Dionne Cocozza, Brexit Party candidate for Glasgow North, has frequently shared Islamophobic posts portraying Muslims as violent, as well as disturbing conspiracy theories suggesting that Muslims could “takeover” the UK. *

Cocozza continued to share anti-Muslim content up until early November on Twitter, and has just today deleted her account.

Muslim “takeover”

Judging for her Twitter feed, Cocozza is an avid follower of far-right website Politicalite, including its conspiracy theorist writers. Just two weeks ago, on 6 November, she retweeted a post by the Politicalite writer “Angela Eagleheart”, saying “I heard a Muslim say, we get elected then slowly we takeover. Happened in Belgium, Sweden and Germany”. Cocozza has also appeared in two interviews on Politicalite, and shared or replied to 19 tweets by Eagleheart.

Much of Cocozza’s Twitter is dedicated to painting a negative picture of Muslims and immigration into the UK and Europe. She frequently posts images and articles to suggest minorities are inherently violent and a threat to the rest of the population. For example, in April she tweeted “Pakistani Muslim refugee murdered his daughter as an act of honor [sic] for having a boyfriend without his permission”, a quote from trump-train.com, a small anti-Muslim website that has now gone offline. Cocozza has also retweeted British far-right conspiracist Paul Joseph Watson about alleged Islamic extremism in France.

In October 2018 Cocozza shared a tweet suggesting that “Germany will become African and Islamic if mass migration isn’t stopped” from Voice of Europe, a large virulently Islamophobic website and Twitter account which often publishes well-known far-right activists. Cocozza has shared content from Voice of Europe at least twice.

“You can’t say anything if you’re white”

Another common far-right trope that Cocozza spreads is that white people are discriminated against in the UK, instead of ethnic minorities. On 2 October she replied to a tweet by Labour MP David Lammy about a Conservative MP Desmond Swayne, who had been photographed in blackface, saying that Lammy was “enticing hate on the whites of today that were not born when this happened. You keep the racism fuelled with [sic] your gobby big mouth & anti-white tweets” for criticising the MP.

There are several variations of the claim that white people are oppressed or victims of racism on Cocozza’s Twitter, indicating that this is a strong belief of hers. For example,when Cocozza tweeted saying “there’s mosk [sic] schools underground in UK”, she ended up in what appears as a debate with a now-deleted Twitter account. After having backtracked on her first statement, she ends her last tweet saying “You can’t say anything if your [sic] white 2019”.

Cocozza is just the latest Brexit Party candidate to be outed for spreading racism, conspiracy theories and Islamophobia, in what is becoming a worrying trend in the party. Fears of a Muslims taking over the UK and suggestions that it’s already happened in Sweden, Belgium and Germany is a far-right conspiracy theory with lack of basis in reality. Her belief and spread of these ideas, as well as racist and conspiracist far-right Twitter accounts such as Voice of Europe, has should have no place in British politics.

You can find out more about the Brexit Party – and how to beat them – by reading our factsheet here.

* Since putting up this blog we have been contacted by the Glasgow University student paper, The Glasgow Guardian, who advised us they had had already published a story on Dionne Cocozza’s social media history on 20th November. Our research was independent and we weren’t aware of the Glasgow Guardian story, but we are more than happy to acknowledge this and congratulate them on the scoop. The Glasgow Guardian’s story can be read here: https://glasgowguardian.co.uk/2019/11/20/glasgow-norths-brexit-party-candidate-has-history-of-islamophobic-tweets/