Nazi salutes and racism: the allegations about Nigel Farage’s school days

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, what was Nigel Farage really like at school?

0:18Before we start, there is some really upsetting racist language in this episode. I remember vividly my first day there. I had these butterflies in the pit of my summer. Today, Peter Ategi is a well-known filmmaker, but 40 years ago, he was just a nervous boy starting out at Dulwich College in South London. I was 13. I'd come from a fairly small school into this slightly intimidating kind of gothic structure that was huge, and there were so many students milling about. As time went on, he found ways to fit in, but it wasn't easy. I was a performer, I could say. I loved music. I loved theatre, but I'd never acted before.

1:04And as much as I didn't love Dulwich College, Dulwich took drama very seriously. And I think that was one of the things that I gravitated towards very soon. And it was kind of like the saving grace of the school for me because I didn't like the whole atmosphere of the school and the culture of it. I always found slightly sort of intimidating, I guess. And the personification of that was the guy sitting in front of me, Nigel Varage. He says that soon after arriving, Varage had him in his sights. Once he found out I was Jewish, you know, that was it. I have this incredibly clear memory of him persistently heckling and hectoring me as a Jew.

1:46He'd kind of come up to me wherever he were, it might be in the classroom, it might be in the school grounds. He'd say things like, Hitler was right, and Gassam, and sssss. the sound of gas escaping, basically. Peter says Farage's abuse was vicious, visceral and constant. And he's watched his political rise with an increasing sense of anxiety. If he was here right now, I'd want to know if that racist mindset of 13, 14, and right up to the end of his Dulwich career, at the age of 18, that that racist mindset, does it have a role to play in his statements about rounding up and wanting to deport hundreds of thousands of migrants, including people with legally settled status?

2:36I'd want to know that. And I think that's a very important question for him to answer. Over the years, Farage has denied he was racist and anti-Semitic at school. But this week, dozens of former schoolmates and teachers have made shocking claims to The Guardian's chief reporter, Daniel Boffey. This guy is the favourite to be the next Prime Minister. It's pretty standard for anyone in that position to have every aspect of their life looked at for transparency. Being Prime Minister is really... It's not any job. You can change a country, you can change a culture. The people deserve to know absolutely as much as possible about you, about your character.

3:18And that's what we set out to look at. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, Oswald Moseley, Nazi salutes and racial slurs. What Nigel Farage's schoolmates remember about the man who could be prime minister?

3:39Dan, can you tell us about how this investigation into Farage's time at Dulwich College all started? Well, I suppose it all began when Keir Starmer started talking about racism. He said that Farage's policy on indefinite leave to remain, scrapping it, was racist. Then in his party conference speech, he talked about Farage crossing a moral line. And then after the conference speech, David Lammy started talking about how Farage had flirted with Hitler youth as a teenager. Now, that was a reference to a book written by Michael Crick. When was that book written? Well, the book was written in 2022, but actually the reporting was in 2013.

4:21And Crick had found a letter from a teacher complaining about the fact that Nigel Farage had been made a prefect at Dulwich College School. complaining, saying he has self-professed fascist and racist views. And in fact, on a combined cadet force trip, that's like Boy Scouts but a bit more army, sponsored by the Ministry of Defence, he had been singing Hitler Youth songs through the fields of Sussex. So that was what he was referring to. Farage was saying it was libelous and disgusting and absolutely not true. and that was intriguing because when Crick had first made this report, Farage had said something a little bit different.

5:04He'd said, generally of sort of various claims about racism, he'd said, yes, I said ridiculous things, not necessarily racist things, depends how you define it. He talked about how, you know, you got to understand the times that we were living in then, that migration, the Brixton riots and everything had made the issue of race a matter of live political debates and that people were pushed to extremes. He's not said which extreme he was pushed to, but he's talked about people being pushed to extremes. So quite equivocal. And now he seemed to be kind of much more definitive. And we have to be clear that he does deny all the allegations of racism.

5:43He absolutely comprehensively denies, without going into any particular details, denies ever saying anything racist or anti-Semitic as a teenager. That raised the question, well, what did happen those 40 odd years ago? And is he changing his tack and why? So that was the spark. We thought we'd better look into it. And so a lot of the reporting you did was from the time when Nigel Farage was at Dulwich College. Can you tell us a bit about what the school was like? So Dulwich College is a public school in southeast London in a very nice building, very nice part of London. Today, you would pay an absolute fortune to go there.

