It is not recent news about his antics. Michael Crick his biographer quotes the objection to Farage’s appointment at the age of 17 to the post of prefect for his final school year by the Master of Dulwich College, David Emms, by a teacher in the English department, Chloe Deakin in a letter to Mr Emms, Ms Deakin related how a colleague who taught Farage “described his publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views” and how “yet another colleague described how, at a CCF (Combined Cadet Force) camp organised by the College, Farage and others had marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night. And when it was suggested by a master that the boys who expressed such views ‘don’t really mean them’, the College chaplain himself commented that, on the contrary, in his experience views of that kind are deep-seated, and are meant.[1]
It is on that last comment that History will judge whether Nigel Farage is still the person who “meant” those views. It is the view of this article that in the last week, history has pronounced its verdict: he, despite his rhetorical weapons of deflection, evasion and rationalising (the ‘banter’ excuse) most certainly is. For his lifelong MO of blowing racially charged dog whistles and fanning fears about immigration and cultural change are the refined and distilled product of the experiences of his school mates felt at his hands all those years ago.
Over the last two weeks the Guardian newspaper has gathered evidence from twenty school contemporaries of racial bullying by Farage which he allegedly engaged between the age of 13 and 18. The story broke on Tuesday 18th November when the first allegations were made. Among his repertoire of racist abuse were the targeting of minority ethnic children, singing a “Gas ‘em all” song that referred to the killing of Jewish, black and south-east Asian people and burning a school roll in a year where there were said to be more Patels than Smiths. Among the accusers were the BAFTA and Emmy winning Jewish film director Peter Ettedguii who claimed that when he was 13 and 14, Farage would sidle up to him and say “Hitler was right” or “Gas them”. Another minority ethnic pupil claimed that when was about nine, 17 tear old Farage targeted him. “He walked up to a pupil flanked by two similarly tall mates and spoke to anyone “different” the pupil said. “That included me on three occasions; asking me where I was from, saying ‘that’s the way back’ to wherever you were from.”[2]
Cyrus Oshidar has said Farage repeatedly called him a “Paki.” Another pupil from a minority ethnic background, told the Guardian that he had also been directly targeted by Farage. Seven other contemporaries have corroborated Farage’s abuse of Peter Ettedgui. For example, Anthony Butler said: “I clearly recall him relentlessly hectoring and bullying him with shouts of “stupid yid” in the playground.'' Rickard Begg, who was in the same year as Farage at O-level, also recalls the abuse of Peter Ettedgui as being direct and designed to hurt. Noting that Ettedgui “never reacted to him,” Begg tellingly comments that “Farage picked on the soft guys who wouldn’t stand up, rise to the bait. That’s the way he worked” [3] The modus operandi of bullies everywhere and every time.
Before going onto trace the racist lineage from Farage the teenager to Farage the adult, it is worthwhile to explain the social and institutional frameworks at the time in which Farage could operate. It was an era of casual racism in British society. As Cyrus Oshidar reminisces, Farage wasn’t the only one speaking “the language of the time” but “he was the only one in Dulwich saying it regularly”.[4] The claims of racism swirling around and his attempts to palm it off as “banter” (of which more later), revisits the pain for those whose who had lived experience of the racism of that era such as Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London whose parents moved to the UK from Pakistan in the 1960s and who has spoken before of facing childhood racist abuse in Tooting, south London. ''For being called the P-word at that age doesn’t just hurt way, it changes you” Khan has said. “It changes how you pronounce your name. It changes the way you talk to friends, and it changes the way you walk down the street.”[5]
Never as in this case has the old adage “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me” sound so inappropriate and criminally ignorant of the effects of not just racist abuse but of bullying in schools and other formative institutions (e.g. scouts, cadets and junior sports clubs) in terms of changing conscious behaviour but also unconscious psychological patterning in, for example, fear and avoidance of groups and aversion to working and organisational cultures.
