Most Reform members believe non-white UK citizens born abroad should be forced or encouraged to leave, poll finds
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’s party,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, who left Reform after falling out with Farage,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,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.
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’s 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.”There was considerable support among Farage’s 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 and advocates mass deportations.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 “blood and ancestry”.
“Its spread is dangerous because of the proposed solutions that follow, most notably ‘remigration’.This concept repackages older ideas of ethnic cleansing and forced repatriation in softer, more bureaucratic language,” the report states.It warned that extreme racial nationalist views of 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 byelection last week, refused to disown his claim that UK-born people from minority ethnic backgrounds were not necessarily British.
The former academic had said: “It takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’.”After the podcaster Konstantin Kisin claimed last year that Southampton-born Rishi Sunak was not English – sparking an online debate which emboldened the far right – Braverman wrote in the Telegraph that she was a proud British Asian but not English.The UK’s far right was now “bigger, bolder and more confrontational”, 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.HnH said the most important new 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 identify positively with Robinson’s movement, according to other polling for HnH by Focaldata using a nationally representative group of 8,185 people,Another rally is being planned by Robinson, who has drawn the support of the billionaire owner of X and Tesla, Elon Musk,Robinson is now in the US, where he was this week feted by rightwing figures including a political appointee at the state department in Washington and a congressman,The wave of anti-migrant 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.
“One worrying feature is that these anti-migrant protests have persisted through the winter months in key areas, with some attracting several thousand people.As we head towards the hot summer months, we will very likely see a surge in activity once again,” it said.
Europe’s next-generation fighter jet project may collapse if row continues, says warplane maker
France and Germany’s next-generation fighter jet project could soon be “dead”, one of the two companies tasked with delivering it has warned, amid a worsening corporate rift over who gets to build the aircraft.Dassault Aviation, France’s leading warplane maker, said Airbus’s defence arm – which represents Germany and Spain – needed to cooperate on the €100bn programme otherwise it would collapse.“Airbus doesn’t want to work with Dassault, full stop. I take note. I never said I didn’t want to work with Airbus or with the Germans,” said Éric Trappier, Dassault’s chief executive, via an interpreter while presenting the company’s financial results on Wednesday
Google faces lawsuit after Gemini chatbot allegedly instructed man to kill himself
Last August, Jonathan Gavalas became entirely consumed with his Google Gemini chatbot. The 36-year-old Florida resident had started casually using the artificial intelligence tool earlier that month to help with writing and shopping. Then Google introduced its Gemini Live AI assistant, which included voice-based chats that had the capability to detect people’s emotions and respond in a more human-like way.“Holy shit, this is kind of creepy,” Gavalas told the chatbot the night the feature debuted, according to court documents. “You’re way too real
X to ban users from earning revenue if they post unlabelled AI-generated war videos
Elon Musk’s X will ban users from making money on the platform if they repeatedly post unlabelled AI-generated war videos, after social media feeds were flooded with fake battle scenes from the Iran conflict.The social media platform, which has about half a billion monthly active users, will suspend people from earning revenue from posts for 90 days if they put up AI-generated videos of an armed conflict without adding a disclosure that it was made with AI. A second infraction wouldlead to a permanent ban, it said on Tuesday night, after the first days of the conflict in Iran were marked by a torrent of bogus online footage.Timelines on X, as well as Instagram and Facebook, which are run by Meta, have carried numerous faked battle scenes, including Iranian rockets pursuing and shooting down a US jet – which was viewed 70m times, according to checks by BBC Verify – and another clip that used AI to replace smoke rising from the site of a real missile strike with a fake fireball several times bigger.Users can make hundreds of dollars a month on X as part of the platform’s advertising model if they build substantial followings approaching 100,000 people, which incentivises the production of shocking viral posts
Nvidia and UK Wealth Fund invest in British autonomous driving startup Oxa
Nvidia is investing in the British autonomous driving startup Oxa, alongside backing from the UK’s National Wealth Fund, in a boost to the country’s technology sector.The Oxford-based company, which has developed software for self-driving industrial vehicles, said it had raised $103m (£77m) from investors to focus on commercial solutions for that software, as well as its physical AI and robotics technology, and to push on with its global expansion plans.The fundraising includes $50m from the National Wealth Fund, owned by the Treasury, and backing from the US tech company Nvidia’s venture capital arm, NVentures.Founded in 2014, Oxa now focuses on the automation of repetitive industrial driving tasks, such as the towing and carrying of goods in ports, airports and factories.The latest investor round also includes capital from existing shareholders the London-listed IP Group, which invests in British tech companies, the Australian superannuation (pension) fund Hostplus and BP Ventures, the UK oil company’s arm that backs innovative technologies
What was really behind Jack Dorsey laying off nearly half of Block’s staff?
Jack Dorsey cited AI as the driving force behind cutting 40% of his company’s employees, but other factors such as a weak crypto market, overstaffing and a declining stock price may also have motivated the move.Last week, the financial technology company Block announced that it would lay off 4,000 of its 10,000 workers. Dorsey, Block’s CEO, said in a letter to shareholders that advances in AI “have changed what it means to build and run a company”.“We’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better
OpenAI amends Pentagon deal as Sam Altman admits it looks ‘sloppy’
OpenAI is amending its hastily arranged deal to supply artificial intelligence to the US Department of War (DoW) after the ChatGPT owner’s chief executive admitted it looked “opportunistic and sloppy”.The contract prompted fears the San Francisco startup’s AI could be used for domestic mass surveillance but its boss, Sam Altman, said on Monday night the startup would explicitly bar its technology from being used for that purpose or being deployed by defence department intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA).OpenAI, which has more than 900 million users of ChatGPT, made the deal almost immediately after the Pentagon’s existing AI contractor, Anthropic, was dropped.Anthropic had insisted “using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values”, leading the US president, Donald Trump, to call Anthropic “leftwing nut jobs” and directing the federal government to stop using its technology.Despite denials from OpenAI that the agreement allowed for surveillance use, commentators raised the spectre of the Snowden scandal, which broke in 2013, when it emerged the NSA was engaged in mass harvesting of phone and internet communications
Labour MP says she had no reason to suspect her husband may have broken law after his arrest on suspicion of spying for China – as it happened
Ex-Nato commander defends Starmer after Trump’s ‘no Winston Churchill’ jibe
MPs say Starmer’s UK-EU reset lacks ‘direction, definition and drive’
Most Reform members believe non-white UK citizens born abroad should be forced or encouraged to leave, poll finds
Shadow of Iraq war lies over Westminster as MPs consider US-Israeli attack on Iran
‘It’s no news just when we wanted some’: bosses react to spring statement