Zia Yusuf says Reform would protect the UK’s Christian heritage

Reform’s home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, has said his party will protect Britain’s Christian heritage whether it is voted into power at the following general election. 

He was due on Monday to deliver his first speech setting out his vision for the nation if he were to turn out to be its next home secretary. 

According to media reports, he was expected to pledge automatic listed status for all churches across the UK to guard their historic character and restrict change of use. 

The party would also introduce a recent class for churches that will prevent them from getting used as places of worship by different religions, with Yusuf telling The Times that he was acting to stop churches being converted into mosques after hearing from “anxious residents” across the UK. 

Yusuf, a Muslim, suggested that enormous numbers of immigrants arriving from “low-trust societies” had contributed to a lack of Christian values in modern Britain. 

“Regardless of whether anyone is of religion or not, or which faith they follow, I believe the Christian heritage of this country could be very vital and protecting our heritage and our culture is significant, otherwise the country is just not a rustic, it’s just an economic zone,” he told the newspaper ahead of his speech. 

“And so, as one step in pursuit of that, we are going to end the incendiary practice of converting churches into mosques or every other places of worship by granting listed status mechanically to all churches and prohibiting that.”

Many historic churches must juggle high maintenance and conservation costs, with small or dwindling congregations. The Church of England alone has 12,500 listed church buildings. While it has seen some growth in attendance over the previous couple of years, total figures remain below pre-pandemic levels. 

The National Churches Trust recently warned that as many as 2,000 churches could close by 2030, a lot of them in rural areas.

The government recently announced a recent £92 million Places of Worship Renewal Fund to interchange the prevailing Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme. Places of worship will even have the ability to use to separate multi-million pound funds covering the repairs and conservation of “at-risk” historic buildings, and geared toward preserving local heritage. It comes concurrently churches losing their VAT exemption on repairs.

Responding to Yusuf’s comments on X, Christian author and commentator Adrian Hilton said, “You must admit, Zia Yusuf is a Muslim apart, and a credit to his religion. Some British Muslims fully respect the primacy of Christianity and the importance of the Establish Church, because, because the late Queen explained, it provides a cover of non secular freedom and sustains the place of faith in public life.

“The demographic reality, nevertheless, is that Christians are diminishing in number while Muslims are increasing, and they don’t seem to be all of Zia’s enlightened disposition. No party has yet proposed a technique for a way best to administer this societal change.”