Ali Milani doesn’t believe in shirking difficult tasks. The 24-year-old Muslim candidate of the Labour Party has taken upon himself to defeat British prime ministerial-hopeful Boris Johnson, who currently represents Uxbridge and South Ruislip in the country’s Parliament.
“Boris Johnson sees us, his constituents, as a platform to becoming Prime Minister,” Milani says on his website. “I have heard on every doorstep and in every community that residents have had enough of MPs being parachuted in and our residents being used as political tools.”
Milani’s mother moved to the UK from Iran when he was five years old. “My mum dreamed of a better life and education and freedom of speech for her children and those were the principles I was brought up with,” he was quoted as saying by MyLondon.
Milani says he is the “antithesis of Boris Johnson” of the Conservative Party. He told the Guardian: “The simplicity of choice here is really stark: it’s either a 24-year-old local resident who studied here, uses the same services here, or it’s a serial liar, the charlatan – a man who’s using every one of these residents, myself included, as a platform for No 10, and our job is to stop him.”
As a teenager, Milani had made anti-Semitic comments, for which he has apologised. When asked if he is worried about those comments coming back to haunt him, Milani said that “they are a part of his story as everything else”. He also said that he wants to make sure that the kids today “don’t make the same mistakes I made as a teenager in tweeting stupid stuff”.
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