The sponsor of a flagship event at Reform UK’s annual conference has accused party leader Nigel Farage of adopting “very far-right, very anti-immigrant” rhetoric, DeSmog can reveal.

The event was hosted on 6 September by the Heartland Institute – an infamous U.S. climate science denial group – and run “in collaboration” with Quews News.

Founded by psychiatrist Sohail Qureshi, Quews News claims to “broadcast [an] accurate, impartial and unbiased Pakistani narrative on sociopolitical issues”.

Qureshi has used his channel to slam Farage’s views on immigration – claiming in a YouTube video on 8 July that Farage is spreading “a very far-right, very anti-immigrant, anti-[Islam], anti-Pakistan rhetoric”.

Just a couple of weeks before Reform’s conference, Qureshi also suggested that anti-immigrant attitudes have been “weaponised” by “far-right TV channels like GB News and TalkTV, and then the emergence of the Reform party and the EDL and Tommy Robinson”.

The anti-climate broadcaster GB News is Farage’s principal employer, paying him £400,000 a year to host a show four nights a week. A GB News spokesperson said that Qureshi’s claims about the channel were “absurd”.

While Quews News was not only allowed to attend Reform’s conference in Birmingham, but also to sponsor a panel, media outlets including DeSmog and The New World were barred from entering.

Quews News appears to have struck a partnership with the Heartland Institute, despite the latter’s close ties to Farage and far-right politicians across Europe.

The Heartland Institute’s UK-EU director Lois Perry, who hosts a YouTube show on Quews News featuring Heartland branding, claimed at Reform’s conference that her institute is advising the party on its climate policies.

She said that she was “very grateful to be able to consult and influence the Reform party at the highest level.”

Perry has reiterated this claim on Quews News, stating in a video on 10 September: “Do you know why they [Reform] are abolishing net zero and why that’s their policy? Me.”

She has also used her Quews News show to interview senior Reform figures, including its head of policy Zia Yusuf.

The Heartland Institute has denied that humans are driving climate change, which it has called a “delusion”.

Reform has pledged to scrap the UK’s commitment to achieving net zero emissions by 2050, and instead campaigns to ramp up fossil fuel production and end subsidies for clean energy.

Farage attended a fundraising dinner for the Heartland Institute in September 2024 during which he called for the group to open a wing “on the other side of the pond”.

In December, Heartland announced that it had followed Farage’s advice and was setting up a UK-EU branch. Farage was a “special guest of honour” at the launch event and headlined an invite-only Heartland Institute panel in June this year entitled “Net Zero: The New Brexit?” held at 55 Tufton Street in Westminster.

Perry, who like Farage is a former UKIP leader, has said she doesn’t believe climate change is caused by humans. She has said it’s her “personal belief” that climate change “is happening” but “is not man made”.

Most senior Reform politicians, including Farage, deny basic climate science. At the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in February, the Reform leader said it was “absolutely nuts” for CO2 to be considered a pollutant. In the same month, Farage’s deputy Richard Tice told Sky News: “There’s no evidence that man-made CO2 is going to change the climate. Given that it’s gone on for millions of years, it will go on for millions of years.”

In August, Reform’s Great Lincolnshire Mayor Andrea Jenkyns said in an interview with Times Radio: “Do I believe that climate change exists? No.”

Reform received 92 percent of its donations between the 2019 and 2024 UK elections from polluting sources and climate science deniers, while its treasurer Nick Candy has claimed the party is actively raising money from oil executives.

The Heartland Institute has been heavily funded by the pro-Trump Mercer family and groups used to mask the source of political donations. It has historically received donations from big tobacco, the Koch family – a leading global sponsor of climate denial – and the oil major ExxonMobil.

Quews News, the Heartland Institute, and Reform UK were approached for comment.

Quews on Climate

Quews News has also frequently given a platform to anti-climate views.

On Perry’s show, former UKIP candidate and hereditary peer Christopher Monckton claimed that climate change was a “scam” and that Russia’s climate model was “the only one that now produces accurate predictions of global warming”.

He also attacked the Labour government’s net zero plans, calling them “totalitarian” and “communist,” labelling the State Secretary for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband “as thick as two short planks.”

It’s unclear how these views conform to Quews News’ mission statement. The platform claims to have been founded to address the “destabilising polarisation of attitudes” among voters and that it strives “to create a shared platform, a public sphere, that increases harmony, peace, and solidarity worldwide.”

On another Quews News show, dating coach Kezia Noble moderated a panel on net zero featuring Harry Wilkinson, head of policy at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s foremost climate science denial group, and regular GB News commentator Lee Harris.

Noble opened the discussion by suggesting that climate change is not caused by human activity. “There are many who say climate change is a natural cycle and that the planet has been at the mercy of these changes for many years, long before humans existed,” she said.

Wilkinson argued that the UK should extract more oil and gas – and restart fracking – which Noble called a “well thought-out plan.”

Harris said, “there’s no definite scientific answer as to whether all of the stuff [climate change] we’re seeing happen is completely man-made” after admitting earlier in the show that he was no “academic on net zero.”

In reality, scientists at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have stressed that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.

A recent report by the New Economics Foundation also found that Reform’s climate policies would cost more than 60,000 jobs and wipe £92 billion off the UK economy.

A version of this story has been published by The New World