The full story behind viral racist video and why it took hold

A mild mannered school teacher found herself the unwitting victim of a manipulated video. Why did so many swallow it without question?

Welcome to your new edition of Inside Birmingham with Jane Haynes. It’s a day and a bit later than I promised but I hope you’ll forgive me. It’s been some week. Normal Friday service will be resumed next week.

Hasn’t the weather been nice? Someone who I’m sure has been lapping up the sun is a certain shades-toting would-be MP from Birmingham, who has taken up more of my headspace than I expected these past two weeks.

Akhmed Yakoob caused a political storm when he galvanised over 69,000 people to back his tilt at the West Midlands mayoralty earlier this month. His ability to get so many people to put their X against his name, at the expense of mainstream parties, especially Labour, and to get new voters to make the effort to vote at all, speaks volumes.

But he’s made headlines the rest of this week for different reasons. Today marks the sixth day in a rollercoaster week for a school teacher from Dudley.

The 27-year-old found herself at the centre of a viral video storm this week as she became the unwitting victim of a racism claim. A mild mannered maths and PE teacher, she was thrust into the public spotlight and labelled a racist. Her name, her school, email, phone number and even her car registration were blasted across social media.

She received hundreds of hateful messages, including death threats, in the ensuing furore. The incident at its centre had occurred while she was out canvassing on polling day for a teacher colleague, Qasim Mughal, who was standing for Labour in the Netherton and Holly Hall ward in Dudley. At one door, she was caught on camera having a pleasant exchange with a resident, who told her he had voted for ‘Akhmed’.

That was Yakoob, who wasn’t even standing in the council election - he was up for the mayoralty of the West Midlands, and his name was unfamiliar to the teacher.

As she walked away, she was seen to utter a few words to a fellow canvasser, also a teacher. Qasim was out of shot but within hearing. The words that were exchanged have since been listened back an estimated 800,000 times, and subsequently scrutinised by audio experts to the millisecond.

When her fellow volunteer asked her: ‘Who did they vote for?’ as they walked on to the next house, she told him: ‘(I) couldn’t understand’. She then started to share a house number, beginning ‘Ninety…’

So how was it that this mundane exchange became widely misheard as ‘Fucking P***s. P***s’?’

The answer is multi faceted, with confirmation bias and our readiness to ‘believe our ears’ playing their parts. But captions overlying the visuals were pivotal.

Qasim Mughal, on the election trail

So far Yakoob, a self-proclaimed disruptor who aspires to sit in the House of Commons, has refused to give meaningful interviews about what unfolded.

But it’s Yakoob who wrapped his own commentary around a version of the inaccurately captioned footage, and sent it viral, via his near-200,000 followers on TikTok and thousands more on other social media channels. He labelled it with hashtags linking Labour to racism. He urged people to rethink their affiliation to the party in light of it.

It’s Yakoob who soon after posted the name and school of the teacher to the world - a move that almost certainly inspired some of the pile-on that followed. And it’s Yakoob, a criminal defence lawyer, who is now under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority as a result.

At the heart of his mayoral campaign had been an anti-establishment sentiment, but Labour was his primary target. To Yakoob and his supporters, it was the national Labour leadership that failed to speak up for Gaza’s innocents against the might of Israel’s Netanyahu Government post-October 7, or to press for global arms sales to be halted.

Closer to home, it was the local Labour leadership, now overseeing a broke city council, that has failed to lift up Muslim-majority areas, they said. Neighbourhoods are deprived and neglected, council homes unsafe, the streets dirty, transport connections poor, and that’s before the shocking child poverty. Look at the glossy city centre, they say, and then look at us. And we can’t even bury our loved ones speedily, in line with our religious beliefs, because of a coronial backlog.

In the end Yakoob took 11.9% of the vote. It was nearly enough to scupper Labour’s Richard Parker, who eventually made it to the mayoralty with a mere 1,508 votes to spare. In traditionally Labour wards like Small Heath and Alum Rock, I’m told Yakoob took more than 60% of the vote. In all, a fifth of Brummie voters gave him their backing.

A still from the video that went viral

Horror about the unfolding Gaza situation might have been the catalyst for many of those votes, but there’s more to the Yakoob campaign than that. He has now set his sights on causing another ‘political earthquake’ - by ousting Ladywood MP Shabana Mahmood, a member of the Labour frontbench. Some of his supporters are planning similar raids on the Labour vote in other parts of the city by standing against other sitting MPs, possibly as independents, possibly as representatives of Galloway’s Workers Party.

With all that in the background, this video was potentially political dynamite. The audio was a bit incoherent, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed. Add captions, and voila - here’s an activist for Labour caught out saying a vile racist slur about a Yakoob-backing Asian resident. A perfect end to a perfect week. Except, it wasn’t true.

I’ve been out to trace the video’s journey, from the house where it was filmed to the present day. What happened, and what next? Do read on.

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A phrase which originated in the 19th century is more relevant today than ever: ‘A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.’

Another historic phrase is relevant to this discussion too. “With great power comes great responsibility.” It was originally coined by Voltaire, the 18th century French author, though most of us remember it from a modern Spiderman film, uttered as a caution to young Peter Parker by his Uncle Ben.

Earlier this week I pressed the Ring video doorbell to a terraced house in a street in the Holly Hall area of Dudley. A CCTV camera was situated a couple of feet above the door, giving full coverage of the small yard, pavement and road beyond.

This was where the footage that went viral originated. The young guy who came to the door was pleasant enough but rejected my request for an interview and his details. He said he absolutely, definitely, did not want to get involved.

He confirmed however that he was aware the video shot on the house camera had gone viral. He also confirmed the police had been round and had closely examined the original footage, in its entirety.

He also confirmed that it was someone at this house (not him) who had posted the original video to a local Whatsapp group. When asked if that was because they thought something racist was said, he repeated that the family ‘did not want to get involved’. ‘That’s all I know, I wasn’t here,’ said the resident. ‘We don’t want to get involved,’ he repeated one last time.

Soon after I went to meet Qasim Mughal in a nearby community venue. We have so far spoken by phone multiple times but this is our first in person meeting. As well as being an associate principal and maths specialist at Stuart Bathurst Catholic High School, he is also now a Dudley Labour Councillor.

Over the next 20 minutes Qasim describes the impact on his friend, the school and the community of what has just unfolded. It’s important at this point to bear in mind he is a senior teacher at a school with a significant Asian and Muslim population, is of Pakistani heritage, and was present at the time.

Bank Holiday Monday was a day of celebration for Qasim, 33. He was with family and friends, enjoying a meal at home, when he took an urgent call from a teaching colleague. "She said she was getting messages about a video while we were out canvassing. I could not join the dots - nothing had happened on the day, so it didn't make sense.

"Within minutes though I found the video, it had been shared thousands and thousands of times by then, the damage had been done. I was there (just off camera) the whole time and the allegation simply did not make sense.

"Even then I thought there was no way people would fall for this. I am of Pakistani heritage, I was there, I heard everything, and it was not said. I was perhaps naive but I didn't think this would get any traction.

"But it just grew and grew and grew because of the way the video was manipulated. Someone with a strong influence on the community shared a subtitled video that reinforced the message that this was going to be a racist comment.

“All I could think was that at the centre of this was a completely innocent person who had come out to support me."