11.12.2025
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Return of gutter racism
Nigel Farage will no doubt survive accusations of boyhood racism. This highlights the drift of politics to the right, argues Paul Demarty - and the total failure of liberal anti-racism
UK politics has been oddly dominated by the news that Nigel Farage might be a bit of a racist - or at least, might have been, in his days of boarding at Dulwich College. It is also rumoured that the pope is a Catholic; and in northern Ontario a woodsman swears he saw a bear relieving itself, while out on a walk. It truly is a crazy time to be alive.
We cannot know for certain the truth of allegations against him from dozens of Old Alleynians, but for a major leader of the far right in this country - indeed even of the far Tory right - to have never used a slur would be an honest-to-god, man-bites-dog surprise! Add in the frankly bestial culture of such schools - certainly in Farage’s day - and there can be no real doubt on the matter.
The first such allegation was made by Michael Crick back in 2013, who discovered a letter from a teacher describing the young Nigel as a “racist” and “neo-fascist”. This is old news, made new again by the recent successes of Farage’s Reform UK outfit. Further, similar stories surfaced in 2019 and 2021, in The Independent and then in Crick’s biography of Farage.
It is The Guardian which has been doing the digging for the current wave of allegations, which they began publishing in October. These include, among other things, the relentless use of the slurs, ‘Yid’, ‘wog’ and ‘Paki’ (the stories from various sources are quite consistent in details of this sort), and the production of a charming song called ‘Gas them all’, to the tune of George Formby’s ‘Bless them all’. According to one former pupil, Jean-Pierre Lihou, the chorus went like this: “Gas ’em all, gas ’em all, into the chambers they crawl. We’ll gas all the Paks, and we’ll gas all the Yids, we’ll gas all the coons and all their fucking kids.” He was apparently particularly cruel to Peter Ettedgui, now a film producer and director, who is Jewish.
Replies
The story is now more about Farage’s replies to these allegations - and moreover a new wave of rightwing whining about the ”bias” of the media, usually from their bully pulpits in the very same media. When The Guardian contacted Reform for comment, it received a very robustly worded letter from a barrister, calling the allegations “wholly untrue”. The same barrister replied threatening action if allegations of racism were published, when the paper contacted Farage directly.
Yet that has not always been the manner of his replies. In 2013, his explanation to Crick was that he said some “ridiculous things” to this teacher that “upset them”. Racist things? ”Not necessarily racist things. It depends how you define it.” When an anonymous letter to The Independent - now known to be from Lihou - mentioned his apparent love of Oswald Mosley in 2019, Farage retorted that he had no time for Mosley, an advocate of a United States of Europe.
That slightly evasive reframing of the story has also been in evidence in recent weeks. “Have I ever been part of an extremist organisation or engaged in direct, unpleasant, personal abuse, genuine abuse, on that basis? No,” he told BBC Wales in November. But that wasn’t the question. As he was pressed by the BBC and ITV later on, he decided to go on the attack, reminding these organisations that they put out plenty of racist content in the 60s and 70s, and demanding an apology from them. (I daresay one has already been made long ago, but perhaps not.) As I write, The Guardian’s lawyers are still waiting for his promised letter before action.
The interesting questions are, in any case, not directly related to the matter of whether Nigel Farage was an odious little shit of a teenager - or a racist odious little shit of a teenager. (As a former teenage boy myself, I am quite sure that we all have deeply regrettable memories of our adolescence, and I am happy to forgive, as I would hope to be forgiven.) It is rather a matter of the role Farage plays in politics now - indeed has played since he assumed leadership of the UK Independence Party, and broadened its foundational euroscepticism to an assault on all immigrants, especially the Muslim religious minority.
In this respect, Farage - while a canny and talented politician, whose individual gifts have no doubt played a part in the recent victories of his political trend - must be placed in the context of a broader political regression: a shift from an officially endorsed ideology of cosmopolitan liberal inclusion to one of national chauvinism and broader political reaction. The cosmopolitan liberals are in abeyance at present, but have not wholly disappeared; and so there has been such a violent reaction to these allegations - and a violent counterreaction to the reaction.
One-eyed
Thus a slightly hysterical op-ed in the Telegraph - rather typical of that paper’s opinion pages these days - by Camilla Tominey. “To be clear,” she writes, “I sympathise with the Jewish students from Dulwich College, who feel aggrieved by comments they say were made nearly half a century ago.” (Apparently no such sympathy is forthcoming for the black and Asian students so aggrieved.) Yet the real issue is the “hypocrisy” of the liberal media, by which she means Farage’s idiotic gotcha about The black and white minstrel show and the like, which she somehow succeeds in making more idiotic:
Many of the moralising Boomers and Gen Xers now lining up to condemn Mr Farage happily watched these programmes at the time and thought nothing of it. They were the same schoolchildren who mocked disabilities with Joey Deacon jokes, used homophobic slurs, laughed at men in drag, and recited the offensive original version of ‘Eeny, meeny, miny, moe’. Selective moral outrage is not principled: it is opportunistic.
