A leading Ukip MEP made a speech to a pro-apartheid club of expat South Africans that has far-right links and calls Nelson Mandela a terrorist, it has emerged.

Stuart Agnew, who is top of one of the party’s regional lists for re-election if European elections take place in the UK in May, addressed a recent meeting of the Springbok Club, which is led by a former activist in the far-right National Front (NF) and has links to the murderer of Jo Cox.

The organisation has the apartheid-era South African flag as an emblem, and has called for the return of “civilised European rule” to the continent.

Agnew, who is one of the few Ukip MEPs elected in 2015 to have remained loyal to the current leader, Gerard Batten, told the Guardian he did not support apartheid but there was a possible argument to establish a “homeland” for white South Africans.

The Springbok Club, which also includes expats from the former Rhodesia, has a section of its website called “Terrorist Watch”, which carries articles calling Mandela a violent terrorist and a communist.

Thomas Mair, the far-right terrorist who murdered the Labour MP Cox in 2016, subscribed to a print magazine published by the club called SA Patriot, which has since been rebranded Imperial Patriot.

The club is led by Alan Harvey, a former NF activist who emigrated to South Africa in the 1970s but returned to the UK following the end of the apartheid.

A transcript of a speech by Harvey on the club’s website says its use of the apartheid-era flag as an emblem makes it plain “where our true sympathies lie”. He continues: “We want our countries back, and believe this can now only come about by the re-establishment of civilised European rule throughout the African continent.”

Harvey’s own Facebook page includes posts calling Grenfell Tower “high-rise tower block of the year 2017” and arguing that Barack Obama was not born in the US.

Agnew’s speech at a London pub on 6 April, at an event marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ian Smith, the prime minister of white-run Rhodesia, covered his period living in Rhodesia and an official European parliament trip to South Africa in which he took part.

Agnew told the Guardian he would “speak to any audience” if asked, and that the restoration of apartheid was “neither desirable or achievable”.

He said: “I was forced to leave my job as a waiter in a drive-in restaurant in 1975 for calling a black customer ‘sir’. What some white South Africans are calling for is a reverse apartheid where there is a ‘homeland’ for whites. If the present murder rate of white farmers continues, world opinion might agree.”

David Lawrence, a researcher at Hope Not Hate, which monitors far-right groups, said: “Ukip’s continued drift further and further far right is no longer a surprise but it is still shocking. The fact that an elected MEP is addressing this sort of vile organisation shows the scale of the challenge we face.”