Nigel Farage Is a Racist

The media is refusing to state the most bleedingly obvious facts about a man whose entire career has been devoted to pursuing a racist political agenda

Nigel Farage is a racist. That is my honestly held opinion based on absolutely everything he has said and done since entering politics in the late nineties.

To say so should not even be a matter of controversy. In recent years the Reform leader has:

• Said he would be worried about living next door to Romanians

• Claimed that parts of Britain are “like a foreign land” due to the presence of immigrant communities

• Said he felt uncomfortable hearing foreign people speak

• Defended a candidate who used a racist slur against Chinese people

• Claimed the “Jewish lobby” has too much power in the US

• Said that British Muslims do not share British values

• Described America’s first black President as “that Obama creature”

• Spread a fabricated quote suggesting that Labour’s Scottish leader Anas Sarwar said South Asian people are “going to take over the country and take over the world”

As well as his on-the-record comments, multiple former associates of Farage have reported him making even more explicitly racist statements away from the public eye.

A letter previously published by Channel Four News by a former teacher at Farage’s school described him as a “fascist” who “publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views”.

According to the teacher Farage had “marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler Youth songs.

In his biography of Farage, the journalist Michael Crick reported that another former teacher recalled staff at his school being concerned that “Nigel had voiced views that were not simply right wing but views that were racist” with Farage later being thrown out of a class for shouting, “shut up you Jew”.

A Jewish pupil at Farage’s school claimed that Farage would come up to him and say “Hitler was right,” or “Gas ’em” while another claimed that Farage had a preoccupation with his initials, NF, due to them being shared with the National Front.

“He was a deeply unembarrassed racist,” remembered David Edmonds, who was in the same class as Farage at the age of 15.

Such behaviour appears to have continued in later life.

When Farage was leader of UKIP, the party’s founder objected to his decision to drop the party’s ban on former National Front members, to which Farage allegedly responded that “There’s no need to worry about the n***** vote. The n**-n**s will never vote for us.”

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Racist Man, Racist Politics

This racism has been reflected in his subsequent politics.

Farage has repeatedly called for racism to be legalised in the UK, while demanding that human rights protections for migrants and refugees be scrapped. In recent weeks Farage has unveiled plans for the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of migrants, including those who have happily and legally lived in the UK for decades, while removing the rights of those who are allowed to remain here from ever claiming any kind of benefits.

These are racist policies by their very definition.

Yet to listen and read the British press over recent weeks is to get the impression that not only is Farage not in any way racist, but that to dare to suggest otherwise is a major affront to decency that risks putting his very life in danger.

The real outrage, in other words, is not Farage’s racism, but the fact that anyone would dare to accurately label it as such.

This backwards thinking was in full display this week following Keir Starmer’s apparently impromptu decision to label Reform’s mass deportation plans as “racist”.

The comments led to immediate outrage, not just from Farage himself, but from multiple commentators, who immediately suggested that Starmer had put Farage at risk of a Charlie Kirk-style assassination.

Of course such fears of repercussions from political rhetoric have been entirely absent during the many decades that Farage has sought to portray immigrant communities as violent criminals and sexual predators.

Nor could they ever be detected when Farage threatened that a second Brexit referendum would lead to violence, saying that he would “pick up a rifle” if the UK failed to leave the EU.

Yet the second anyone suggests that a man whose entire political career has been devoted to attacking migrants and making discriminatory comments about non-white people, might be a a racist, all hell breaks loose.

As ever, the level of outrage led to Labour backtracking from their attack, with Starmer telling the BBC that he was in fact not personally calling Farage a racist, and the Foreign Secretary David Lammy withdrawing his attempt to highlight the Reform leader’s racist past.

Just like BBC newsreader Geeta Guru-Murthy, who was last year forced to make an on-air apology for the crime of accurately labelling Farage’s words as “inflammatory”, it appears that the only people who ever have to apologise for Farage’s long history of racism, are the people who dare to call it out.

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‘Bad Politics’

Even among the less hysterical responses to Starmer’s attack on Farage, the consensus across the British press this week has been that the Prime Minister’s comments about the Reform leader were “bad politics” and a “mistake”.

The justifications for these claims have varied. On the less extreme end, commentators have argued that Starmer’s comments have “played into Farage’s hand” by giving him the attention he craves.

Others have falsely suggested that by highlighting Farage’s racism, Starmer has, by definition, insulted all Reform voters as racist, something he explicitly and repeatedly made clear that he was not doing.

Of course we can debate the political effectiveness of Starmer’s comments, although if we do so we should probably start by acknowledging the polling showing that voters are much more likely to agree with statements suggesting Reform are racist than disagree.

Yet by focusing endlessly on the “politics” of Starmer’s statement, almost none of these commentators have stopped to ask the question as to whether his comments about Farage were actually true.

And on this measure the answer is incontrovertible. As I have set out at some length above, Nigel Farage is quite obviously somebody who holds racist views and is pursuing a racist political agenda.

This is such an obvious statement to make that I feel daft having to make it, yet it is a statement that is almost never clearly expressed in mainstream British politics and media.

Of course is not the first time that an openly racist politician has been given a free pass like this. For years I sought to highlight Boris Johnson’s long history of making explicitly racist and bigoted statements.

Yet with the exception of a handful of other journalists, this record was almost never raised in the long period between him being an obscure backbench Conservative MP and becoming the most powerful politician in the country.

This failure is now being repeated on a much bigger and more dangerous scale with Nigel Farage, who unlike Johnson, is prepared to translate his own personal racism into a racist agenda for government.

And far from telling their readers and viewers what this man actually represents, much of the British press is instead acting as his unpaid praetorian guard.