Nigel Farage’s ‘White Minority’ Prediction Came From the Racist Eugenics Movement

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s first Substack essay made the incendiary claim that white people will be a minority in Britain by the end of the century. A Byline Times investigation can reveal that Farage’s forecast traces back to a demographer who spent decades at the heart of Britain’s eugenics movement and who now advises a major anti-migration Tufton Street think-tank backed by a Reform UK donor.

Days after racist rioting erupted in Belfast, Farage released an essay claiming that the British state has turned against its own white population. As a result of the immigration policies of successive governments, he wrote:

White Brits will become a minority in this country before the end of the century… Make no mistake: if there is no urgent action taken to remove discriminatory and dangerous anti-White policies, we will see another Belfast.

No official body makes any such forecast. So where did Farage get his prediction from?

One potential source for the claim is Matt Goodwin, honorary president of the party’s Students4Reform campus organisation and a former Reform UK parliamentary candidate who lost the Gorton and Denton by-election.

In June 2025, the University of Buckingham’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science (CHSS), where Goodwin is a visiting professor, published Goodwin’s report projecting that white Britons would drop from 73% of the population in 2025 to 57% by 2050, become a minority by 2063, and reach 33.7% by 2100.

However, Goodwin’s numbers flatly contradict the most robust scientific projections of the UK’s ethnic future. A 2017 study by the University of Leeds projected the ethnic minority share of the population rising from 8% in 2001 to 30% by 2061 – leaving white people at around 70% of the UK population (even on a deliberately high net migration assumption). The same team’s later work in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies arrives at much the same verdict across three Brexit scenarios.

Goodwin’s claim that white people will end up as a minority in Britain revived a methodology with a specific pedigree in the work of Oxford demographer David Coleman, who heartily endorsed Goodwin’s forecast for confirming his own “long-standing detailed academic projection”.

Byline Times can reveal that Coleman, who spoke alongside Goodwin years earlier at a hard-right immigration conference, spent four decades inside Britain’s organised eugenics movement and served as a trustee of the Galton Institute, the renamed Eugenics Society.

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David Coleman and Migration Watch UK

Coleman co-founded the anti-immigration pressure group, Migration Watch UK, which is based in a building owned by a Reform donor. In 2023, Coleman and Goodwin spoke alongside each other at a conference titled ‘Immigration: Britain’s Single Biggest Issue’, hosted by the New Culture Forum.

The think-tank is based in 55 Tufton Street, which is owned by the businessman Richard Smith, a longstanding Conservative and pro-Brexit donor who donated £100,000 to the party in 2024, two days after Farage was announced as leader, through the HR Smith Group. The building also houses the pressure group Migration Watch. Smith also finances the New Culture Forum.

Long before Goodwin, Coleman was the single leading proponent of the idea that white people are destined to become a minority in Britain due to immigration.

He first set out the claim in a 2006 paper in the journal Population and Development Review, where he described a “third demographic transition”: the idea that sustained immigration into low-fertility European countries was changing their ethnic make-up.

In a 2010 set of projections he estimated that ethnic minorities would rise from 13% of the UK population in 2006 to 44% by 2056, and wrote in Prospect magazine that, on the trends he modelled, the white British population would become a minority “after about 2066.”

Coleman is an emeritus professor of demography at Oxford. Between 1985 and 1987 he was a special advisor to the Conservative Home Secretary Douglas Hurd.

Coleman’s scholarship reaches front-line politics mainly through Migration Watch, which he co-founded in 2001. He sits on its council, and the group’s published projections say their modelling is guided by his work.

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‘Crypto-Eugenics’

Coleman’s link to Britain’s eugenics movement was first reported by The Guardian back in 2007, but that story did not expose the full-scale of it. Byline Times can now reveal from an analysis of archived public records and academic publications over four decades that for most of his career, Coleman was an active participant in Britain’s organised eugenics movement.

