Speaking in Dover, Nigel Farage told the audience:
"I fear that we will see a rise of a really worrying, dangerous form of extreme right ethno-nationalism. And I think we’re beginning over the last couple of weeks already to see some specimens of it. Nobody, nobody over the last quarter of a century has done more to defeat the genuine, intolerant, abhorrent, extreme, far-right than me. We did it with the British National Party and we’ll do it with whoever else follows."
While Farage doesn't name them directly, his target is clear: the thousands of former Reform voters and defectors now backing Rupert Lowe and his political party Restore Britain, a party that Reform's London Mayoral candidate Laila Cunningham absurdly labelled 'neo-nazi'. Rupert Lowe remains wildly popular among the people of Great Yarmouth who elected him as a Reform candidate. If Lowe and his supporters are the people Farage is aiming at with his 'extreme right' label, he is effectively demonising the very everyday, normal people who built his movement.
Nigel and Reform are themselves primary targets of Hope Not Hate, who have branded Farage a racist for years, yet Farage is happy to use the same rhetoric in a desperate attempt to discredit his political opponents. With so many defectors to Restore Britain coming from Reform UK, the obvious question is: if Farage believes these people are extremists, why was he ever happy to have them in his party? He knew Rupert Lowe over the course of decades and picked him out to be a candidate in a constituency that Reform were likely to win.
This is not the first time that Farage has demonised his own supporters. A great many Reform members and voters remain unhappy about the elevation of Zia Yusuf. At a Reform UK press conference in 2025, Farage condemned the “online abuse and frankly outright overt racism” that was supposedly being directed at Yusuf:
"Had it been shown towards any other member of the ethnic minorities from the Labour and Conservative parties, every one of you in the journalistic arena in this room would have been in uproar. It would have been a major national story. Because its happening to us, no one seems to really care."
The overwhelming majority of the criticism aimed at Zia Yusuf came from within the Reform party, not outside of it. Farage was chastising the media for not calling his own supporters racist.