More than half of Reform UK members believe non-white British citizens born abroad should be deported or encouraged to leave, according to the first publicly available poll of those in Nigel Farage\u2019s party.<\/p>\n
The findings come as the Reform leader attempts to court centre-ground voters while facing pressure from his right flank, including a hardline new party launched by Rupert Lowe<\/a>, who left Reform after falling out with Farage.<\/p>\n According to the research published by the 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 it for non-white citizens whose parents were born in the UK.<\/p>\n Survation, a respected polling company, surveyed 629 Reform members between 29 January and 16 February. Reform said in December that it had about 270,000 paid-up members.<\/p>\n The findings were described by HnH, which publishes its annual \u201cState of Hate\u201d report on Wednesday, as evidence of tensions in Farage\u2019s party.<\/p>\n Nick Lowles, chief executive of Hope Not Hate. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc\/Alamy<\/p>\n Its chief executive, Nick Lowles, said: \u201cWith a dilution of Reform\u2019s policies to win more moderate voters, or if they were to form a government, you could see a number of their members becoming quite disillusioned.\u201d<\/p>\n There was considerable support among Farage\u2019s own members for two of his rivals on the right: Lowe and the activist Tommy Robinson. Two-thirds had a positive view of Lowe, who recently launched Restore Britain<\/a> and advocates mass deportations.<\/p>\n HnH, which has been monitoring the far right for decades, said it was sounding an alarm on the rise of a more explicitly racial nationalism, which defines English identity by \u201cblood and ancestry\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIts spread is dangerous because of the proposed solutions that follow, most notably \u2018remigration\u2019. This concept repackages older ideas of ethnic cleansing and forced repatriation in softer, more bureaucratic language,\u201d the report states.<\/p>\n It warned that extreme racial nationalist views of who is British or English were breaking into the mainstream with the backing of Reform UK<\/a> and media cheerleaders.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Goodwin, who lost the Gorton and Denton byelection last week, refused to disown<\/a> his claim that UK-born people from minority ethnic backgrounds were not necessarily British.<\/p>\n The former academic <\/a>had said: \u201cIt takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody \u2018British\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n After the podcaster Konstantin Kisin claimed last year that Southampton-born Rishi Sunak was not English<\/a> \u2013 sparking an online debate which emboldened the far right \u2013 Braverman wrote in the Telegraph that she was a proud British Asian but not English.<\/p>\n The UK\u2019s far right was now \u201cbigger, bolder and more confrontational\u201d, according to HnH. It 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.<\/p>\n