The Eugenics Education Society was founded in 1907, later becoming known as the Eugenics Society, before it was renamed the Galton Institute in 1989 after Francis Galton – the Victorian era originator of racist eugenics. It was renamed again in December 2021 as the Adelphi Genetics Forum, at which point it fully distanced itself from what it called “coercive eugenics”.

The Eugenics Society’s own records show, however, that in 1959 and 1960 its council resolved to pursue eugenic aims “by less obvious means” – in its own phrase, “a policy of crypto-eugenics”. The idea was to move into population studies and family planning and, in 1968, replacing the Eugenics Review with the neutrally titled Journal of Biosocial Science. The demographer and historian Rebecca Sear has charted the group’s resulting entanglement with eugenics in a 2021 paper in Population Studies.

Company records seen by Byline Times confirm that Coleman was a director and trustee of the Galton Institute for two years from 1993 to 7 June 1995 – one of the people legally responsible for governing the organisation.

Beyond that, as a member Coleman was involved with the Eugenics Society in its different iterations for nearly half a century. Coleman published in the Society’s journal, the Bulletin of the Eugenics Society, from 1980. He co-edited the volume of the Society’s 22nd annual symposium, published in 1988 under the Society’s copyright, and served on the editorial board of the Journal of Biosocial Science, the journal that in 1968 had replaced the openly titled Eugenics Review.

And in October 2019 he devised and chaired the Galton Institute’s conference at the Royal Society, “New Light on Old Britons,” on the deep genetic ancestry of the British population. It was a sustained association, and Coleman has continued to defend it: when University College London removed the names of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson from its buildings in 2020, and the Society renamed itself in 2021, he publicly stood by the tradition.

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The Eugenics Society

In March 1980, the Bulletin of the Eugenics Society led with a synopsis of the Caradog Jones Lecture for 1979, delivered by Coleman at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, under the title “Statistical Studies of Marriage and the Integrity of Society.” The lecture treats “racial difference” as a fixed, inherited property of a national population and asks how many generations it will take to disappear.

Coleman set racial difference apart from all other social categories as permanent, identifying it as the core danger to Britain. “Racial attributes”, he wrote, cannot be discarded like faith or exchanged like social class; they present “the most serious opportunity for social disharmony.”

He measured Britain’s minority population against an unstated white baseline, describing almost two million people “of racial and ethnic character very different from the native inhabitants.” Cultural and racial mixing was portrayed as “overpowering noise of alien cultural elements” introduced by intermarriage, with heterogeneous societies linked to cultural “backwardness.”

Drawing on American data, he discussed the “Negro population” and the rate of intermarriage between black and white Americans. He speculated it might take 17 generations for the “distinctness” of Britain’s minority populations to dissolve.

Coleman framed this eventual dissolution of “racial difference” as fundamentally desirable, presenting intermarriage as a critical force to  weaken group boundaries and lead to “a less-divided society.”

The Eugenics Society’s acknowledgements for that year credit Coleman, by name, as one of eight people who wrote the Bulletin’s annotations and unsigned leading articles. And the same volume carrying Coleman’s contributions contain explicit support for race science.

The volume contained an article by the late Richard Lynn, a white supremacist who was a long-time director of the Pioneer Fund, a Nazi foundation set up in New York in the 1930s to promote the discredited racial pseudoscience that humanity can be divided into a hierarchy of fundamentally distinct biological races. Lynn reviewed a book by renowned expert in IQ, James Flynn, and defended the very theory Flynn attacked – that the gap in average IQ between, in Lynn’s words, “Negroes and North Europeans” is “largely attributable to genetic causes.

The volume also noted that among those elected to the Society’s membership, alongside Coleman who was a member at this time, was long-term Pioneer Fund grantee Arthur R. Jensen, who claimed that the gap in average IQ between black and white Americans is substantially genetic, and “Wilmot Robertson” — the pen name of the American white nationalist Humphrey Ireland, author of The Dispossessed Majority, a foundational text of the modern “white replacement” movement, and founder of the racialist magazine Instauration.

