Farage's Reform appoints director of 'anti-Muslim' think tank as senior advisor

Nigel Farage's Reform UK has appointed the executive director of a think tank described as a "monstrous animal" and "racist organisation" by one of its own founders as the party's chief advisor on global affairs.

Alan Mendoza was a Conservative councillor in Westminster but announced earlier this week he had defected to Reform, the anti-immigrant party that is currently topping national polls.

The move provides a significant indicator of the direction Reform may take in the coming months - particularly on foreign policy.

Mendoza's think tank, the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), was formed in 2011 and has promoted a neoconservative approach to foreign and domestic policy. It is heavily pro-Israel and significantly influenced successive Tory governments' counter-terror policies.

HJS has argued that the government should take a hardline approach towards what it considered Islamist extremism, including the non-violent and legal varieties.

Some of the most pointed criticism of the think tank has come from former insiders.

One of its founders, Matthew Jamison, denounced it as a “monstrous animal” and a “deeply anti-Muslim racist organisation”.

Another former member, Marko Atilla Hoare, described it as having become “an abrasively right-wing forum with an anti-Muslim tinge, churning out polemical and superficial pieces by aspiring journalists and pundits”.

The journalist and polemicist Douglas Murray said in 2013 - while an associate director at HJS - that London had "become a foreign country" because white British people were a minority in most of the capital's boroughs.

In 2012, HJS's then-director William Shawcross, who went on to run the Charity Commission and lead a Tory government-commission independent review of Prevent, said that "Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future".

Support for Israel and opposition to Islamophobia definition

Mendoza and Murray both spoke in 2017 at a far-right Restoration Weekend conference in Florida organised by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which is considered an extremist organisation by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an American hate-group monitor.

Other listed speakers included Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon, Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos, who were then considered key figures in the "alt-right" American white nationalist movement.

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Mendoza this month opposed the government's plan to allow dependants of Palestinian students from Gaza into the UK, saying on TalkTV that "we don’t know what they believe. We don’t know what their tendencies are. We don’t know whether they mean us well or ill."

In October he described the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans attending a fixture in Birmingham, which local police later said was due to "hooliganism" among the fans, as "extremists in contemporary Britain dictating who is allowed to enter the no-go zones they create".

He also criticised the government for continuing "to avoid naming Radical Islam as a threat to the entire nation that needs urgent and definitive action to tackle".

And he has strongly opposed the idea of the government creating a definition of Islamophobia, warning in June that the "chilling effect across the country on pointing out wrongdoing or criticising bad behaviour will be palpable".

HJS has been strongly pro-Israel, even funding Tory MPs to attend conferences held by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), America's most influential pro-Israel lobby group.

The think tank has also long campaigned for the UK to ban Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation.

Racism allegations

Mendoza's new appointment comes as Farage himself is embroiled in a row over multiple allegations of racist behaviour during his teenage years, which Farage has strenuously denied.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer urged Farage on Wednesday to address the allegations, but the Reform leader's spokesperson said if "things like this happened a very, very long time ago, you can’t necessarily recollect what happened".

Contemporaries told the Guardian newspaper that Farage targeted ethnic minority children at Dulwich college, singing a "Gas 'em all" song about killing Jewish, black and south-east Asian peopl,e as well as burning a school roll when there were more Patels than Smiths. 

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Bafta- and Emmy-winning director Peter Ettedgui, 61, said Farage would stand beside him and growl "Hitler was right" or "Gas them". Farage has denied having been racist at school.

Last week Reform was accused of "embracing racism" after appointing former academic Matthew Goodwin as head of its new student organisation.

Goodwin has argued that being born and raised in Britain does not mean people from immigrant backgrounds are always British.

But the party stood by Goodwin.

Farage's senior advisor, appointed last month, is Cambridge academic James Orr - who was in 2023 widely accused of racism after saying "Import the Arab World, become the Arab World" about pro-Palestine protests in London.

In recent years he has been widely accused of making bigoted or racist remarks.

In 2013, Farage said that while some Muslim immigrants integrate into British society, which he supports, others are “coming here to take us over”. This stoked nationwide outrage, but Farage stuck by his position. 

In May last year, Farage came under fire after he said on Sky News: "We have a growing number of young people in this country who do not subscribe to British values, [who] in fact loathe much of what we stand for."

The interviewer asked if they were talking about Muslims, to which Farage replied: "We are."

Later challenged on those comments, he claimed that “I could take you streets in Oldham right now where no one speaks English."

Middle East Eye has contacted Reform and the HJS for comment.