Cameron BanksThe racist and antisemitic allegations against Nigel Farage from contemporaries at the fee-paying Dulwich College have now reached 34 in total. The most recent accuser, Jason Meredith, claims that Farage called him a “P*ki” and would tell him to “go back home”.
In recent months, such allegations have flown in against Farage, the most egregious being that he told one schoolmate to “go back to Africa” and made hissing noises imitating gas cannisters at a Jewish student, saying “Hitler was right”. Farage has dismissed these claims in a number of ways, from dismissing the comments as “aggressive banter” to calling them “complete made-up fantasies”.
This is not the first time that allegations against Farage have made the front pages; his schoolboy behaviour has been the subject of public scrutiny for many years. Teacher Chloe Deakin wrote to Dulwich headteacher, David Emms, in 1981 to protest against Farage being made a prefect due to him being a “racist and a neofascist”. This letter was made public in 2013, alongside reports of him singing Hitler Youth songs in a Sussex village while at a cadet camp.
Controversy and scandal have dogged Mr. Farage throughout his political career, and not just from his schoolboy days. Extramarital affairs, offshore trust funds to avoid tax, and reverence of Vladimir Putin are just some of a long catalogue of personal indictments that are held over Farage.
Yet, despite all of this, Farage’s Reform UK sit pretty at the top of the polls according to the most recent Politico poll, and Farage is the most popular politician in the country at around 31% favourability, per YouGov.
What’s more, these recent accusations against Farage have had a minimal impact on his favourability. Only 4% of people have said these recent revelations have changed their opinion on Farage from positive to negative, while 5% have said that it’s actually changed their perception from negative to positive. The rest already had a fixed position (28% positive, 47% negative), therefore have not changed their opinion. This outcome aligns with Farage’s comments that these new accusations have had “zero effect” and, if anything, have reinforced support for Reform UK.
How can this be the case? How can the British public see fit to elect a man with such a tarnished personal record as their next Prime Minister?
The answer is, of course, complex. It extends beyond common explanations for Farage’s popularity being his charisma and his ability to portray himself as a ‘man of the people’ despite him being, quite frankly, anything but.
Instead, the crux of Farage’s success rests upon a culture of apathy and disillusionment within the British public. Disillusionment with the bipolarity of British politics, disillusionment with the status quo of neoliberal globalisation, and disillusionment with the mundanity of the stagnant British establishment.
Farage, as all British politicians are, is a largely unpopular figure among the British public, despite him being the most favoured politician. The issue instead is twofold: one being that those who dislike Farage also dislike the majority of other politicians, especially Starmer, and the second (and more significant issue) being that, while many people may not personally like Farage or agree with some of his comments, they do align with his prescription of the country’s ills, and they believe that – at the very least – he is a necessary evil required to enact change to a broken political system.
More than ever, people have given up on traditional British politics. The two-party dominion is now all but over with the emergence of the revived Greens and the electoral success of the Lib Dems, and our Prime Minister is the most unpopular in living memory, more so even than the disgraced Liz Truss. There is a reason why Farage, once a fringe troublemaker who failed to be elected to Parliament seven times and leader of a party which David Cameron famously dismissed as “a bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”, is now the driving force of British politics. His politics have hardly changed, perhaps only now more direct and refined, but the politics of the British public has.
Centrist politics is dying, if it is not already dead. The neoliberal, globalising, centrist consensus which existed broadly existed between Labour and the Conservatives, especially during the New Labour period and the Cameron-May years, has now been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the British public. They are the parties which took us to war in Iraq, encouraged the unbridled capitalism which caused the financial crash in 2008, showed their weakness and ineffectuality in the Brexit debacle, and which gave us six Prime Ministers in a decade.
Farage offers a drastic change from establishment politics. He has made a career of criticising the monotony of the two-party system, and now that the public believes a radical change is long overdue, he is the man they turn to, despite their reservations about his personality.
While Farage’s stance on immigration and the preservation of British ‘culture’ has remained the same throughout, the British public’s attitude has changed. This is not to say that Britain has become fundamentally more racist. Racial and ethnic prejudice have always existed in Britain, and the Britain of today is overall a far more tolerant nation than it was, say, in the 1960s, when Enoch Powell was in his pomp.
Instead, Britons have become more susceptible to fears of cultural erosion and economic replacement due the political and economic turmoil which the two-party system has overseen for much of the 21st century. In a period of economic downturn, people turn inwards and focus primarily on their own economic security. They believe that globalisation and neoliberalism, the hallmarks of both Labour and Conservative policy this century has failed them, with ‘open borders’ and immigration being symptoms of this. The media’s continuous platforming of Farage has not helped with this trend; despite Labour decreasing immigration numbers since coming into office substantially, the noise around the issue continues to persist.
This is not to say that racism and xenophobia are not prevalent issues currently, and it is undoubtedly more pronounced in this period than any other this century. However, this is not due to a sudden increase in the number of racists or far-right radicals in the UK. Rather, it is more symptomatic of a general political apathy in Britain and an unwillingness to challenge these views out of a yearning for change and broad agreement over the failures of mainstream politics to cure the nation’s ills.
The contrast between developments here and those that occurred over the pond in America are quite striking. The rise of Trump and the rise of Farage essentially mirror each other step for step in how they have come to pass:
They are two political outsiders, riddled with personal scandals and character flaws that have seen them ridiculed and dismissed by the political mainstream.
They share charisma and plain speaking, a willingness to tap into the broader popular discontent and disillusionment with the political establishment. An ability to portray themselves as a ‘man of the people’ and speaking for the ‘common man’, despite being of inordinate wealth and privilege.
In both cases, there is a clear distinction between them and the political establishment they seek to convince the people to overthrow.
Trump and Farage, in essence, are not political revolutionaries or ideologues with grand political visions. Instead, they are opportunists, masters of identifying public opinion and popular trends, and exploiting them. While a lot of the focus is on the radicalism of their rhetoric, and the devotion of their followers, the untold story is on the acquiescence of the desperate and disillusioned, who are so exhausted with the political mainstream that they have turned to the fringes to solve their problems.
This is why the strategy of Starmer and Labour is so flawed, and why no matter how many stories come out about Farage’s racist language, adultery, or dodgy financial dealings, there will be little change in his polling position. Everyone has made up their minds on Farage; he is so prominent and divisive that you will find next to nobody who is indifferent about him. Those who do not like him will never like him, and those who like him (or tolerate him) will not back down. To back down would be to concede defeat to the liberal left, the perpetuators of the ‘woke’ establishment politics which has failed them at every turn.
Therefore, Labour’s strategy to discredit Farage is one doomed to fail; it is not a vote winner, or a vote swinger. Failing to provide alternatives to Farage’s claims, in particular on immigration (think Starmer’s “island of strangers” talk), merely emboldens him and the right. Labour’s safe centrism simply will not cut it anymore; it pleases absolutely nobody and only serves to make Starmer even more reviled.
Instead, Labour must change and evolve, tap into the discontent with establishment centrism and provide a new, bold political vision for the country. Progressive, popular social democracy is the only answer to the rampant right, and the only way to stop the British public electing a far-right government.
Edited by Charlie Windle
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