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The Great Replacement

By 1994 – seven years before he co-founded Migration Watch – Coleman published an article, “Ins and Outs of British (Im)migration Policy,” in The Social Contract, the notorious journal of John Tanton. Its publisher, the Social Contract Press, is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which calls the journal “racist” and describes both Tanton and its long-serving editor, Wayne Lutton, as white nationalists.

That same year, the Social Contract Press brought The Camp of the Saints back into print in English. Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel depicts the West being overwhelmed and destroyed by a fleet of non-white migrants from the developing world. Linda Chavez, a former Reagan administration official who had worked alongside Tanton, later called Raspail’s novel the most vehemently racist book she had ever read. Tanton, who had bought the publishing rights, praised Raspail as “twenty years ahead of his time.”

The novel is one of the founding texts of the far-right Great Replacement conspiracy theory – the idea that white people will be replaced by non-white, and especially Muslim, populations through mass immigration and higher birth rates. Political elites, it says, have engineered or allowed this, turning against their own people. The theory has appeared in the manifestos of the gunmen behind the white supremacist mass shootings in Pittsburgh in 2018, Christchurch and El Paso in 2019, and Buffalo in 2022.

Two issues before Coleman’s own article, in the same annual volume in the winter of 1993–94, The Social Contract had printed a translation of Raspail’s preface to his novel.

The most prominent essay in the same summer 1994 issue in which Coleman appeared was Lutton’s “Nationhood and Ethnicity,” which argued that a nation rests on a white, European “core” and set out birth rates by race.

The issue also carried praise for Tanton from Garrett Hardin, a microbiologist financed by the Pioneer Fund to argue that civilisation would collapse if non-white immigration to Western nations continued, and from Robert K. Graham, a self-funded multimillionaire who used the Pioneer Fund-backed ‘race science’ advocate William Shockley as the star donor for his selective-breeding sperm bank designed exclusively for ‘high-IQ’ elites.

Coleman’s own article contained no eugenics claims or assertions of racial hierarchy. It did, however, offer a restrictionist history of British immigration control, written for an American audience, endorsing the idea that “people from different cultures” represent a racial threat to society.

Coleman did not respond to request for comment. Neither did Reform UK.

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The Projection Revived

Matt Goodwin, who has revived Coleman’s apparent fixation on the ‘white minority’ prediction, is plugged into many of the same race-science networks linked to the Pioneer Fund.

While his 2025 projection – endorsed by Coleman – was widely covered in The Telegraph, Daily Mail and on GB News, they did not mention that he has repeatedly promoted American white nationalist Charles Murray, whose book The Bell Curve used research sponsored by the Pioneer Fund to popularise the idea that black people have lower IQ than white people for genetic and hereditary reasons. As Byline Times also previously revealed, the “mission-aligned” network of partner organisations to Goodwin’s University of Buckingham research centre, the CHSS, include Aporia – a magazine that argues IQ differences between ethnic groups are largely genetic.

Undercover investigations revealed that Aporia is the front-publication of a rebranded version of the very same Pioneer Fund. When Richard Lynn – David Coleman’s fellow contributor to the Bulletin of the Eugenics Society back in 1980 – died in 2023, his Pioneer Fund assets passed to Emil Kirkegaard, who co-founded a new company to launch Aporia.

The magazine has since set-up office and events space in Westminster at The Sanctuary, underwritten by the British crypto-billionaire Ben Delo, who donated £4 million to Reform UK earlier this year.

The idea that white people are destined to become a minority in Britain, which Farage appends to his essay, heralds from a long tradition of Anglo-American eugenics and race-science.

Farage’s use of it to claim the British state is working against white people represents an alarming step-change in Reform UK’s political agenda. The party has now shifted to openly endorsing the very white supremacist Great Replacement conspiracy theory which was weaponised by far-right groups to orchestrate targeted attacks on minorities in Belfast.