In a YouGov poll published on 1 October 2025, 47% of UK voters considered the Reform UK party to be “generally racist”. In the same poll, 43% of UK voters believed that Reform UK voters themselves, were “generally racist”.
The poll was conducted at a time when Reform UK’s proposal to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain for millions of UK residents had just been announced by Nigel Farage. The policy would place in jeopardy the settled status of around 430,000 UK residents.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, between 87% and 90% of Reform UK voters rejected this assessment of the party and of themselves as being “generally racist”.
So how do we resolve these two contradictory viewpoints? Not by ignoring them, or by simply equating the clash with the normal differences in opinion of alternate political viewpoints. Something dark and dangerous has stepped onto the UK’s political stage and we need to try to understand how it’s attracting such a large audience.
How can someone who actively supports a party whose main political aims are to completely stop immigration, revoke the settled status rights of half a million already settled immigrants, and defund all initiatives aimed at correcting inequality, claim not to be racially motivated?
How can these same voters listen to the openly racist and Islamophobic statements of key political actors in their party of choice, while continuing to claim that they themselves do not hold any racist views?
How is this possible?
White British people, like me, have been extremely good at avoiding certain truths about our culture and history for generations. It takes a real effort to educate ourselves about our nation’s history, even though there is excellent material available, such as David Olusoga’s Black and British: A Forgotten History and Professor Keon West’s The Science of Racism.
Even if we do take the time to read about imperialism, slavery, and the racist ideologies developed to justify them, our natural response is to dismiss them as distant historic curiosities with little relevance in today’s egalitarian times.
Most white British people have limited dealings with our ethnic minority neighbours. We might work with individuals, or interact on shopping trips, or we might even have one or two ethnic minority friends, but we can’t experience today’s racism unless we are not white, or someone extremely close to us is not white. Then we might start to understand through their eyes, the daily exclusions, insults, and uneasiness in white-dominated environments.
Seeing is believing
My eyes were opened during the filming of Black and White, a BBC investigative series broadcast in 1999. I was struggling to grasp the reality of racism and, despite the many examples we captured on film, I couldn’t really ‘feel it’. Then one evening I spoke with two Black British mothers who shared their experiences. One told me of how her daughter (six years old) came back from school in tears saying that she’d been told that “my hair is too curly”.
That’s when I finally grasped, emotionally, the all-pervading experience of being a person of colour in a nation of white people who almost universally considered you to be different, perhaps not even capable of being English, but still required to conform, to pass a test that wasn’t fully defined, every moment of every day.
Now I can – to an extent – understand how people who act with prejudice can at the same time find it difficult to really feel their own racism.
However, it’s certainly there. The evidence is clear to most of us – even if only 43% of us are willing to say that Reform UK voters are “generally racist”. Far more of us can see that statements such as “it drives me mad to see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people” made by Sarah Pochin, Reform UK MP for Runcorn and Helsby, are racist.
But even being generous, I find it difficult to believe that 90% of Reform UK voters don’t admit in private moments that they dislike ethnic minority British people and see cultures considered by them to be not British as inferior or dangerous.
Racism is a learnt response, and it can be unlearnt
The British have been broadly educated and encouraged to feel superior to other peoples for generations. This national self-image has proved useful to the state, and particularly to the main financial beneficiaries of our nation’s imperial history. The ideas that still linger, that Britain civilised Africa and accelerated industrialisation in Asia to the benefit of the Indigenous peoples, have been useful in deflecting from the horrors of industrialised slavery and heartless extractive economics, leading to human tragedies such as the mass starvation of Bengal – and before that of course – Ireland.
As a young man I was drawn into the feel-good propaganda of the time, culminating in the mass hysteria around the Live Aid concert in 1985. Even then I felt an instinctual discomfort at much of the language of generous paternalism that was its currency.
Even as violent, racially motivated attacks erupted into mass rioting on the streets of Birmingham, Liverpool, and London, our leaders and commentators responded with two sides equivocation and prescribed a cultural sticking plaster of colour blindness, rather than openly acknowledging the racist environment we were unquestioningly perpetuating.
So, there should be no surprise that ‘outdated views’ on race and religion – and Britishness – while little expressed before 2016, run deep in our citizenry.