6:22Back then, though, not only were the fees lower, but there was something called the Dulwich Experiment where the local authority paid the fees of pupils who were able to pass the 11 plus and the entrance exams at the college. It meant that the intake and the demography of the school was quite different to other public schools. And when was that? What decade are we talking here? We're talking in the 70s. So he joined in around 75, 76, so the 70s, mid-70s, and he was there until 1981. So you talked to over 30 people as part of the reporting. Could you talk us through some of the behaviour that former pupils and staff at Dulwich College told you about Nigel Farage?

7:04Well, I mean, the most powerful, inevitably, the most powerful testimony would be from those who were subjected to abuse, so anti-Semitic or racist abuse. And that would involve with Peter Etigui, Farage allegedly whispering Jew or Hitler missed you or Hitler was right. And one ethnic minority child, he doesn't want his heritage to be mentioned because he's concerned about repercussions, which tells a story in itself really. but he was he talks of Farage on multiple occasions stalking through as a prefect so he has a position of sort of power and responsibility and status in the school walking quite a sort of a distance through the school to the lower school to pick him out and and say where you from and go back there and I think it's worth saying that this little boy was only nine and Nigel Farage was 17 at this point and a prefect and so in a position of authority and i really remember that bit from your piece as a mother the idea of this little boy getting out of his parents car and seeing this group of older boys waiting for him just waiting to target him and inflict some kind of mental damage on him and i just found that really upsetting and unfortunately that wasn't just that you know i spoke to another chap andy field who recalled farage saying look this is how to be a prefect because andy had just been made a prefect as well this is what you do walking to the playground picking on a an asian heritage child and putting him in detention purely on the basis of his the color of his skin according to um andy field we have to say that this is not the experience of everybody uh you know i spoke to for example one jewish pupil who said he didn't remember any racism from from farage but those who did a lot of them did sort of say that it was kind of it seemed to be very central to his personality.

8:58It wasn't just kind of the odd off-colour remark here and there. It was just kind of at the core of him as a pupil is how he stood out. I'm very open for the views and the actions that he was kind of professing and carrying out at school. I mean, your reporting kind of talks a bit about how he conducted himself in the school classrooms. And I wonder if you could tell us a bit about that. Well, yeah, again, this is what's quite odd about the denials, in that he was apparently very brazen about it, you know, seek heiling, goose-stepping, and it seems to be also habitual, a lot of kind of, which is kind of the one thing that really sort of struck me, is kind of habitual chanting of the name of Oswald Molesley, kind of really niche stuff, the British movement, a chant which goes, we are the BM men, we are the BM men, we are the British Nazis, or something along those lines.

9:52It's kind of associated with something called the British Movement, which is later called the British National Socialist Movement. Really quite niche, weird kind of extremist right-wing stuff. So we obviously knew his stuff. Yeah, he seems to be sort of very kind of knowledgeable about this odd world. And we have the chanting of a song, Gassamal, which goes to the tune of Blessamal by George Formby. and it involves gassimal, gassimal, crawling to the showers, gassimal, kill the yeads, kill the, you know, I don't want to go too much into the language, but it's pretty horrible stuff. And, you know, this particular song associated with the National Front, it could be heard, unfortunately, on the football terraces, you know, where certain football clubs were playing.

10:39We spoke to one member of the Combined Cadet Force, this sort of Boy Scouts club, who heard, he alleges, Farage singing this song, and he admits he sang it as well, was asked by an ethnic minority child not to do it anymore, and he stopped, and he thought, oh, Christ. And now feels pretty ashamed, and I spoke to a couple who felt really ashamed of being involved, because they did sing it, deeply ashamed, 40 years on. Unfortunately, we've not had that sort of admission of shame from Mr. Farage as yet, and that's kind of the point, that's the worry, that's the concern. Why does he not feel ashamed?

11:20Why does he not talk about that? I mean, there's absolutely no suggestion that Farage still holds the views that people have recounted as the racist views. But the memories of those views, they sort of come up, they're stirred when he talks about issues such as immigration and that was the case with a lot of those who we spoke to. So with the people you spoke with, was there a sense that Farage was preoccupied with immigration, something he's obviously made a career out of? So there was a testimony of a chap called Andy Field who recalls going on a, he was a regular one on the train with Nigel Farage.

11:56And one year there was, they have a little booklet and it was like a school role. They had all the names of the children in the school in alphabetical order. And so being a nerdy bunch, they would always look through the school role, looking for funny names. and one year there were more Patels and Smiths. So you can see the things were changing in the school and apparently, according to Mr Field, he alleged that Farage burnt the school role in kind of a ritual. As a kind of protest that the school was changing. He was an outspoken supporter of Enoch Powell who was invited to the school to speak, actually.

