Hope not Hate’s State of Hate 2026 report, published earlier this week, presents itself as a sober guide to “far-Right extremism” in the United Kingdom. Yet the first page is a fundraising appeal urging readers to “Donate to Stop Reform UK”. The intent is unmistakable: this is a political statement dressed in the lab coat of serious research.

The report’s table of contents drills home this point. Reform UK appears in the same compendium as chapters titled “Race Science”, “Nazi Terrorism” and “Holocaust Denial”. Reform is not placed in the Nazi chapter, but the framing does the work. Before encountering any evidence, the reader is encouraged to perceive ordinary, democratic party competition as part of a single sliding scale of “hate”. And if the framing wasn’t overt enough, the report declares: “It’s safe to say that Reform UK represents the biggest far-Right electoral threat in our country’s history.”

The entire report is based upon a definitional sleight of hand. Hope not Hate’s expansive “working definition” casts the “far-Right” as anyone whose outlook is more “extreme” than those who are “center-Right of the mainstream”. Indeed, the report presents Nigel Farage’s party as part of the same broad “far-Right” ecosystem which also includes militant groups such as the white-supremacist Active Club movement.

Even the report’s headline statistic is misrepresentative. It claims that “over half (54%)” of Reform voters think “non-white British citizens born abroad should be forcibly removed or encouraged to leave”, compared with 24% if those citizens are white. The implication is that Reform voters are deeply racist.

But that figure comes from a Survation poll of 629 self-identified Reform members conducted in early 2026, in which respondents were asked what should happen to different categories of British citizens defined by race and birthplace. Participants were offered the following options: “Non-white British citizens born abroad should be welcome to stay; encouraged to leave (but not by force); forcibly removed; or don’t know.” Hope not Hate collapsed the non-coercive preference (“encouraged to leave”) into the same bucket as the coercive one (“forcibly removed”). The result is a headline that most readers will naturally interpret as majority support for race-based deportation.

This is not an isolated slip. In its State of Hate 2024 report, Hope not Hate built a “Pessimism Index” by combining three separate questions: whether respondents felt pessimistic (rather than optimistic) about the future, whether they described modern Britain as “declining”, and whether they believed their own lives would be “worse than their parents”. Hope not Hate then labeled the 16.3% of Britons who answered pessimistically on all three questions as the “core pessimistic” population segment and presented this as a key driver of far-Right sentiment. By this method, widespread and often perfectly rational public disillusionment is repackaged as evidence of extremist sentiment.

The report’s pitiful evidentiary threshold becomes clearer still when examining the individuals it targets as nodes in this supposed extremist ecosystem. Among them is Gad Saad, a Canadian evolutionary psychologist of Lebanese-Jewish heritage who fled the civil war as a boy. Drawing on data about grooming gangs, integration failures, and terror patterns, he argues that large-scale unassimilated migration from incompatible societies risks civilizational collapse. These are evidence-based arguments rooted in evolutionary psychology and observable reality. One may disagree with such arguments without denouncing them as far-Right. Hope not Hate would do well to engage with them, even if only to understand why Reform is polling so strongly.

Conspicuously absent are equivalent profiles of the Islamist terror threat, which accounts for the majority of MI5’s counter-terrorism caseload. The report makes no mention of the Manchester synagogue jihadist. Nor does it include Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein, who were planning to gun down hundreds of Jewish targets — also in the Manchester area — in an Isis-inspired plot police described as potentially one of the deadliest terror attacks on British soil. Mosques linked to radicalization, hate preaching and grooming gang scandals similarly receive no mention, never mind a forensic treatment, from Hope not Hate.

The State of Hate report is not a serious study. It pathologizes legitimate democratic anxieties about mass immigration and failed integration. It chills debate and misdirects counter-extremism resources. Worse, it steadily erodes trust in the very institutions it claims to defend. Genuine vigilance against extremism requires honesty, proportionality and intellectual courage. State of Hate offers none of these.