Nigel Farage has been inciting and making excuses for racist and fascist rioters. A pogrom has been unfolding across the UK involving surging racist attacks of extreme and vicious violence. Join the protest at Reform UK on Saturday 10 August at 2.30pm as part of the National Day of Protest against the far right.
As part of his fomenting of anti-Muslim hatred, Farage claimed the authorities were “hiding the truth” as social media rumours swirled that the Southport killer of three children was a Muslim – he was not a Muslim. The accused is Axel Rudakubana, a 17-year-old from Lancashire, born in Cardiff.
But out of the mouth of Nigel Farage we are told that these pogroms being instigated by fascists, where mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers have been attacked and attempts made to kill the people inside the buildings, is based on “legitimate” and “understandable” anger about immigration.
Nigel Farage deliberately amplifies far right talking points
Farage, encouraged by billionaire antisemite Elon Musk, continues to parrot and amplify antisemitic and racist conspiracy theories such as the ‘great replacement theory’ and the lies about ‘two-tier policing’.
However despite ferocious attacks on the police by the racist gangs, the response from the authorities has been weak. In reality compared to the treatment of people in the 2011 disturbances after the killing of Mark Duggan by police, the actions of the police and the government have been slow and lenient.
Special court sittings took place in 2011, with people handed down sentences of two years and more for stealing basic necessities such as bottles of water and nappies. By contrast the first sentence for a violent racist rioters in these pogroms was just two months in prison.
Even former Home Secretary Priti Patel, who did much to contribute to the racist environment created by government over the past few years, has called out Farage for trying to compare the BLM social justice protests with the pogroms of the far right.
By whipping up Islamophobia with comments about Muslims and immigrants not being part of ‘British culture’, Farage reveals his true colours. He says he has never encouraged violence but his history of supporting racist and fascist ideas suggests a darker side.
Here’s an extract from a recent Guardian story about Nigel Farage’s support of fascism in his public school days at Dulwich College:
Chloe Deakin, an English teacher at Dulwich college, wrote in 1981: “You will recall that at the recent, and lengthy, meeting about the selection of prefects, the remark by a colleague that Farage was ‘a fascist but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect’ invoked considerable reaction from members of the common room.
“Another colleague, who teaches the boy, described his publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views, and he cited a particular incident in which Farage was so offensive to a boy in his set, that he had to be removed from the lesson.”
In Michael Crick’s biography of Farage, One Party After Another, those who shared a classroom with Farage at the private school in south-east London expressed the full range of views on him.
One Jewish pupil claimed Farage would sidle up to him and say: “Hitler was right,” or “Gas ’em.” Another claimed Farage had a preoccupation with his initials, NF, as they were the same as those of the National Front.
“He was a deeply unembarrassed racist,” said David Edmonds, who was in the same class as Farage when they were about 15. Others told Crick they did not hear such comments and that they regarded him as neither malicious nor exceptional in the views he held.
In his autobiography, Fighting Bull, Farage admitted some people were alarmed by his admiration for Enoch Powell, and when confronted in 2013 by Crick he admitted saying “ridiculous things” but “not necessarily racist things”.
What was undeniable, he conceded, was that he was a “difficult bolshie teenager who pushed the boundaries of debate further than perhaps I ought to have done”.
It could be argued that Farage never really grew up.