12:32Which kind of seems extraordinary. Yeah, but again, Enoch Powell... Now, maybe not in the 1970s. Yeah, I mean, it was a decade after Powell had made the River of Blood speech. So, yeah, the picture is very odd. It just comes across as a very odd teenager.

13:01Peter, you were just 13 when this all started. what Farage was saying to you about the gas chambers and about what happened to Jewish people in the Holocaust was that something that you understood was that something that you talked about as a family so did those words have particular meaning to you? Oh I absolutely understood that my grandparents were German Jews and they had managed to escape from Nazi Germany in 1937 around the time of the night of broken glass, Kristallnacht and they had found a new home in the UK. Much of their family perished in the Holocaust and I knew that from a fairly young age.

13:44So how did it make you feel when you had those things said to you? It made me feel abused, definitely. It was shocking because knowing enough about my family history to know what gas chambers meant and who Hitler was, to hear those used as sort of slurs against me was, you know, deeply upsetting. It was also, I mean, it was also sort of shaming in a way.

14:25So, and humiliating. and these are formative memories and they stick to you you know they made me feel very conflicted about my Jewish heritage you know is this something that I should be ashamed of and of course I shouldn't but it was you know when you're when you're spoken to in that way it definitely sort of affects you quite deeply. I think when you're 13 you're still kind of such a work in progress aren't you I mean people you can you can leave their thumbprints all over you from what they say to you. And did you get a sense that he knew what he was saying? He knew the meaning or the intention behind what it was that he was saying to you?

15:05Yeah, I have absolutely no doubt about that. There was a lot of racism in this period. We're talking about the 1970s. So there was a lot of racism around. But I had never experienced anti-Semitism before. so this was like it was profoundly shocking um to hear that for the first time and the second and the third time but there was a point where because there were it wasn't like being bullied in the sense that you have a gang of people who are bullying you it was just him he was kind of like a bit of a loner at school i felt uh um i may be wrong about that but but i kind of had the sense of him as sort of like an eccentric, knowledgeable beyond his years.

15:49You could say that this was harmless provocation that kids do all the time, but Farage already knew his stuff. I mean, he knew Enoch Powell. He talked about Enoch Powell, who I'd never heard of. He talked about the rivers of blood speech. I remember these things sort of like, you know, like they're yesterday. So it felt like there was already a whole nascent philosophy around the kind of racism that he espoused and certainly the anti-Semitism that was directed towards me. And I would hear him say to other kids, you know, go home and use words like Paki and Wog and so on. I hear that. I think everyone probably who was at Dulwich heard that.

16:33So he was quite well known for being openly racist. As I say, with some of those words, you know, we are talking about a different time. And I think we have to be a little bit careful. People use slurs like that. It was quite normalised. It was particularly directed at kids with black and brown skin. It was quite normal. I mean, we had the Brixton riots going on down the road from Dulwich College at the time. And the National Front was on the rise. And so, you know, it wasn't exceptional. And I think that needs to be pointed out, even though I would say that his abuse of me felt beyond that. You know, I never experienced anything else like that from anyone else.

17:23So it was the detail of it that was so disturbing. It went beyond just name calling. How did you cope with it? In time, I think I really learned to bury it. I kind of almost like put an invisibility, not invisibility, a cloak around myself. So that when I was in his presence, because I knew that it wasn't being taken up by other kids and I had made other friends and I sort of found my place in the drama department. I kind of like I got on with my life pretty much. at school and I learned to sort of like just get on with things and it was helped by the fact that there was no one else you know kind of saying anything remotely like that I mean occasionally you might get yid or whatever you might get that sort of because it was the time where people used like that quite it was quite normalized but you know Farage's abuse was much more specific and much more visceral and nasty than that.

18:37Dan, you said that not everyone you spoke to remembered Faraj's behaviour to be problematic in any way. What did you make of that? Well, some saw him as just kind of rude, repugnant, boisterous, perhaps did some things which were off colour and certainly wouldn't be approved of today, but not really racist having it just of its time. I think that's fair enough. That's their recollection. But as I say, unfortunately, nearly 20 people do have some pretty horrible accounts. And these are very credible witnesses. We sort of looked into the background of the witnesses, obviously. any political affiliations, make sure there's no kind of conspiring, there's no attempt to sort of set a narrative that would be unfair to Mr Farage, because Mr Farage, his claim is that this is all a smear.