The storm of allegations racism against Farage lays bare the nature of the institutions which schooled young men like him. An anonymous letter writer to the Guardian who went to a private boy’s similar to Dulwich College and also belonged to the combined cadet force found that the racist behaviour exhibited by Farage was normal. Not surprisingly since these schools were built to train young Englishmen for Empire-building and were deeply racist in the 1980s. This particular school had a quota for the maximum number of Jewish pupils and that pupil recalls his German teacher, routinely, and publicly the one Muslim boy in his class. Another Guardian letter writer, Richard Gordon Hartley, recalls his time at a top public school in the 1970s where Jewish people were routinely assailed with the Y-word, while the N-word was routinely aimed at any person with darker skin. Being American, he was merely thought of as stupid. He recalls the National Front winning a mock school election in 1979, and Enoch Powell and Patrick Moore, among others, being invited as speakers and receiving rapturous applause for spouting their racist bile.[6]
The recrudescent racist and classist toxins in the public school system are attested to by the poet, journalist and musician Musa Okwonga who attended Eton in the 1990s and encountered not dissimilar attitudes from that of Farage two decades previously from a pupil who boasted that his great-grandfather was a slave driver to it being common to hear “Jew” or “rabbi” being used to describe anyone thought to be mean with their money, and peers of his erupting into racist stereotype rants whenever there was coverage of the West Indies cricket team on television.[7]
Okwonga expresses little surprise at the trajectory of Farage’s life post-Dulwich College life. For he writes that just as a mosquito requires stagnant pools of water in which to thrive, so his former classmates provide the perfect breeding ground for the toxic bigotry that has recently reemerged in British society. He despaired at the sight of a man whose racist prejudices have accelerated since his student days being hailed as a returning hero at a reunion event. Most disappointing for him was to see an old and close friend embracing the politics of Boris Johnson.[8] It is probably just a morsel of hope that the current Labour cabinet is the first in British history to have been entirely state school educated, but maybe that is a start in tackling this toxic sludge at the heart of British society.
Farage’s explanation for and defence of the racist allegations about him during his Dulwich days have all the characteristics of the slippery evasiveness that defines his public life (traits which faux anti-establishment figures like him always claim to see in political elites pleading the banter defence or the fallback position of blaming wokeness; shifting from denial to non-denial (“ I did not intentionally hurt anyone” – analyse that) to the darker, conspiratorial, gaslighting narratives of the motivations of those coming forward decades after the alleged events in the way that a serial sexual offender like Jimmy Savile would accuse his prey of ambulance chasing and lying for financial benefit.
That is the first line of defence that Farage offers: that the accusers are all liars which as one of his Jewish accusers points out is an antisemitic trope: that Jews lie about their own suffering in pursuit of some devious, unstated end.[9]
The second is that he cannot be held responsible for something he did as a child, which according to Jonathan Freedland, is the reason why some Jewish community officials are prepared to cut Farage some slack despite the gratuitous tone and nature of the antisemitic abuse he inflicted upon Peter Ettedgui. However, that the Jew baiter of Dulwich College of the 1970s cannot be accused of antisemitism in 2025 falls down on examination of his more recent pronouncements concerning Jewry. In 2017, the Board of Deputies for British Jews said he had “crossed the line into well-known antisemitic tropes “, after he had nodded that Israel had both the Republican and Democratic parties “in their pockets”. Farage replied “In terms of money and influence they are a very powerful lobby” explaining that “there are about six million Jewish people living in America, so as a percentage it’s quite big.”[10]
So.a word to the wise for Palestine advocates. By all means criticise how lobby/interest groups like AIPAC operate in the USA and UK Lawyers for Israel works in Britain but refrain from wading into tall tales about Israel or a faceless, amorphous “Israel lobby” or Zionist Occupation Government capture of the US and UK governments (the basis for the latter alleged occupation is the fact that Keir Starmer’s wife is Jewish). By all means criticise the pro-Israel default positions of both the UK and US governments but avoid conspiracist myths around Israeli capture of these governments. They are not the same phenomena and believing the latter narrative puts you in the Faragiste orbit.
In the following three years Farage was checking every available box in the Jew baiter’s credo. The Board of Deputies in 2020 denounced him for trading “in dog whistles and tropes. He fulminated against “globalists”, “cultural Marxists”, Goldman Sachs and the perennial hate figure for those who see his hidden hand behind the destruction of nation states and their replacement by global government – George Soros. In a 2020 interview for Newsweek, Nine Jobs Nigel who started out as a commodities trader in the City of London took aim at “unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives based on secret recommendations from the big banks.”[11]
As the 2020s progressed, Farage mired himself deeper in the ordure of the American far right sitting alongside Alex Jones of Infowars as they celebrated the greatest hits of antisemitic conspiracism from the Bilderberg group to New World Order. He was no less ingratiated by at least six times by Rick Wiles, a far-right pastor who would later brand the impeachment of Donald Trump as a “Jew coup”[12]
It was said of former Labour Cabinet Minister and Labour Left icon of the 1980s Tony Benn by former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson that he “immatured with age”. In a sense, Nigel Farage has matured in that his youthful racist bullying has metastasized into vintage Farage port of nativist nationalist demagoguery which has already led the UK to the needless disaster of Brexit and which is shifting the Overton window on immigration and multiculturalism in at least some parts of an increasingly culturally divided society. Where Farage has, of course, not matured is in the ability to reflect on actions such as that of his schoolboy racist bullying or even the strategic value of a full apology (even if appearing insincere to his detractors.) His ‘man of the people’ shtick, his entitled confident demeanour which soon turns snarly when put under scrutiny and his arbitrary and authoritarian style of party leadership were all birthed at Dulwich College.
