Nigel Farage is a far-right politician with a long history of extreme, outlandish and xenophobic comments. He has always adamantly rejected that he is either racist or far right, but here is a selection of his comments over the years that prove otherwise.
Farage has for decades made overtly racist and xenophobic remarks. Even as a young student at Dulwich College, an expensive south London private school, numerous teachers reportedly raised concerns about his extreme views, with one alleging that Farage “marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler Youth songs”.
Farage is a well-known admirer of Enoch Powell, who gave the infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech. Farage asked Powell for his support in a by- election in 1994, and drove Powell to a UKIP rally in 1993, writing: “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.”
Farage has reiterated his support for Powell over the years. “While his language may seem out of date now,” Farage has said, “his principles remain good and true.” He has also claimed: “I would never say that Powell was racist in any way at all. Had we listened to him, we would have much better race relations now than we have got.” Farage has elsewhere agreed with a section of the Rivers of Blood speech, claiming that the “basic principle” was correct and has even recited sections of the speech from memory.
Throughout his long political career, Farage has regularly made racist statements directed at a range of minority groups.
The founder of UKIP, Alan Sked, claimed that when he objected to Farage’s decision to drop the ban on former National Front members, he responded by saying, they shouldn’t “worry about the n****r vote. They will never vote for us.”
In 2014 on LBC Radio, Farage famously said: “I was asked if a group of Romanian men moved in next to you, would you be concerned? And if you lived in London, I think you would be.” Upon being asked whether he would object to living next door to German children, he replied: “You know what the difference is.”
That same year, Farage claimed that parts of Britain were “unrecognisable” and “like a foreign land”. He had also said he felt “awkward” when he heard people speaking other languages on the train.
When asked in another 2014 interview with Newsweek Europe who he thought should be allowed to come to the UK, he said: “People who do not have HIV, to be frank. That’s a good start. And people with a skill.” During the 2015 general election campaign, he deployed misleading statistics about foreigners with HIV in a TV debate.
During the EU referendum, Farage produced the infamous “Breaking Point” poster, which was widely compared to Nazi propaganda. Despite this, Farage refused to apologise for it.
In this period, he also collaborated with Leave. EU, the unofficial Brexit campaign run by Farage’s longtime ally Arron Banks and co- founded by Reform’s chairman Richard Tice, which relentlessly sought to link immigrants and Muslims to violence and societal decline. Both Farage and Tice have distanced themselves from Leave.EU since the referendum, as multiple scandals have struck the outfit.
While leader of UKIP, Farage defended a candidate’s use of the racist slur “ch*nky”, stating: “If you and your mates were going out for a Chinese, what do you say you’re going for?”
Farage has also propagated antisemitic conspiracy theories. For example, in 2017, on LBC, he
named the so-called US “Jewish lobby” as one of his concerns. He also used well known coded language including discussing the “new world order” and the threat of “globalist” government, describing the Jewish philanthropist George Soros, who is a regular target of conspiratorial antisemitism, as “the biggest danger to the entire western world”. When Jewish groups condemned his comments, he dismissed them as “pathetic”.
Farage has increasingly targeted Muslims and migrants. Following the Westminster terrorist attack, Farage spoke of a “fifth column living inside these European countries” on Fox News. “If you open your door to uncontrolled immigration from Middle Eastern countries, you are inviting in terrorism,” he said. Farage also made “fifth column” comments in the wake of the 2015 Paris attack.
During the recent general election campaign, Farage argued that it “should be the immigration election” and called for a “freeze” on non-essential immigration and declared that “net migration should be zero”.
Speaking on Sky News during the campaign he said, “We have a growing number of young people in this country who do not subscribe to British values, [who] in fact loathe much of what we stand for.” When asked if he was talking about Muslims he responded, “We are.”
In the immediate aftermath of the horrifying murder of three children in Southport, Merseyside, on 29 July this year, Farage published a deeply irresponsible video on X/ Twitter in which he suggested the “truth” about the identity of the alleged perpetrator was being withheld.
His comments were made as social media was awash with misinformation wrongly claiming that the attacker was a newly-arrived asylum seeker and/or a Muslim. When challenged about his video, he declined to retract it, instead arguing: “I don’t believe we’re being told the full truth yet about this person. I want to know.”
He also asked whether the suspect was on an MI5 watch list, a dog whistle suggesting the attacker may have been a Muslim.
During this year’s general election, a broad sweep of far right and extreme right groups and figures, including Tommy Robinson, Britain First, Patriotic Alternative and the Homeland Party, all urged their supporters to vote for Reform UK.
Mark Collett, leader of the neo-nazi group Patriotic Alternative, stated that the British National Party’s (BNP) old election leaflets “were actually markedly tamer than Farage’s current rhetoric,” arguing that: “The same man who boasts about destroying the BNP is now standing on a platform that is more explicitly about demographics than the BNP did at its height.”
Collett was especially excited by Farage’s pledge to “leave the ECHR and deport all illegal migrants to stop the boats.” In a livestream,
he said: “Now this sounds rather familiar, because I’ve spent the last few weeks working on election leaflets for a number of nationalist candidates. […] These leaflets read ‘Deport All Illegal Immigrants’. It’s almost like Nigel has been aware of this and, to put it politely, is copying our homework. If one was to be less polite they might say he stole our policy.”
