Nigel Farage subjected fellow pupils at Dulwich College to antisemitic and racist abuse. One of his teachers told others that “Farage is a fascist”. He had, said another, “marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler Youth songs.”
Farage can recite Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech from memory. After getting the elderly hatemonger’s support in a by-election he wrote:
“That meeting, with a man who had achieved so much and sacrificed so much for his principles, awoke all sorts of aspirations in me which I had not even acknowledged before. It inspired me.”
But you don’t have to go back 40 years to find him peddling racist narratives in politics. Farage stood in front of a billboard during the Brexit referendum campaign, showing a crowd of black and brown faces apparently “invading” Britain.
He has professed himself awkward when hearing people speaking foreign languages on a train. In 2017 he expressed worries about the “US Jewish lobby”, the “new world order” and described George Soros, the Jewish businessman who has become the bête noire of the antisemitic right, as “the biggest danger to the entire western world”.
Now his party is mobilising the votes of racists, in a surge that – if it persists until close enough to the election – will destabilise both the financial markets and British democracy itself.
The lesson is, when people tell you they’re racist, believe them. We have a deep tradition of racism in Britain, and all it needed was to be freed from its connection to post-Thatcher conservatism, which has successfully become multi-ethnic, if not multicultural.
Racism comes in a plebeian flavour and a patrician flavour. It is so powerful that it can make people who cannot feed their kids vote for a man who goes fox hunting and wears pink corduroy trousers; a man whose drinking buddies at the golf club would regard them as scum.
One of the keys to resisting Reform, and defeating it in the coming local and Welsh Senedd elections, is to understand the visceral power of racial hatred, and its deep roots in our national story.
We were an imperialist power. We forced China, at gunpoint, to give us sections of its coastal cities, and to submit its population to opium addiction. We enslaved and transported around three million Africans. We ruled, with the help of local princes, all of the Indian sub-continent, while genociding the indigenous people of Tasmania and suppressing the culture of New Zealand’s Maoris to the point of near eradication.
In living memory we subjected the Kenyans, Malaysians and Yemenis who resisted British rule to inhuman treatment, and then repeated the crime in Northern Ireland. Farage is popular because he is the avatar of the deep-seated evil that such actions have lodged in our collective psyche. He brings those old hatreds back into the present.
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Over the past 20 years, casual racism has become a fully theorised ethno-nationalism and white supremacy. People who, 20 years ago, might have told you they didn’t like the smell of curry or women wearing the hijab, today have a mindset structured by the theories of post-1945 fascism.
They believe that we are being “invaded” by people who want to pollute and eradicate our Anglo-Saxon DNA, even though the latest immigration figures show the number of people coming to Britain is in freefall. They believe the invasion’s collaborators are human rights lawyers, feminists and even police chiefs who enforce laws against hate speech. They can’t wait for the civil war they believe is coming, that will result in the “remigration” of black and Asian British people to countries they have never lived in.
Right wing populism has begun to think, but think like fascism. And because of the power of stochastic mobilisation – whereby people unconnected in real life can be triggered to action by networked information – you can get sudden and chaotic fascist mobilisations, like the 2024 riots and the Tommy Robinson demonstration, arising out of an inchoate and disorganised mass of people.
So we are in trouble, and Farage symbolises it. But defeating him will be surprisingly easy.
First of all, because of the numbers: in no poll has Reform topped 30% – and these were the outliers. He can’t win power that way. Second, the prospect of a viscerally Powellite government with deep links to our Russian adversary running a country with no constitution will alienate bigger sections of the financial and business elite than it will inspire.
But it means that those of us who can appreciate the danger must put the work in to build an anti-racist coalition.
It means saying to people on the left who’ve become “values voters” there is no net zero, no Scottish devolution, no pro-Palestine demonstrations in a Farage-run Britain. By all means measure your support in by-elections, council elections or devolved assemblies: but the next election will be us or them.
Farage is popular not because of his communicative skill, or because he’s been boosted by the BBC for decades. He’s popular because his lifelong racism has been unashamed. Therein lies his attraction. But therein also lies the path to his once-and-for-all defeat.
