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Reform has been exploiting fears around attacks on women to stoke hate against migrants. Good Law Project investigates the flawed statistics and the group with far-right links that have helped spread its narrative.
Nigel Farage has spent the summer stoking fears around migrants and women’s safety. But the statistics Farage and other Reform UK politicians have been parroting don’t stand up to scrutiny. Campaigners tackling violence against women and girls warn that women’s safety has been “hijacked” to promote “racist, anti-migrant agendas”.
Many of the most extreme claims – cited repeatedly by Farage and Reform figures such as Zia Yusuf, Sarah Pochin and Kent County Council leader Linden Kemkaren – come from the Centre for Migration Control (CMC). This think-tank is run by Robert Bates, who volunteered for Reform in the 2024 general election, and has suggested that “foreign nationals are arrested at 3.5 times the rate of Brits for sexual offences”, “one in four sex crimes are committed by foreign nationals”, “40%-47% of sexual offence charges in London last year were foreign nationals” and that “Afghans and Eritreans are 20 times more likely to be convicted of sexual offences”.
Critics have thrown these figures into doubt, pointing out that much of the research compares recent crime statistics with data from the 2021 census, which predates a spike in immigration which brought more than a million people from outside the EU to the UK. This means that the population sizes for some nationalities is likely to be too small, sending estimates of migrant arrest and conviction rates skyrocketing.
According to Ben Brindle, a researcher at the Migration Observatory, it’s impossible to measure any differences in rates of offending by nationality, because “we don’t have any reliable statistics”.
“One option is to use the 2021 census,” Brindle said, “but the number of foreign nationals in the population has grown since then. As a result, the census will produce population figures that are too low, which will overstate conviction rates – but we don’t know by how much.”
Younger people are also much more likely to commit sexual crimes than the national average. And foreign nationals are, on average, younger than British nationals. But some of the CMC’s statistics don’t seem to take age into account. Nor does the centre take any account of socio-economic status or the potential for disproportionate policing – all of which risks inflating the estimates even further.
The CMC told Good Law Project that people “must ask themselves whether they trust senior ONS statisticians, government data, and Oxbridge academics”.
“It is grim to see activists seek to downplay the cold hard fact that a quarter of sexual assault and rape convictions last year were foreign nationals,” the centre said, “which constitutes a significant overrepresentation.”
One of the groups that has been instrumental in spreading these figures is the Women’s Safety Initiative (WSI), founded by Farage supporter Jess Gill in April. The WSI currently claims more than 500 members, saying that it wants to “expose the dangers of uncontrolled immigration” and “put women and girls first”. The group regularly appears on GB News and TalkTV. One of its spokespeople, Lucy White, is also a policy specialist at the CMC and claimed on GB News that “Islamophobia as a concept does not exist”.
The WSI describes itself as “a non-partisan organisation focused on advocating for policies that align with our mission, regardless of political affiliations”, but Good Law Project can reveal that the organisation’s founders have associated with or shown support for figures on the extreme fringes of UK politics.
In February, communications manager Saskia Teague attended a march in support of the far-right agitator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – also known as Tommy Robinson – while spokesperson Eloise Schultz, formerly a youth leader in David Kurten’s radical right Heritage Party, has posted on social media in Yaxley-Lennon’s support.
Founder Jess Gill has interviewed Yaxley-Lennon supporters for the rightwing outlet VoxPopuli Media, and interviewed the YouTuber and eugenicist researcher Edward Dutton, a fixture in far-right “race science” circles, at the 2024 Witan event held by far-right conference network Scyldings. Dutton is an employee of the Human Diversity Foundation, a successor to the eugenics promoting Pioneer Fund, an organisation established in 1937 which developed ties to Nazi Germany and disseminated its propaganda in the US.
Dutton has in turn retweeted and quote-tweeted WSI and its founder since the group’s launch, stating in one tweet that “if you oppose mass-deportation then you actively want young women like this to be sexually harassed and worse, much worse”.
Gill told Good Law Project that the WSI “represents women from all walks of life” and that while members engage with “a wide range of individuals, this should not be taken as an endorsement or alignment with their personal views”.
“We have worked with politicians across the political spectrum, not just Reform UK,” Gill said, though she did not provide any examples. “Everything that WSI advocates for is in line with the views of the majority of the public, as opinion polls show.”
The group’s “mission and values are entirely our own”, she added, and is focusing on immigration because “this is a growing problem for women’s safety and our approach is to focus on the victims”.
“Many in the mainstream media are turning a blind eye to the spate of sex attacks being committed by foreign nationals,” Gill said. “The WSI is focused on raising awareness of this message and ensuring that victims’ voices are finally heard.”
Reform has enthusiastically embraced the WSI, with Reform’s leader of Kent County Council, Linden Kemkaren, writing in an invitation to a drinks reception held on council premises that she was “proud to be partnering” with the group. Councillors from opposition parties refused to attend the event, which was described by one of them as serving “as a launch platform for a new Reform-affiliated organisation” and by the Liberal Democrat opposition leader Anthony Hook as a “political platform”.
More than 100 women’s rights groups came together last month to hit out at the “weaponisation of violence against women and girls by far-right groups and mainstream politicians to further a racist, anti-migrant agenda”. Writing to the prime minister, they explained how their work is being “hijacked by people seeking to use women and girls’ pain and trauma – and the threat of it – for political gain”.
According to the activist Patsy Stevenson, Reform must shoulder much of the blame.
“Instead of coming up with any concrete, evidence-based policies to tackle violence against women and girls,” Stevenson said, “such as sustainable funding for specialist support services, or changing the way police and courts handle assault cases, Reform chooses to ignore these critical issues.”
The party is focused on “orchestrating a moral panic centred on asylum seekers and refugees”, she added, “but it is clear the party isn’t interested in addressing real dangers for women”.
