That Nigel Farage seems to have been a nasty little racist and anti-Semite in his teenage years is, despite his denials, pretty well established by now. Accusations of how he behaved towards and around fellow pupils at Dulwich College school were made, mostly anonymously, in Michael Crick’s 2022 biography of Farage, One Party After Another, and in the last few days have been repeated by several contemporaries in a major report in the Guardian.
According to these witnesses he used terms like “P**i” and “Wog”, sang songs with choruses such as “gas ’em all”, as a prefect he gave a pupil a detention for merely being Asian, and would accost non-white pupils and point to “the way out”. Some others who were at the school at the time attribute this to a boisterous contrarianism and a desire to offend; his victims however, tend to see the boy in the man. Farage wrote to the Guardian and strongly denied saying anything racist or antisemitic as a teenager.
But what are the rest of us to make of it? Should we believe that Farage still harbours deep prejudices against people of other religions and colours, or give him the benefit of the doubt? I was a student communist at the same time as Farage seems to have been a schoolboy fascist, and I remember comrades singing a really horrible song about the murder of Trotsky. Luckily for them (as for Farage) camera phones were still several decades away.
For many years immigration was not the issue for which Farage was famous. The party in which he made his name was not the National Front or its successor the British National Party, but UKIP, which had been set up almost entirely as a vehicle to argue for Britain to leave the EU. Its arguments rested almost on “restoring” national sovereignty,
Under Farage immigration became a stick with which to beat EU membership. The target was the Freedom of Movement of Labour provision, which accompanied the freedom of movement of capital – ie, the European free market. In 2014 Farage told a radio interviewer that most people would be wary if Romanians moved in next door because of the high crime rate associated with that nationality.
In the same year he complained about not hearing English spoken on a commuter train journey through the London suburbs. It made him “feel slightly awkward”, adding, “that does not mean one is anti immigration, we’re not anti immigration, we want immigration, but we do absolutely believe we should be able to judge it both on quantity and quality.”
Two years later, during the Brexit campaign Farage unveiled his Breaking Point poster showing a large queue of brown skinned men and the legend “We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.” It was pointed out that the only white person in the photograph had been obscured by text. er was condemned by Boris Johnson.
But in 2016, when the British people voted for Brexit, Farage became theoretically redundant. The great enterprise of his political life was completed. The Brexit party morphed into Reform UK and the entire emphasis shifted from Europe (which Farage hardly mentions at all, if ever, and never seems to be asked about) to migrants. And from Romanians to small boats.
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Farage insists in his party publicity that there is no place in his party for racist views. But things have shifted since 2014. Overt hostility to migrants on racial and cultural grounds is now respectable. Even a leading contender for the Conservative leadership, Robert Jenrick, once a Tory moderate, can go to Birmingham and say that his not seeing “another white face” is a sign of a failure of integration.
Leading figures in Reform such as Sarah Pochin MP and the deputy leader of Durham Council Darren Grimes, can make statements or post videos deploring Blacks and Asians in adverts or poking fun at non-white children on a boat in Scarborough harbour, and Farage will either say nothing or suggest that, though they could have worded their sentiments better, they are only saying what most people believe.
As Elizabeth I said, we don’t have windows into other people’s souls. It is impossible to know whether Nigel Farage is, in himself, a racist. He says not, and many believe him. But I do think he probably learned years ago how to say the loud part quietly.
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