In addition to his long history of racist comments, Farage also has a worrying track record of sexism. Most famously, Farage defended Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” remarks as “locker room banter” and “alpha-male boasting”. He has also offered his opinion on breastfeeding mothers who he said should “sit in the corner” in order not to be “openly ostentatious”.
Farage claimed that, in banking, women were “worth far less” than men if they chose to have a family: “If a woman with a client base has a child and takes two or three years off work, she is worth far less to her employer when she comes back than when she went away because that client base won’t be stuck as rigidly to her”. Upon being asked if this was fair, he replied: “I can’t change biology.”
Under his leadership, UKIP’s 2010 manifesto had a policy to abolish statutory maternity pay (SMP): “Rather than playing the ‘money-go-round’ with the attendant administrative burden, UKIP would abolish SMP entirely and simply allow parents who stay at home with their children to claim a weekly parental allowance set at the same level as the basic cash benefit proposed in our welfare policy (in other words, around £64 per week for parents aged 25 and above) regardless of how long they are off work and regardless of the other spouse’s income.”
In 2010, when asked about women’s football, Farage gave the following answer: “Here’s the bigger question. Do we think, chaps, when we’re there in the front line, when the balloon goes up, with fixed bayonets, when the whistle’s about to blow to go over the top, do we actually want to be there with women beside us? Do we? What an extraordinarily bizarre idea! I certainly don’t think so. But maybe it’s because I’ve got so many women pregnant over the years that I have a different view. I find it very difficult to think that we could stand up and run over the top together, into the machine guns or whatever. Men and women are different — thank God!”
Farage is a longstanding critic of the NHS, and has argued that the UK should move to a private insurance-based health service. He said: “I think we’re going to have to think about healthcare very very differently and I think we’re going to have to move to an insurance- based system of healthcare.
Despite portraying himself as a “man of the people”, Farage is actually a privately educated millionaire. He is the son of a wealthy stockbroker, and attended Dulwich College, one of the most elite schools in the country, as had several of his family members . Farage went on to send his sons to boarding school.
He became a metals trader in the city after being offered the job by a man he met on a golf course. Despite repeatedly railing against politicians for never having worked a “proper job”, Farage described his work as “alcoholic like you cannot believe.”
In 2016, Farage threw a party at the Ritz, during which he decried the “career, professional political class” to a room full of billionaires and multi- millionaires.
Despite claiming to be “skint” in 2017, the International Business Times estimated that he had a net worth of £2.4m the previous year. Farage also claimed in 2017 that he would not relinquish his MEP’s pension from the EU.
In 2013, The Mirror revealed that Farage had set up an offshore trust fund on the Isle of Man, claiming that his “financial advisors recommended I did it”, and admitting it was a “mistake”, and that “I am not blaming them it was my fault”. In 2016, he also refused to release his tax returns, unlike a number of high-profile politicians, in the wake of the Panama Papers tax avoidance scandal.
In July 2018, The Guardian reported that Farage was the highest earning MEP outside the European Parliament of any of the 73 British MEPs, the seventh-highest earning MEP overall. The same article also claimed that, through his media work, he had earned between £524,000 and £700,000 in the previous four years.
His huge earnings again came to light when his disclosures were made in the latest Register of Members’ Financial Interests, an obligation for any MP, showing he is the UK’s highest earning MP. Farage earns over £1.2m a year on top of his MP’s salary of £91,346. Remarkably, he has declared a £81,607 payment from GB News for 32 hours work, a rate of more than £2,500 an hour.
Over the years Farage has repeated numerous conspiracy theories and at the 2024 general election his climate change scepticism led him to propose the scrapping of net zero targets and a return to fossil fuels by unlocking the UK’s remaining oil and gas reserves.
Farage has made at least six appearances on InfoWars, the American conspiracy show run by far-right pundit Alex Jones. Jones has been described as “the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America” by the Southern Poverty Law Centre.
In April 2018, when asked by Jones “Why is the left allied with radical Islam?” Farage replied: “Because they hate Christianity. They deny, absolutely, our Judeo-Christian culture, which if you think about it actually are the roots, completely, of our nations and our civilisation. They deny that. They also want to abolish the nation state – they want to get rid of it. They want to replace it with the globalist project, and the European Union is the prototype for the new world order.”
In June 2010, he referenced the Bilderberg group — a bugbear of conspiracy theorists — claiming: “These lunatics genuinely believe that they know what’s best for us, genuinely believe in this concept of global government, and it will be a disaster.”
In December 2009, he claimed: “We have a political class across the world that are basically aiming for a form of global governance. If you don’t believe me, look at what’s happening in Copenhagen. Governments are sitting there trying to sign us up to treaties on a very, very questionable concept of global warming caused by CO2 emissions.”
Farage has long been criticised for his sympathetic views towards Vladimir Putin, and during the recent general election campaign he faced widespread condemnation for comments about the ongoing war in Ukraine.
In 2014, when asked about his political idols, Farage said: “As an operator, but not as a human being, I would say Putin. The way he played the whole Syria thing. Brilliant.”
More recently, he was criticised for suggesting the West “provoked” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, claiming that the war was “a consequence of EU and Nato expansion”. While accepting that Putin is at fault for the war, he has also said: “We provoked this war.”
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