To say the Green Party’s Magid Magid breaks the ‘average politician’ mould is an understatement.
Sporting red Doctor Martens, an ‘Immigrants Make Britain Great’ T-shirt and a bright yellow cap, the Somali refugee turns heads in Hull city centre, where we meet him campaigning to be Yorkshire’s next MEP.
“The most common question people ask is ‘what are you doing?’,” says Magid. “The next thing they usually ask is do I have a chance of winning.”
If the polls are to be believed: yes. The Extinction Rebellion protests have bounced climate change to the top of the agenda and pro-Remain voters frustrated with the big parties are looking for alternatives, with the Greens picking up some 200 new council seats at the local elections.
Magid, who is fasting for Ramadan, is in the middle of his ‘Tour de Magid’ campaign itinerary, which takes in most of Yorkshire via fracking sites, cities and food banks.
The punishing schedule – all via public transport – signals his team knows they can’t ride a Green wave to victory in Brexit-loving Yorkshire.
But Magid isn’t fond of easy wins. He wants to be “the antidote” to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and expects to get flak for it.
“He is peacocking,” says a fellow party campaigner as Magid gravitates towards a crowd of shoppers. “He wants attention. That’s the whole point.”
The 29-year-old shot to political fame as Sheffield’s youngest lord mayor. He turned an old-fashioned municipal role into something to inspire younger BAME people to get into politics. As part of his year in the role, he famously ‘banned’ Donald Trump from the city.
Though he was prepared for “resistance”, the “direct racism” he experienced left him stunned, however.
“People who say racism doesn’t exist have never experienced it,” he says. “People would throw things at the car when we were driving past.
“At times I would use that kind of thing for fuel but other times I would think ‘Jesus Christ, is this what we are up against’.”
He regularly faced racist terms like “black bastard” and “n****r” but says he was able to “just laugh it off”.
“But when it was ‘someone from your background should not be allowed to be mayor’ and ‘it should be someone who is white/British’ or ‘you don’t represent us’, when people were basically saying that I wasn’t enough or that I wasn’t equal to them purely because of my background, that bothered me,” he says.
Magid sees the UK as locked in a culture war unleashed by Brexit. So sitting out the European elections, despite “really wanting a break”, was not an option for him.
“When I saw that Nigel Farage was forming the Brexit Party, something just compelled me to act,” he says.
“I am genuinely worried and scared. We have people saying they need to ‘stop the Islamification of Europe'.”
- Magid Magid
“I wanted to help be the antidote to all this hatred and division being spouted and really just give off a different message, one of hope.”
Magid openly admits that if he wins, he will use his profile to organise Yorkshire’s pro-Remain grassroots.
“It’s weird because, if I win, I could be an MEP for five weeks, five months or five years,” he says, with Brexit far from decided.
“If I do get elected, stopping Brexit will be my main priority.”
The never-ending saga means Brexit is becoming toxic, he claims.
“Maybe they got it from the media but I swear to God, people in the street are saying to me ‘we didn’t vote to be poorer’,” he says.
He hopes more BAME and working class people will be inspired to speak out during the debate on Brexit and climate change.
“We need to have more diverse people leading the remain campaign so people see we do represent them and we are speaking for them,” he says.
“It’s the same with climate change. Climate change will disproportionately affect working class people and people from a BAME background, but we don’t hear their voices in these debates.”
While far-right parties are riding high in the polls across Europe, English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson - real name” Stephen Yaxley-Lennon - has a fighting chance of taking a seat in the North West, if turnout is low. Magid says people will live to regret being complacent about the far-right.
“It’s serious,” he says. “It’s a real thing. I am genuinely worried and scared.
“We have people saying they need to ‘stop the Islamification of Europe’ and ban the burkas and headscarves. Once they have normalised that rhetoric, what’s the next stage? It’s only going to get worse. We need to nip this in the bud.”
Echoes of the Brexit referendum are everywhere in this region. Shells of lost industry pepper the countryside, ‘Brexit means immigration controls’ graffiti is daubed on a wall on the railway route in to Hull station. The scene of MP Jo Cox’s brutal murder at the hands of a far-right terrorist is barely an hour away.
“I feel there is a battle for the soul of Britain and I refuse to believe that the authors of our future are people like Nigel Farage,” he says. “We have a better story to tell.”
Magid’s mother arrived in the northern city of Sheffield with Magid and his five siblings in 1994, when he was just five, having fled war-torn Somalia and spent six months in an Ethiopian refugee camp. His personal journey is one he has never shied away from telling.
“As mayor, I was aiming to be outspoken,” says Magid. “I knew I might piss people off. People either loved me or they hated me, but they had a passionate opinion.
“At least I was engaging people and we were having conversations that we might not otherwise have had.”
Most people are happy to stay and chat with Magid despite light rain in Hull. He is happy, warm and interested in what they have to say.
After an exchange with one couple, he tells me: “People sometimes look at my T-shirt and say ‘we have enough immigrants as it is’ and ‘there’s not enough space’ or ‘they all need to go home’.
“They tell me immigrants don’t contribute and often we get into a conversation about the NHS, so I point out a lot of doctors and nurses are immigrants.
“Statistically, immigrants are more of a net gain, so people do not have the evidence to back their claims up.
“One day I had an Austrian woman join in. She spoke really good English and pointed out that she was an immigrant, but they said ‘well, we’re not talking about you’. Then you start to wonder, are we talking about immigration here or is it something else.”
Magid says other parties “follow” the Greens on policy, citing Labour’s switch to calling a climate emergency call and the £10-an-hour minimum wage.
“A lot of these so-called radical or ‘loony left’ ideas, people are slowly starting to see make sense,” he says.
There are other Green policies, which may come under close examination at the next general election, that may be a hard sell, such as decriminalising the sex industry and assisted dying.
Yet to come under scrutiny is also the Greens foreign and defence policy agenda, which includes exiting NATO and nuclear disarmament.
Does he think the UK is ready for that kind of fundamental change?
“Not really, if I’m honest with you,” he says. “These things aren’t what people talk about day by day though. They want to talk about things that affect them.”
The Green Party offers voters a chance to pull the big parties in another direction, he says.
“I don’t say to people ‘vote for me, I’m left’,” he says. “There does seem to be this shift. The middle ground no longer exists, and why should the middle ground exist.
“You can’t be middle ground for LGBT rights or austerity, you need to be either for or against.
“I think people are sick and tired of the middle ground.
“I think people are searching for an alternative. People see the status quo, and continuing to do the same thing over and over again, as not working for them.
“People want clarity. They want someone big and bold, who does not sit on the fence.”