The young right wingers turning away from Farage

The decision not to support a campaign to free Robinson is part of a campaign to detoxify Reform that includes the removal of more than 100 candidates due to their extreme views and racist comments (plus, in one case, being listed on a ballot despite being dead). 

But while the removal of the obvious extremist elements may help their public image, it is angering a very vocal section of their youth supporters that continues to grow via social media – Reform have a huge following on the TikTok platform, which says that 60% of its users are Gen Z – and lean ever further to the right. 

Often educated in private schools and raised online, these young men admire Robinson, excel at social media promotion and seem to pine for a version of England that, if it ever existed at all, did so decades before they, or even their parents, were born.

Influential to many of these young right wingers is Connor Tomlinson, 23, a devout Catholic and a regular political commentator on GB News and Talk TV. Last year he started a group called Reform Youth, begging MPs to fund an under-30s branch of the party. 

But by November, Tomlinson had changed his stance and was openly criticising both Farage and his deputy Richard Tice for moves that he saw as diluting the core values of Reform. Declaring himself now “a critical friend of the party”, he wrote “I cannot support them while they continue to soften on immigration and Islam” and said he preferred Robinson to defectors from the Conservative Party: “He is not responsible for the record net migration figures, and thousands of foreign criminals in our midst.”

Despite a scathing response from Tice, who accused Tomlinson of peddling “delusional garbage”, Tomlinson continues to tweet both praise and criticisms of the party. This includes the complaint that Farage’s refusal to “politically alienate the whole of Islam” while ruling out mass deportations was “alienating not just potential voters, but core supporters”. 

Immigration is Tomlinson’s pet issue, specifically that of non-Europeans, whose presence he sees as evidence of white British people being “replaced” – a view he has expressed in social media posts claiming that, by 2066, “white Britons will be in the minority”. 

This claim was first made in 2010 by demographer Dr David Coleman, founder of the hard right think tank Migration Watch and a member of the Eugenics Society (later renamed as the Galton Institute). In recent times, Coleman’s claim has been used by a number of white supremacist groups, keen to push the (completely meritless) idea that immigrants are “invading” and that this is part of some nefarious plan by politicians to push white Britons out of “their” country.

Tomlinson’s Reform Youth co-founder, Charlie Downes, appears to hold similar views. Another GB News regular, he is the founder of the Centre for Migration Control think tank, which was revealed last year to be a rebrand of Future for Leave – a pro-Brexit group chaired by Tice and Farage.

In a TV appearance earlier this year, Downes described why young people were increasingly drawn to the populist right. “A lot of young people are failed by the current system,” he said. “We can’t afford decent housing, we work jobs where we feel like cogs in a machine, being taxed to fund these policies that don’t seem to benefit us.”

This kind of feeling is a powerful one for Reform to tap – and converting disaffected youth into voters would be a huge boost to their electoral prospects. Lowe tried to reach out to them in a recent Facebook post, in which he wrote that “young white men” were being “told that you’re racist for feeling patriotic, far right for going to the gym, bigoted for having a joke, chauvinistic for enjoying a beer and the football. Blocked from certain jobs/courses in favour of ‘diverse’ candidates, even though you may well be best qualified.

“Anti-white racism is absolutely thriving in 2025… everything is stacked against you, and nobody will even discuss it.”

The Lowe schism and criticism from the likes of Downes and Tomlinson threaten to pull some of those young people away from Farage and Tice, who unbelievably are now seen by some as mainstream and soft on migration.

Downes has written that “remigration is a political and demographic necessity” and has called for “deporting every single illegal immigrant that currently resides in this country”. For this kind of stuff, he has received not criticism from the ‘normal’ right but a hand of welcome. Last month he spoke in a House of Lords committee room alongside Lord Daniel ‘Brain of Brexit’ Hannan at an event sponsored by the hard right Tory peer Lord Moylan.

When they are not on national television complaining that refugees and immigrants have somehow robbed them of their national identity, Tomlinson and Downes regularly appear on hard right talk shows where the conversation turns to ‘men’s rights’ and the ‘red pill culture’.

Interestingly, while Tomlinson blames feminism for the rise of Andrew Tate and has said he does not believe women should have the vote, he does not ally himself with incels. His views seem to be shaped more by the ideas of Faith, Flag and Family. The mission is one of noblesse oblige, as seen in lengthy posts written in the purplest of prose.

It reflects a tendency for some young right wingers to separate themselves from the stereotypical older Reform supporter by presenting their quite similar ideas as the intellectual choice. 

Following the footsteps of the likes of Jordan Peterson (whom Tomlinson claims to have become a “surrogate father figure” to young men denied the right to “a pathway to fulfilling that meaningful role as he of last resort looked to by a wife, children, and community”), the couching of extremism as a philosophical position may appease those wishing to build careers as political commentators but, given the online nature of Reform Youth, may have serious implications for those believing their schtick. 

Both older and more recent investigations into extremism have shown the damaging and disturbing role played by online content in the far right radicalisation of young men. Whilst the posts of Tomlinson et al use more educated language than those of the recognisable far right, the content is disturbingly similar. 

Likewise, the number of Reform supporters cheering them on and the fact that they have a regular platform on GB News and now in parliament, shows exactly how far these young men already have a boot in the door. It could be one that ends up kicking Farage – and then the rest of us.