Ex-Tory councillor speaks after judge finds colleagues discriminated against him
Tories must ‘stand up to discrimination’, says Mohammed Arif, after court rules his Muslim faith was ‘weaponised’ against him by Walsall Conservatives
A former Conservative Muslim councillor has urged the party to tackle Islamophobia and “stand up to discrimination” after a judge ruled that he had been discriminated against and victimised because of his Pakistani heritage and religious beliefs by members of his local Tory association.
Mohammed Arif, who was a councillor for the St Matthew’s ward in Walsall in the West Midlands, took members of the Walsall Conservative Federation — now the Walsall and Bloxwich Association — to court over claims members of the local party had discriminated against him and blocked him from standing for re-election in 2015.
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Following an eight-day trial in Birmingham County Court in December 2025, judge James Tindal ruled on 2 April that Arif’s Muslim faith had been “weaponised” against him in a decision not to select him as a candidate for the local election.
The judge also ruled that Arif had been discriminated against or victimised in 13 different instances between 2015 and 2018, including being described by a fellow councillor as being part of a “Pakistani Islamic clique” after the federation saw a rapid increase in members who had joined — in the judge’s words — in an “unorthodox way, overwhelmingly from the local Muslim community”.
“We know that there have historically been barriers in politics to ethnic communities, not just Muslims,” Arif told Hyphen in his first interview following the judgment. “We were some of the first in Walsall to break down those barriers.”
Arif sued both the Walsall Conservative Federation and the Conservative Party in 2019. The national party settled the claim and launched an investigation into Arif’s allegations, conducted by independent barrister Aileen McColgan KC. Some of the allegations were dismissed but a 2021 report by McColgan found a number of instances of discrimination against Arif on the basis of his race or religion by the federation, including when he was expelled by the Walsall Conservative Party in 2016.
McColgan’s report had found that the party’s national headquarters “lacked the appropriate tools” to deal with “persistent discrimination” by the Walsall Conservative Federation.
Arif said: “I think it’s part of the problem that we’ve suffered in the Conservative Party, not just now, but in the past as well.”
The ex-councillor referred to the Birmingham Trojan Horse scandal — sparked by a fake letter alleging the existence of an Islamic plot to take over schools — and accusations of Islamophobia against former prime minister Boris Johnson after he said Muslim women wearing burkas “look like letter boxes”.
“That makes people who are in the Conservative Party uneasy because they feel as though they’ve been targeted for political gains,” said Arif. “If you go and knock on someone’s door and they happen to be a Muslim member of the electorate, well, they’re not going to be interested in voting for a Conservative Party that’s against their religion.”
The judgment comes come five years after the party claimed it was “committed to long-term, meaningful change and progress” following an independent investigation by professor Swaran Singh, a former equality and human rights commissioner, which found evidence of discrimination and anti-Muslim views at local association and individual level but denied any existence of institutional racism.
An update in 2023 found that progress on implementing the report’s recommendations had been “slow”.
More recently, the Conservative Party has been accused by prime minister Keir Starmer of having a “problem with Muslims” following comments by shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy, who described mass public prayer at an open iftar in Trafalgar square as an “act of dominance and division”.
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Arif believes this rhetoric is part of a wider issue within political parties in the UK. “As somebody who’s been in politics for a long time, it’s a problem across the political spectrum,” he said.
In his judgment, Tindal said: “I have unusually published this county court judgment as there is a public interest in how political parties address internal issues of race and religion — as all major parties have experienced over recent years.”
Gordon Clough, who led the Simons Muirhead Burton legal team representing Arif, said: “This vindication for my client is long overdue. Although the judgment focuses on events in the West Midlands, the bigger scandal is how Mr Arif was treated by the central Conservative Party.
“He consistently reported his unlawful treatment to the Conservative campaign headquarters, only for his complaints to be largely swept under the carpet. The judge’s findings very closely mirror those reached by an independent investigation into the same allegations in 2021, but the party failed to take proper action.”
The Conservative Party has been approached for comment.