I have a hunch that this is true of exactly none of the actual journalists and broadcasters who raked this particular muck (they are all far too young to fit her description), so an account is demanded of their motivation. We can suppose her account is the same as the one she imputes to Labour for delaying several mayoral elections: “they are doing what socialists always do when the walls close in: chipping away at democratic principles, muting the voice of ordinary people, and attempting to ‘manage’ public sentiment instead of confronting it honestly.”1
The trouble with this view is that it is comically one-eyed. The Tories introduced American-style voter ID laws in an open attempt to reduce turnout among their opponents’ voters, and have repeatedly used outrageous calumnies against Labour leaders with far less basis in reality than - apparently - those made against Farage, in order to depoliticise politics and scare voters into line. In America, the second Trump administration has been a single continuous attempt to suborn the media, the academy, the legal profession and anyone else deemed guilty of lèse-majesté. Both US parties are presently engaged in tit-for-tat gerrymandering in the states they control. This is not ‘socialism’, however defined, but just the default setting of politics at the present time in western ‘democracies’.
Tominey is right, of course, that this is bad. It really does amount to a series of attempts to avoid honest confrontation with the public will, which after all would mean giving us a meaningful set of political choices to sort between. If we discard all the character assassination, the fight between Labour and Reform at the present time seems almost laughably trivial. Starmer and Shabana Mahmood promise to harass migrants for breaking the rules, like a pair of overpromoted traffic-wardens; Farage proposes to do so for the sheer joy of it, as one might expect from somebody who (allegedly) used to sing cheerfully about gassing ‘Yids’ and ‘coons’.
Anti-racist failures
Tominey also has half a point in her claim that anti-racism, specifically, has seen heavy use in the policing of political boundaries. The combination of tough rhetoric on migration with specific allegations of deep racism was already common in the 2000s, when it was Nick Griffin’s British National Party that was to be quarantined, and Farage’s UK Independence Party still remained more or less a party of retired colonels, slightly too loopy for the Tories.
Yet that too has been used against the left, most obviously in the weaponisation of factitious claims of anti-Semitism against the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. In those, happier, times the Tories, the Farage-curious Guardianista liberals and many prominent leftwingers could unite in an anti-racist crusade. (Corbyn himself, in throwing people under the bus, was a cowardly accomplice.) More recently, successive British governments have concocted further factitious claims of anti-Semitism, so as to continue assisting an act of genocide without embarrassment.
Media manipulation
The ease with which such campaigns for political hygiene can be manipulated by the bourgeois media-political complex ought to make us wary of merely adopting wholesale essentially subjectivist, liberal versions of anti-racism. There is also the small matter, of course, that it plainly does not work. After a period of decades, in which allegations of this sort, in such numbers, would certainly have immediately terminated a mainstream political career, Farage feels comfortable just brushing it off. That is one indication among many that the worst sort of shameless gutter racism is now socially acceptable once more.
By now, therefore, the energy expended in recent years on ever-more abstruse ‘inclusive language’ and the fight against workplace ‘microaggressions’ really ought to strike all honest observers as a total waste. Liberal anti-racism succeeding in building an ideological edifice in the cultural institutions and workplaces of bourgeois professionals; Trump and Farage huffed and puffed, and blew the house down.
We are still in the period of transition, which I think accounts for the rather schizophrenic quality of political discourse at present. At one moment, Farage brushes off accusations of racism as silly; the next, he wails about being victimised (in the silliest instance, claiming that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour conference speech put his life in danger). Gestures of defiance are replaced at a moment’s notice with oceans of tears. None of our politicians can make up their minds whether they are in the boxing ring or on the fainting couch.
An effective response to all this is hardly impossible, but brings us back to the basics, familiar to regular readers of this paper. We need political internationalism, to fight for higher values than the British national interest; we need concrete organs of solidarity between native and migrant workers, including organised self-defence; we need unashamedly partisan media platforms that can plausibly contest the corruption and cynicism of the capitalist media and expose the dissimulations of mainstream politicians of all stripes.
To have all of these things at once, working in concert, we need the basic sinews of organisation provided by a disciplined, democratic party. A top down rainbow coalition as envisaged by the Your Party powers-that-be, will not do it - and nor will yet another anti-racist front campaign of the Socialist Workers Party stamp.