Former Tory MP Marco Longhi claimed he was putting "our people" first by refusing to help asylum seekers in his constituency
Nigel Farage used last week’s Reform conference in Leicester to announce that former MP Marco Longhi had switched allegiances, leaving the Tories to join Reform UK.
Longhi was MP for Dudley North from 2019 to 2024, when he lost his seat to Labour’s Sonia Kumar.
Explaining his decision, the former MP said the Conservative Party had become “unrecognisable” and “captured by a left-wing influence”.
Longhi is the latest former Conservative MP to switch to Reform. Dame Andrea Jenkyns, who also lost her seat in July, joined Reform back in November last year.
He stated: “The Conservative Party I once identified with – the party of Churchill and Thatcher – has transformed into something unrecognisable, captured by a left-wing influence that masquerades as conservatism at election time, while prioritising the wishes of an elite few when in power.”
Speaking at the Reform UK conference in Leicester last Friday, Longhi boasted about how from October 2023, he had banned asylum seekers from attending his constituency surgeries.
“I was the only MP to publicly refuse, and make a strong statement in the chamber about this, to support the hundreds of asylum applications coming through my office paid for by who? By all of you,” he said.
He claimed that by refusing to help asylum seekers with casework, he was putting “Dudley people first”.
“I wanted to put our people first,” he added.
In June, Longhi sent a divisive letter to British Pakistani and Kashmiri voters in Dudley, encouraging them to vote for him, over Sonia Kumar, due to her British Indian heritage.
In the letter, he asked: “Will it be me, or Labour Party Parliamentary Candidate Sonia KUMAR?”, underlining Kumar’s name.
Longhi attempted to win over Muslim voters, claiming he would be “at the forefront of standing up for Kashmiris in Parliament”.
At the time, Kumar, who is Sikh, said it was “unacceptable” to “imply that she would not stand up for all of [her] constituents because of [her] religion and heritage”.
Longhi claimed he was not stoking division with the letter and said he will “always stand up for abuses of human rights wherever they take place”.
Labour Party chair Anneliese Dodds called the letter “clearly inappropriate, divisive, dog whistle politics”.
Kumar won the Dudley North seat by a margin of 1,900 votes.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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