How Reform UK’s Leaders Embraced Far- Right Racists

Reform UK is currently attempting to fight off new allegations of systemic racism amongst its members and councillors. Yet Byline Times investigations over several years have documented how senior figures of the party have cultivated far-right extremists, promoted racist pseudoscience and argued that ancestry determines who can be “English”.

From hosting anti-black racists to courting white supremacists, from lunching with anti-semites to speaking at platforms supported by neo-Nazis, Reform UK’s leadership has for faced little to no scrutiny about the normalisation of racism at the top of the party.

The truth is that the new examples of racism and misogyny exposed by an undercover ITV News investigation are just the tip of this iceberg. The footage shows Reform councillors calling Asian families “parasites” and black children “animals”, and one discussing sexually assaulting a female candidate. Others describe concealing their views until they win power.

Reform says it has begun investigations and suspended some of those involved, but maintains that a handful of individuals who do not share its values have slipped through vetting. Reform leader Nigel Farage promised in 2024 that his “few bad apples” would be gone for good.

That explanation leaves a much larger question unanswered: why have people at the top of the party repeatedly made room for, courted and embraced the far right – including Nigel Farage himself, who in 2021 endorsed a convicted racist?

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Farage’s Far-Right Alliances

Nigel Farage’s own record, documented in this author’s book Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within, includes decades of far-right alliances.

In 1997, he was photographed with two senior British National Party figures: Mark Deavin, who blamed non-white immigration on a Jewish elite, and Tony Lecomber, convicted of explosives offences and assaulting a Jewish teacher. Farage admitted lunching with Deavin, calling it the worst mistake of his political life, and said he met Lecomber unwittingly.

Fifteen years later, Farage flew to Prague to deliver a keynote speech for Akce D.O.S.T., a group with leading Czech neo-Nazis among its supporters. The previous year, the group had backed eight neo-Nazi activists prosecuted for promoting Nazism and organising a pro-Nazi rally. Czech Jewish leaders had warned that it threatened both Jews and democracy. None of that put off Farage.

In the European Parliament, Farage co-led a group of far-right parties with Francesco Speroni of Italy’s far-right Lega Nord. After the 2011 massacre in Norway by the neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Breivik, Speroni described the killer’s ideas as “in defence” of Western civilisation. Another member, Mario Borghezio, praised some of Breivik’s ideas. Farage threatened to withdraw UKIP unless Borghezio retracted, but remained after Borghezio declared: “Long live the whites of Europe … a people who want to stay white.”

After the 2014 elections, Farage formed another group of parties in the European Parliament. This one included the Sweden Democrats, which counted Waffen-SS veteran Gustaf Ekström among its founders. Farage later recruited an MEP from Poland’s Congress of the New Right, led by Janusz Korwin-Mikke, who claimed Hitler did not know about the extermination of the Jews.

Farage’s Danish ally in the group was Morten Messerschmidt, who had been convicted of racial hatred in 2002 over a poster blaming rape on multi-ethnic society. In 2009, Messerschmidt gave an interview to “Gates of Vienna”, an extremist blog cited 86 times in Breivik’s manifesto. In another interview that year, he predicted civil war with Muslims, warning that riots would become “genuine insurgencies”.

Farage endorsed Messerschmidt for the Danish People’s Party leadership in 2021; he won the following year. 

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James Orr and Racist Pseudoscience

James Orr, Reform’s head of policy until September, stepped down after an undercover Channel 4 News investigation into foreign donations. Prior to that, his connections to race science were long documented. In 2021,  Byline Times revealed that Orr had organised an event with Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve. The book drew on research financed by the Pioneer Fund, an eugenics foundation with Nazi-era roots, to claim that Black people have inferior intelligence to white people. 

In April, Byline Times reported that Orr had accepted the late US activist Charlie Kirk’s framing of immigration as Europe replacing itself. Orr described his role as the head of National Conservatism in Europe as trying to build a “Comintern” of far-right parties in Europe, including the racist and antisemitic AfD party in Germany.

