What if Farage's party offered you £30k to work for him? This is what happened to me

I couldn’t care less whether a client or colleague voted Leave or Remain. But I do care if they hate me because I have a Muslim name, or want to tear the hijab off my mother’s head

If more business people choose to boycott those who stand for racism and bigotry, we can create real change (Getty)

Earlier this month I was approached to help Nigel Farage's Brexit Party with their data privacy and GDPR compliance, for which I would have been paid £30,000. Although I welcome Brexiteers taking data privacy seriously after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I turned down the contract.

It is time for more conscientious objectors in the business world. Only by cutting off divisive, racist individuals from the suppliers who make their organisations function can we pressure them into either moderating their views, or disappearing into obscurity.

Activism is not a regular part of my job. As a Privacy & GDPR compliance consultant, I provide an essential service to medium and large organisations who are handling a lot of personal data about the public. Most of the time I’m like any other service provider, giving my expertise to companies across a plethora of sectors without too much concern about their values.

Data privacy is something that every organisation needs to think about – especially when there are so many laws about what you can and can’t do with data. After the scandals surrounding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, this is even more important – particularly to right wing campaign groups and political parties.

When I was approached by The Brexit Party recently to help them secure and mine their data for mass marketing, part of me was pleased that they were, unlike the Leave.EU campaign, taking data privacy seriously.

But once I considered that I was dealing with Nigel Farage’s party, I realised that I could essentially be making the latest incarnation of Cambridge Analytica's work data-compliant and untouchable to regulators. I knew I couldn’t take their tainted money. And tainted money is exactly what it is, with hate crimes in the UK at an all-time high.

If this makes me sound like a fanatical Remainer, that is only because Farage and his friends have succeeded in making their racist and Islamophobic values synonymous with the movement for Britain to leave the EU.

I am not a party political person, and couldn’t care less whether a client or colleague voted Leave or Remain. But I do care if they hate me because I have a Muslim name, or want to tear the hijab off my mother’s head.

I am all for a rich and varied political discourse, including views with which I disagree. But Farage claiming that 80 million Turks are imminently moving to London, or him describing the continent as being at “breaking point” because it has received a tiny slice of the world’s 71 million displaced people, is not normal political discourse.

And the Brexit Party’s problem is bigger than just Farage: the party’s former leader, Catherine Blaiklock, resigned after it emerged that she tweeted Neo-Nazi material “dozens of times”.

I don’t believe that all of the 17.4 million people who voted for Britain to leave Europe hold those beliefs. But they weren’t asking me to help them – Farage’s party was.

I don’t believe there is any conflict between business and ethics. I care about making a profit and growing my firm, and I also care about having a clear conscience and being able to sleep at night.

The best businesses have clear values and principles that ground them and allow them to grow. I’d invite my fellow entrepreneurs to think about what they want their businesses to stand for, and take responsibility for living up to that.

Any organisation, whatever it does, can only operate with the co-operation of a plethora of suppliers – from caterers, to cleaners, to data compliance experts. If more business people choose to boycott those who stand for racism and bigotry, we can create real change that cannot be achieved through retweets and hashtags.

It was a business boycott that led to the collapse of one of the most longstanding racist systems of the 20th century: apartheid South Africa. Britain might not have a Mandela, but it does have business owners with a conscience, who are willing to stand by their principles – even if it costs them £30,000.

Jamal Ahmed is the founder of Kazient Privacy Experts