Why is Reform suddenly worried about women’s safety?

After years of stirring up hatred against migrants, Nigel Farage has landed on a new obsession: stoking up fear around women’s safety.

At a press conference on 11 August, Reform MP Sarah Pochin suggested that migrants and refugees have a “warped view of their right to sexually assault women.” She claimed that men from “predominantly Muslim countries like Afghanistan” hold a “medieval view of women’s rights” and that “women are at risk of sexual assault and rape from these men”.

But there’s no credible evidence to back up these claims. It’s a cheap political ploy to spread fear and prejudice. And what Pochin didn’t mention is that violence against women in Britain is overwhelmingly committed by men already living here.

Instead of the threatening migrants that Reform imagines, most rapes are carried out by current or former partners, and 90% of femicide killers are known to the victim. Domestic abuse offences make up nearly 16% of all recorded crime in England and Wales. But according to Charlene Pink, campaigns manager at Good Law Project, “Reform consistently fails to put forward a serious policy on violence against women.”

“Where is the plan to fix the broken justice system and clear the backlog of rape and serious sexual offence cases?” Pink asked. “Where is the real, sustained funding for prevention and education in our schools? Let’s not mince words: when women’s rights are on the table, Reform sides against them.”

Earlier this year, Reform voted against the Employment Rights Bill, aimed at preventing workplace sexual harassment. It also promised to replace the Equality Act 2010 and scrap all equality, diversity and inclusion measures – the very protections that underpin women’s rights in law. According to the deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, Reform risks “failing a generation of young women” with their pledge to scrap the Online Safety Act – a law designed to tackle revenge porn.

Farage has been loudly attacking the cause of women’s rights for years, proclaiming that he didn’t identify as a feminist and didn’t even know “what it means” in 2018, and calling the accused rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate an “important voice for men” last year. His rhetoric is a betrayal of the women his party claims to be protecting.

Reform’s use of women’s safety as cover for racism is not just hypocritical, it’s dangerous – deliberately scapegoating migrants while ignoring the real sources of violence that threaten women every day.

• Tell Reform to stop exploiting women’s safety.