The UK Home Office has granted a string of Islamic bookshops the power to sponsor Skilled Worker visas, allowing them to bring migrants into Britain even as those same stores sell texts by Muslim Brotherhood ideologues that promote antisemitism, the overthrow of secular governments through jihad, and guidance on beating wives.
An investigation has revealed that these shops have issued dozens of certificates of sponsorship. One Birmingham bookshop alone has issued up to 16 since 2021. An east London outlet has sponsored as many as 18. A Leicester-area operation and two further east London businesses, including one in Tower Hamlets, have each been linked to up to 10.
Among the titles on their shelves is Milestones by Sayyid Qutb, the influential Muslim Brotherhood thinker executed in Egypt in 1966. The book argues for the toppling of all secular governments through “physical power and jihad” and their replacement with sharia regimes.
'Would this story exist if these were Christian or Jewish bookshops?'
— GB News (@GBNEWS) July 26, 2026
Political commentator Fahima Mohamed reacts as a new investigation reveals several Islamic bookshops stocking antisemitic literature have been granted Home Office authority to sponsor skilled worker visas. pic.twitter.com/QfUSqgYfWs
Several shops also stock Qutb’s In the Shade of the Qur’an, which contends that Jewish people “try to destroy all values and all that is sacred to mankind” and possess a “wicked nature.”
Works by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna appear alongside writings by Bilal Philips, a cleric already barred from the UK by the Home Office. Philips’s The Fundamentals of Tawheed includes guidance on wife-beating and states that “un-Islamic government must be sincerely hated and despised.”
UK Prison Service inspectors flagged the latter text as extremist material in 2016 and ordered it removed from prison chaplaincies.
None of these publications are illegal under current UK law, and some are available on mainstream platforms. There is no suggestion the shops themselves have broken the law. Yet the Home Office has still handed them official sponsorship licences under the Skilled Worker route.
Reform UK MP Lee Anderson commented, “It’s a perfect illustration of 14 years of Tory failure: rather than doctors and engineers, we brought in staff for Islamic shops selling books on jihad. It is beyond belief that the Home Office did not realise this.”
He called for the immediate removal of the sponsorship powers and the revocation of all visas issued through these businesses.
The same public register of licensed sponsors that includes these bookshops also lists nearly 80 individual vape companies across Britain.
Vape shops can apply for skilled worker visas from the Home Office, the Telegraph can reveal.
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) May 30, 2026
Almost 80 different vape companies across the country are listed on the Home Office’s public register of licensed sponsors for worker and temporary worker immigration routes.
?:… pic.twitter.com/aipXM7Eody
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp called the inclusion of vape shops a “total joke,” stating: “Labour’s claims that they are only giving immigration visas to high-skilled people are clearly nonsense. Here are dozens of vape shops allowed to sponsor immigrant workers.”
“Many of these vape shops are fronts for organised crime and even those few that are legitimate certainly don’t employ high-skilled workers. These vape shops must be immediately stripped of their sponsorship status,” he added.
A corner shop in Leven, Fife is now a Home Office-licensed Skilled Worker visa sponsor.
— Robbie (@Robbie_Reasons) July 14, 2026
Nearly 250 corner stores in Kent alone hold the same licence. Takeaways, subway franchises, vape shops. All approved visa sponsors.
All approved to import skilled workers. pic.twitter.com/FZ8NAQZP2M
That detail lands with particular force after months of reporting on exactly what some of these operations have been doing on the ground.
Illegal vape shops have been caught handing free products to children as young as 11 in exchange for sexual favours. Trading standards and Channel 4 investigations exposed the practice in multiple towns.
A parallel scandal erupted involving mini-marts and convenience stores where alcohol and cigarettes were exchanged for the same exploitation of vulnerable kids.
In Glasgow the pattern turned physical when a dubious vape shop went up in flames, gutting part of the city’s historic heart and leaving residents asking how such operations ever received planning and licensing permission in the first place.
The cumulative picture of high-street decline, organised crime fronts, and institutional blindness has been documented for years.
The same system that waved through nearly 80 vape operators as “skilled” sponsors has now extended the same privilege to bookshops whose stock includes open calls for jihad and domestic violence framed as religious instruction.
A Home Office spokesman insisted that recent salary-threshold rises make approval for such businesses “incredibly unlikely,” that holding a licence does not guarantee a visa will be issued, and that more than 100 occupations have been cut from overseas recruitment while sponsor revocations rose 950 per cent in 2025 compared with 2023. The numbers already issued by the bookshops themselves tell a different story.
Britain’s immigration machinery continues to treat the importation of labour for low-skill retail outlets as a technical exercise rather than a question of national security, social cohesion, or basic common sense.
The result is another quiet expansion of the very networks that have already damaged high streets, targeted children, and imported ideologies fundamentally at odds with the country that hosts them.
The Skilled Worker route was sold as a post-Brexit tool for genuine talent. In practice it has become another back door.
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