Farage’s 'Racist' Abuse Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone

People can and should be forgiven for the sins of their past, but it's harder to absolve them when the behaviour never stopped.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage interviewed by BBC Wales’ Gareth Lewis

Facing fresh accusations of racist abuse, Nigel Farage has offered a selection of contradictory responses. None of them, naturally, involved actually condemning racism itself.

Not for the first time, someone from Farage’s schooldays at Dulwich College has come forward to describe a venomous, sneering little menace known for hurling out racist and anti-semitic epithets. This time, his former Jewish classmate Peter Ettedgui recalls Farage growling that “Hitler was right” and imitating the hiss of a Nazi gas chamber. Some may also recall the 2013 letter in which former teachers described the young Nigel as a “racist” and “fascist” terror.

And I’ll pause here briefly to lodge a genuine caveat. I believe strongly in the idea that people can be absolved of their past sins, especially the stupid and hateful things said at thirteen. Who among us can claim their early teens as a time of great wisdom and empathy?

But Farage’s case is different for one simple reason: he’s still doing it. His entire political project is merely the scaled-up version of that racist schoolyard bullying, honing down ham-fisted slurs into dog-whistles and mass deportation policies that inflict real-world violence on people just going about their lives.

And Farage himself makes his lack of remorse abundantly clear in how he chose to address the allegations.

His initial response to BBC journalist Gareth Lewis was to remind us all of the inexorable passage of time. “It was forty-nine years ago!” he cried defensively, as though Lewis had violated some secret statute of limitations protecting him from public curiosity.

When pressed for a categorical denial, Farage moved the goal-posts. He claimed simultaneously that he had “never directly racially abused anybody,” and that “I would never do it in a hurtful or insulting way.” Make of those contradictory statements what you will.

In the wake of that waffly interview, Farage’s team produced a slightly more polished and equivocal statement. True to form, he found a way to cast himself as the victim.

“I can tell you categorically that I did not say the things that have been published in the Guardian, aged 13, nearly 50 years ago,” Farage said. “Isn’t it interesting? I’m probably the most scrutinised figure in British politics, having been in public life for thirty-two years, but it’s only now that my party is leading in the polls that these allegations have come out.”

“We know the Guardian wants to smear anybody who talks about the immigration issue, but the truth is that I have done more to defeat extremism and far-right politics than anybody else in the UK, from my time fighting the British National Party right up to today,” he said.

It’s an outright lie that this is the first time such allegations have emerged, and Farage is likely betting that the British public has a goldfish-like memory. (We don’t!) And to that point, he can only claim to have “fought” the BNP in the narrow sense that UKIP siphoned off many of their voters - repackaging that anti-migrant thuggery into the more electorally viable suit-and-tie nationalism we know today.

You can imagine someone else responding to such allegations with something like: ‘‘I have made very regrettable mistakes in my youth, and I completely disavow all of those racist ideas today.’’ Perhaps Farage was concerned that many of his voters (or donors) would consider that a bit too woke.

So no, the issue here isn’t ‘cancel culture’ or the habit of dragging up sordid things from the pasts of public figures. That can, in some cases, be a problem, because of course people can and do change.

But Farage hasn’t, and that’s why this isn’t about the distant past - it’s about today and everything in-between. We remember him posing in front of the fear-mongering “Breaking Point” poster. We remember him saying he’d be “concerned” if Romanians moved in next door. We remember the endless raving about “migrant invasions” and his documented lies about multiculturalism producing “lawlessness” in London.

And though his party tops the polls today, people are increasingly seeing his agenda for what it is: taking legitimate anger at Britain’s broken politics and economy and directing it at minority ethnic groups and refugees. Building an authoritarian detention-and-deportation machine that would make Enoch Powell cry noxious tears of joy. Indeed, Farage has achieved what Powell only dreamed of: making a hardline, anti-immigrant vision not just speakable, but a cornerstone of a potential government.

In general, I can genuinely forgive someone for saying regrettable or even obnoxious things in their childhood. But when that child grows up to become the architect of Britain’s foremost anti-migrant political project, it’s just a completely different story.

Perhaps what matters today is less those poor children he may have tormented in the 1970s, and more the millions of migrants and minorities his party now hopes to subject to detention, forced removal, and state-engineered exclusion.

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