The race-science magazine Aporia, which is a rebranded front of the Nazi-aligned Pioneer fund, had thanked Orr in 2023 for “organising and inviting us” to the National Conservatism summit.

At his house in Cambridge, where Orr and his wife house graduate students in breach of the university’s safeguarding rules, one of Orr’s regular guests and residents has included US writer Rod Dreher.

In an 18 August 2025 Substack essay, Dreher wrote that “black culture is more prone to violence than white culture is”. The essay opens by praising Steve Sailer, of the The Bell Curve thesis about race and IQ, and a contributor to the white nationalist website VDARE which publishes Holocaust deniers. Dreher draws a parallel between Black Americans and Arab tribal societies, calls Black Americans the only non-white group to have proved unassimilable, and says anxiety around large groups of young Black men is logical, not racist. He approves of a growing white desire to live apart from Black people, saying he does not blame anyone for seeking somewhere safer.

Orr has interviewed Dreher on his own podcast, praised his work, and promoted his Substack with such writings.

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Alan Mendoza’s American Friends

Farage’s chief advisor on global affairs, Alan Mendoza, joined Reform from the Conservatives in November 2025. He remains executive director of the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a foreign policy think tank.

On his online show in 2017, Mendoza hosted notorious American activist David Horowitz – described as “a driving force” of the “anti-black movement” by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), the leading US civil rights law firm. He also failed to challenge Horowtiz’s claim that American Muslim student groups were “terrorist front groups”.

Months later, Mendoza and HJS colleague Douglas Murray attended Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend, where speakers included Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys group, which the Anti-Defamation League has designated a right-wing extremist group. A week earlier, Horowitz had tweeted that America’s only serious race war was “against whites”. 

In 2020, Byline Times found that HJS had raised $1.7 million from US sources through an American arm between 2016 and 2018. Its funders had also sponsored far-right extremist groups in the US.

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Matt Goodwin and the Race Science Network

Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in February’s Gorton and Denton by-election, holds a visiting professorship at a University of Buckingham centre run by his co-author Eric Kaufmann. The centre’s network includes the race science platform Aporia.

Goodwin appeared on Aporia’s podcast in 2023 and has recommended the work of race science pioneer Charles Murray at least three times. He told the Triggernometry podcast that genetics would soon make the idea of no inherent differences between groups look “utterly ridiculous”.

Goodwin also advises the Free Speech Union, a free speech campaign group chaired by Conservative peer Lord Toby Young. Lord Young co-directs the company behind the Daily Sceptic with Noah Carl, a senior editor at Aporia. Lord Young has also described The Bell Curve as a “measured discussion of the evidence”. Reform UK’s James Orr is also a Free Speech Union advisor.

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Ancestry, Englishness and Tommy Robinson’s Supporters

The argument over ancestry has now become explicit among Reform’s Conservative defectors.

Suella Braverman has argued that Englishness is rooted in ancestry and ethnicity, and that she, a British Asian, is not English. She repeated the claim on Question Time on 1 October. Former Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick later told the disgraced broadcaster Dan Wootton that “millions and millions” of British passport holders are not culturally or ethnically English. Goodwin has likewise defined Englishness through ancestry.

Asked by Wootton whether Reform would accept supporters of the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (known as ‘Tommy Robinson’) and his former bodyguard Daniel Thomas (going by ‘Danny Tommo’ – both of whom are serial convicted criminals), Jenrick said that he wanted “as broad” a coalition as possible. Tommo had organised the balaclava-clad protest that blocked roads in Dover on 5 September. He has been arrested and charged for slashing a dinghy with a rescue worker on board.

The Reform UK councillors caught on camera used crude abuse. But among the party’s senior figures, exclusion of minorities takes a more respectable form: arguments that ancestry determines belonging, platforms for racial pseudoscience and political alliances with far-right extremists.

Reform UK has blamed poor vetting for the racists in its midst. That explanation, however, leaves the systematic choices of its own leadership unexamined.