19:31But we did our homework to make sure that we were entirely confident with each of the witnesses. What do you say to the argument that lots of people may have behaved really badly, really horribly as teenagers, and why are we raking over this now? yeah i think that's absolutely perfectly reasonable challenge and it's actually it's one that i slightly came to the whole story with that that sort of skeptical um outlook is this really is it is there value in this and but the more i talk to people particularly those who had been targeted i thought well actually these people should have a voice and it's not so much the the alleged racist behavior itself for me, although some of it is extremely strange and sort of habitual and quite striking to a lot of people, it is the reaction.

20:22It is the inability seemingly to condemn that sort of behavior, to be open and transparent about it and to talk about it in a kind of straightforward way. And that's what's key to me because that's what we should care about now. It's just the man himself. You know, we're not saying, and I don't think you can say that the boy father's the man, that the views of a teenager, 18, you know. You're definitely a young man by then, aren't you? There's a lot formed. But we're not saying that because he did this and said that and felt this at that time that he feels and does and says that now. But we are saying, well, but you condemn that behaviour, don't you?

21:04And you can be frank now with us about what happened. The process to become prime minister is a difficult one. it should be a difficult one. People should know an awful lot about you because there's no position quite like it. So that's why this was, I think, extremely important, actually. And there'll be other things in Nigel Farage's life that we'll have to look into. And he should expect that, and really he should welcome it. If he wants to be Prime Minister, this is the test. This is it. This is what he wants to do. Well, this is what you've got to go through. Simple as that.

21:37Coming up, how does it feel when your childhood bully is tipped to become the next prime minister?

21:58Peter, what's it been like for you watching Farage's political rise over the last few years? I mean, extraordinary to see his success as a single-issue politician. and the impact and influence he's had on British politics. And, you know, well done to the guy. Because that's what success looks like, I guess. On another level, I can't watch him. I've got to be quite honest. If he comes on television, I have to switch off because his voice, everything about him as a character that I see now connects with the boy I knew when I was 13. I can't watch it. I will change the channel. So I'm probably more ignorant than I should be about the detail of his rise.

22:51I often find myself wondering when I think about him now where these attitudes came from, you know, when he was a 13-year-old kid. I mean, was it his parents? Was it... What was it? I don't know. I mean, I don't know whether Nigel Farage today is racist. I can't speak to that. I don't know the guy. And what would you say to people who would defend these comments as a joke or the fact he was only 13, you know, that he didn't know any better or he didn't know what he was saying? Okay, I think the fact is that this type of language and racism in general is becoming normalised again now. And I think a large part of that is the anti-immigrant sort of agenda that has been peddled since the Brexit campaign.

23:48And it's kind of really upsetting and disturbing to see that sort of like rise to the surface again. And the easiest thing for him to have said when these allegations first came up would have been, yes, I did say some extraordinarily upsetting things to people that were racist. And I unreservedly apologize to them for that. But I can assure them and the general public that this has nothing to do with my politics today. He's never said that. I mean, there was a statement that went out from someone from Reform, a spokesperson from reform saying there's no primary evidence it's one person's word against another if things like this happened a very very long time ago you can't necessarily recollect what happened i mean that makes me really really angry um because of course you can you know of course i can and it's about making sure that before someone goes into a voting booth and casts a vote for nigel farage as their prime minister, their leader, the person who's going to affect policy for the next years to come, that there's a full understanding of who he is.

25:11And as I say, that doesn't mean to say that he's racist today, but the question needs to be asked. And the repeated denials from both himself and his spokespeople mean that the question is still very much there. And what do you think about the idea of him being our Prime Minister? I mean, this is very subjective, but I've said to close friends and family members I'd have to move out of the country. Whether I actually would do that or not, I mean, I don't have any other passport than British, so it's now, thanks to Brexit, much more difficult to go and live somewhere else. but whether I do or not the very idea of living in a country ruled by the person who said the things that he said to me is deeply disturbing Peter, thank you so much for sharing your story with us It's a pleasure, thank you for having me

26:25And that's it for today My thanks to Peter Eteggi and Dan Boffey. You can read more about this investigation and all of Dan's reporting at theguardian.com. This episode was presented by me, Annie Kelly. The producers are Eli Block and Charlie West. Sound design is by Brian McNamara and the executive producer is Homer Khalili. We'll be back on Monday.

26:59This is The Guardian.