The Brexit effect
Then came Brexit: a campaign of misinformation and open lies, heavily predicated on xenophobia and Islamophobia, that took a population who only a few months earlier had almost no interest in the EU – only 1% considering it of high importance in a 2015 survey – to a national obsession for 59% of the population in 2019.
At the time of the referendum, 80% of Brexit voters considered immigration and multiculturalism to be antithetical to British interests, while only six years earlier 90% accepted that the UK was a multicultural nation, and 70% expressed themselves happy with the situation.
Sentiment for Brexit and anti-multiculturalism rose together at an unprecedented rate, driven by online misinformation and the charismatic leadership of figures like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump.
But for this incredible turnaround in attitudes to be achieved, there had to be a well of existent feelings that could be tapped into. Feelings of dissatisfaction and racial superiority; of xenophobic fear and concerns over disentitlement. Feelings that had been educated into generations of white British people, that most of us (white British) still carry with us to some extent.
These feelings only crystallised for me after four months of work in the field, capturing racism in Leeds on film and almost coming to blows with my Black co-investigator over my accusation of him behaving as a “black knight” zealot on the subject. Finally, I opened myself up enough to be able to listen to the reality of today’s racism in the seemingly unremarkable but heartrending testimony of the Black mother of a six-year-old child.
The dangers of culturally learnt racism
By voting for Brexit, the UK has lost an estimated 4%-6% of its annual potential GDP growth. It’s roughly £100bn in lost trade each year, substantially due to friction caused in the UK-EU trading relationship. That’s roughly £40bn in lost tax revenue for the Government. Money that could easily pay for the increase in defence spending that has become so critical, as Russia continues its wars and the US backs away from NATO and even threatens European territory.
Brexit – won substantially on the back of the manipulation of implicit racism – has been the greatest defeat to the UK since the Suez Crisis. Using the same manipulative tools, the political right – including the Conservatives under Kemi Badenoch – are now aiming to remove UK citizens’ human rights, claiming that only by removing the UK from the European Court of Human Rights jurisdiction, can we fully implement an effective block on immigration.
Not only would this immediately undermine the Good Friday Agreement, throwing Northern Ireland into further chaos, but it would also place the UK alongside Russia and Belarus as the only European countries to eschew pan-European human rights protections. The impacts would be cross-societal, including women’s rights, worker’s rights, children’s protections, family protections, and all equality rights. It would be the single biggest assault on our individual freedoms in British history. And yet, it’s sold as a mainstream policy.
Racism is not limited to individuals. It’s not simply about individual cases of abuse, or attacks, or exclusions from opportunities in employment. Racism is a part of British cultural identity. It’s cooked into being white and British. It’s something we have all been exposed to and if we don’t want it to dominate our political environment, as it clearly is right now, we need to up our awareness and call it out. Not just in others, but in ourselves. In the way we allow our news and politics to be framed as ‘the concerns of ordinary people’, when in fact, these are AstroTurfed manipulations of people made receptive by a culture that believes itself to be implicitly superior.
Acknowledge the problem
We can’t fight this rise in racism-fuelled politics without acknowledging the cultural racism at the heart of our nation’s self-image. By understanding the causes at their root, we can address the problem more effectively and confidently. At this point, those sympathetic to far-right parties and spokespeople will be calling me out for ‘talking Britain down’. There is irony in this, coming from parties such as Reform UK, whose whole political agenda is to claim “Britain is broken” to rile voters into blaming their neighbours for problems that have nothing to do with race, religion, or immigration.
Britain is far from broken. It’s the sixth largest economy in the world. It’s the home of many of the inventors of the modern age and remains one of the most creative and productive nations in the modern world. Our society is a successful multicultural mélange. London – with its Muslim mayor – is once again internationally adjudged to be the best city in the world in which to live. Britain is far from broken.
We need to offer positive narratives to counter the relentless negativity of the far right, and at the same time, we must call out the mechanism by which Reform UK, the Conservatives, and other parties on the increasingly far right are manipulating voters. Silence and avoidance of difficult truths by blinding ourselves to our learnt biases will not save our democracy.
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