Ukip’s new leader, Gerard Batten, has reiterated his intention to move the party towards the hard right by urging people to read the Qur’an so they can “educate” themselves about the threat posed by Islam.

Batten, who took over in February after the removal of Henry Bolton, repeated his belief that Islam is inherently antisemitic and the Labour party is deliberately tolerant of the prejudice in order to attract Muslim votes.

.@UKIP leader @GerardBattenMEP claims there are degrees of anti-semitism in the Labour party because it “depends on the Muslim vote in inner cities and the Islamic religion is inherently anti semitic”. #Peston pic.twitter.com/rBd8YvolEr — Peston on Sunday (@pestononsunday) April 29, 2018

“I draw attention to the problems that the Islamic ideology brings to our country, and I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do,” he told BBC Two’s Daily Politics.

Batten has long held such views personally, describing Islam as a “death cult”. However, his espousal of such views as Ukip leader marks a significant change for a party that has traditionally made a point of opposing far-right infiltration.

A longstanding Ukip rule barred entry to former members of the British National party or the English Defence League, a hard-right, anti-Muslim street group.

However, Batten appears to be openly courting such support. Last week, he took part in a long video interview with Tommy Robinson, the founder of the EDL, for Robinson’s YouTube channel.

Asked on Daily Politics about his opinion on Islam being necessarily antisemitic, Batten said this was the case. “Absolutely,” he said.

But he denied he was being anti-Islam, saying: “It’s anti-Islamic ideology. I have nothing against individuals, I take people as I find them. But the ideology of Islam is inherently antisemitic.”

Challenged by the Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, who was also on the show, Batten told her: “Maybe you should read the Qur’an and the Hadith and educate yourself.”

After reciting a passage from the Hadith, an Islamic holy text, which he said backed his view, Batten rejected the idea that only a tiny proportion of Islamist extremists believed this. “They are not extremists, they are literalists, who take it literally. Most Muslims don’t, thank goodness, but a lot of people do take it literally,” he said.

Batten said he was not concerned about potentially stigmatising Muslims in general, and said people should learn about the threat posed by the faith: “No. If anybody doesn’t know the truth of this, go and buy yourself a copy of the Qur’an and the Hadith and read it yourself.”

Batten took over as interim leader with a stated mission to stabilise the embattled party, which has seen three permanent leaders come and go since Nigel Farage stepped down in 2016. He has pledged to serve for a year and then hold a leadership election, in which he may stand.

His approach for Ukip will have its first test on Thursday, when the party, which won almost 4m votes in the 2015 election, contests about one-quarter of the seats in local elections.

Batten told Daily Politics he would be happy if Ukip took between 5% and 7% of the vote where it was fighting seats, and said the party’s slump in the polls was to be expected.

“There’s two reasons for that. Number one is an awful lot of people thought Ukip’s job was done after the [EU] referendum, and secondly, we spent the last two years shooting ourselves in the foot,” he said.