauskas is Lithuanian.
• There’s Mavis Oti Boakye (Valence ward), who can be seen here.
• There’s Fuad Ashraf (Chadwell Heath) whose surname I gather is often historically associated with the prophet Muhammad. A man of that name is listed at Companies House as the sole director of Dagenham-based Sparklean Cleaning Services Ltd. His nationality? Pakistani.
• There’s Biljoy Johnson (Mayesbrook), whose forename is Bengali. See a picture of him here.
• Sisir Das, another Indian, particularly Bengali, name. Another local businessman, perhaps?
• Anish Samuel (Beam). A Sanskrit name, Anish is, of course, common in India and elsewhere.

All told, close to half of Reform’s 51 Barking & Dagenham candidates are either not British, not white, not either of those things, or very possibly British nationals and white but also immigrants or their descendants. All of them would seem to be either immigrants or descendants of immigrants, whatever their ethnicity.

This is all very London and rather nice. It is also pretty funny, given that Farage, Goodwin and other leading lights of Reform are vehemently of the view that Britain is being ruined by what they call “mass immigration”. The dozen or so Reform candidates with Romanian names bring to mind remarks made by Farage in 2014, when he was the leader of the UK Independence Party.

He said there was “a problem” with Romanians in London being criminals and agreed with the proposition that British people should be wary of Romanian families moving into their streets. This caused quite a stir. Now, members of such families are on board with his latest vehicle for his political ambitions.

For the avoidance of doubt, Reform is also fielding candidates called Dave Godfrey, Billy Edmunds and Tracey Jayne Sullivan-Sparks. Also of note in their ranks is Nick Vandyke – another interesting surname, there – who has been a Conservative election candidate more than once in the past, including twice for the London Assembly. But how will Reform’s nonetheless profoundly multicultural slate be received by voters in Barking & Dagenham, where Labour is braced for a serious Reform assault on its very large and long-held majority?

You can look it it two ways. On the one hand, some who might have had reservations about Reform’s strident nationalist populism, could be reassured. On the other, there may be those among the 62.4 per cent who voted to leave the EU in 2016 who take one look at the array of foreign names on offer, conclude that Reform is full of “bloody immigrants” and stay at home. Barking & Dagenham is definitely a borough to watch.

On London has collaborated with public affairs specialists Lowick Hedry to produce a comprehensive, ward-by-ward guide to the 7 May London borough elections. It is written by On London publisher and editor Dave Hill and top-drawer elections analyst Lewis Baston. Sign up in advance for a copy here.

Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky and at LinkedIn. Photo of Reform campaigners from the party’s Barking & Dagenham Facebook page.