More than half of Reform UK members believe foreign-born non-white British citizens should be deported or encouraged to leave, according to the first publicly available survey of members of Nigel Farage’s party.
The findings come as the Reform leader attempts to court voters at the center while facing pressure from his right flank, including a new hardline party launched by Rupert Lowe, who left Reform after falling out with Farage.
According to research published by anti-racism group Hope Not Hate (HnH), 54% of reform members thought non-white British citizens born abroad should be forcibly removed or encouraged to leave, while one in five (22%) also supported this measure for non-white citizens whose parents were born in the UK.
Survation, a respected polling company, surveyed 629 reform members between January 29 and February 16. Reform said in December it had around 270,000 paid members
The findings were described by HnH, which publishes its annual “State of Hate” report on Wednesday, as evidence of tensions in Farage’s party.
Its chief executive, Nick Lowles, said: “With a dilution of Reform policies to win over more moderate voters, or if they formed a government, you could see a number of their members becoming quite disillusioned.”
There was considerable support among Farage’s own members for two of his right-wing rivals: activist Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe. Two-thirds had a positive opinion of Lowe, who recently launched Restore Britain and advocates for mass deportations.
HnH, which has been monitoring the far right for decades, said it was sounding an alarm about the rise of a more explicitly racial nationalism, which defines English identity by “blood and ancestry”.
“Its spread is dangerous because of the solutions proposed below, particularly ‘remigration’. This concept recasts old ideas of ethnic cleansing and forced repatriation in softer, more bureaucratic language,” the report states.
He warned that extreme racial nationalist views about who is British or English were breaking into the mainstream with the backing of Reform UK and media cheerleaders.
HnH drew a link between racially charged views on identity pushed by far-right activists during a backlash to Black Lives Matter and recent interventions by Reform UK figures such as Matthew Goodwin and Suella Braverman.
Goodwin, who lost the Gorton and Denton by-election last week, refused to repudiate his claim that people born in the UK from minority ethnic backgrounds were not necessarily British.
The former academic had said: “It takes more than a piece of paper to make someone ‘British’.”
After podcast host Konstantin Kisin claimed last year that Southampton-born Rishi Sunak was not English, sparking an online debate that emboldened the far right, Braverman wrote in the Telegraph that she was a proud British Asian, but not English.
The UK far right was now “bigger, bolder and more confrontational”, according to HnH. He said Restore Britain was also creating a realignment on the far right after attracting support from activists across its spectrum, but it was still a fragile coalition.
HnH said the biggest development last year was the “unite the kingdom” rally in London led by Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley Lennon. More than 150,000 people took to the streets in the largest far-right protest in British history.
A quarter of the British population identifies positively with the Lennon movement, according to another survey for HnH carried out by Focaldata among a nationally representative group of 8,185 people.
Robinson is planning another rally, which has been supported by billionaire X and Tesla owner Elon Musk. Robinson is now in the United States, where he was feted this week by right-wing figures, including a political appointee at the State Department in Washington DC and a congressman.
The wave of anti-immigrant protests that reignited in Epping in July last year outside a hotel housing asylum seekers was also highlighted in the HnH report, which tracked 251 such demonstrations throughout 2025.
“A worrying feature is that these anti-immigrant protests have persisted through the winter months in key areas, with some attracting several thousand people. As we approach the hot summer months, it is very likely that we will see an increase in activity once again,” he said.
