Kanye West, the one hate preacher Nigel Farage doesn't want blocked from entering the UK

Kanye West’s ban on entering the UK and the subsequent scrapping of the Wireless Festival has caused some unlikely figures racing to back the controversial rapper with a history of antisemitic conduct.

Reform leader Nigel Farage, for example, has frequently criticised the Home Office for allowing individuals he describes as “hate preachers” or extremist clerics into the UK. As far back as 2015 he was telling Fox News how “we have been turning a blind eye to preachers of hate coming here and saying things for which most of the rest of us would be arrested”.

In 2023, when Enayet Ullah Abbasi, a preacher with a history of making inflammatory statements about Jews – including allegedly saying “Hitler did a good job on behalf of humanity” – was granted entry to the UK to give a series of speeches, Farage was apoplectic.

“Free speech has its limits,” he told viewers of his GB News show. “And those limits are the incitement of violence above all.”

So how did Farage respond when a rapper with years of public antisemitism on his CV – including praising the selfsame Hitler and selling swastika t-shirts on his website – wanted to enter the UK?

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Rats in a Sack

“If we start banning people from entering the country because we don’t like what they say, I worry where that ends up,” he told an event in Warwickshire today. “I worry where that ends up, if Keir Starmer was to ban people coming into Britain, with whose views he doesn’t like, almost everybody wouldn’t be allowed in. I think it’s a dangerous path to go down.

“I suspect the free market, choice, will sort this out.”

Farage’s GB News colleague Bev Turner, meanwhile, was apoplectic. “Just when you thought you could not hate this authoritarian government any more,” she wrote on X. “He’s just played several nights in the USA – a country whose closest ally is ISRAEL!!,” she added, in an early bid for Non-Sequitur of the Year 2026.

“I am so ashamed of our country,” she went on. “@UKLabour just broke the hearts of thousands and thousands of teenagers and guaranteed that they will never, ever vote for them.”

Won’t somebody think of the young people! Although quite how many teenagers will be weeping on missing out on seeing a 48-year-old man whose debut album was released in 2004 is unclear.