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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.