But even if he does not get the keys to 10 Downing Street in 2029, he can bask in what may even be a greater triumph for him than Brexit – the shifting in the terms of debate and discourse of immigration policy at the heights of government. He is, in the words of Musa Okwonga, a Pied Piper leading his followers to a future of exhilaration. But he has enabled a Labour government to bend their migration policies to his will to such an extent that “record numbers of overseas-trained doctors are quitting the UK, leaving the NHS at risk of huge gaps in its workforce, with hostility towards migrants blamed for the exodus”.[13]
Over the last two weeks the Guardian newspaper has gathered evidence from twenty school contemporaries of racial bullying by Farage which he allegedly engaged between the age of 13 and 18. The story broke on Tuesday 18th November when the first allegations were made. Among his repertoire of racist abuse were the targeting of minority ethnic children, singing a “Gas ‘em all” song that referred to the killing of Jewish, black and south-east Asian people and burning a school roll in a year where there were said to be more Patels than Smiths. Among the accusers were the BAFTA and Emmy winning Jewish film director Peter Ettedguii who claimed that when he was 13 and 14, Farage would sidle up to him and say “Hitler was right” or “Gas them”. Another minority ethnic pupil claimed that when was about nine, 17 tear old Farage targeted him. “He walked up to a pupil flanked by two similarly tall mates and spoke to anyone “different” the pupil said. “That included me on three occasions; asking me where I was from, saying ‘that’s the way back’ to wherever you were from.”[2]
Cyrus Oshidar has said Farage repeatedly called him a “Paki.” Another pupil from a minority ethnic background, told the Guardian that he had also been directly targeted by Farage. Seven other contemporaries have corroborated Farage’s abuse of Peter Ettedgui. For example, Anthony Butler said: “I clearly recall him relentlessly hectoring and bullying him with shouts of “stupid yid” in the playground.'' Rickard Begg, who was in the same year as Farage at O-level, also recalls the abuse of Peter Ettedgui as being direct and designed to hurt. Noting that Ettedgui “never reacted to him,” Begg tellingly comments that “Farage picked on the soft guys who wouldn’t stand up, rise to the bait. That’s the way he worked” [3] The modus operandi of bullies everywhere and every time.
Before going onto trace the racist lineage from Farage the teenager to Farage the adult, it is worthwhile to explain the social and institutional frameworks at the time in which Farage could operate. It was an era of casual racism in British society. As Cyrus Oshidar reminisces, Farage wasn’t the only one speaking “the language of the time” but “he was the only one in Dulwich saying it regularly”.[4] The claims of racism swirling around and his attempts to palm it off as “banter” (of which more later), revisits the pain for those whose who had lived experience of the racism of that era such as Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London whose parents moved to the UK from Pakistan in the 1960s and who has spoken before of facing childhood racist abuse in Tooting, south London. ''For being called the P-word at that age doesn’t just hurt way, it changes you” Khan has said. “It changes how you pronounce your name. It changes the way you talk to friends, and it changes the way you walk down the street.”[5]
Never as in this case has the old adage “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me” sound so inappropriate and criminally ignorant of the effects of not just racist abuse but of bullying in schools and other formative institutions (e.g. scouts, cadets and junior sports clubs) in terms of changing conscious behaviour but also unconscious psychological patterning in, for example, fear and avoidance of groups and aversion to working and organisational cultures.
The storm of allegations racism against Farage lays bare the nature of the institutions which schooled young men like him. An anonymous letter writer to the Guardian who went to a private boy’s similar to Dulwich College and also belonged to the combined cadet force found that the racist behaviour exhibited by Farage was normal. Not surprisingly since these schools were built to train young Englishmen for Empire-building and were deeply racist in the 1980s. This particular school had a quota for the maximum number of Jewish pupils and that pupil recalls his German teacher, routinely, and publicly the one Muslim boy in his class. Another Guardian letter writer, Richard Gordon Hartley, recalls his time at a top public school in the 1970s where Jewish people were routinely assailed with the Y-word, while the N-word was routinely aimed at any person with darker skin. Being American, he was merely thought of as stupid. He recalls the National Front winning a mock school election in 1979, and Enoch Powell and Patrick Moore, among others, being invited as speakers and receiving rapturous applause for spouting their racist bile.[6]
The recrudescent racist and classist toxins in the public school system are attested to by the poet, journalist and musician Musa Okwonga who attended Eton in the 1990s and encountered not dissimilar attitudes from that of Farage two decades previously from a pupil who boasted that his great-grandfather was a slave driver to it being common to hear “Jew” or “rabbi” being used to describe anyone thought to be mean with their money, and peers of his erupting into racist stereotype rants whenever there was coverage of the West Indies cricket team on television.[7]
Okwonga expresses little surprise at the trajectory of Farage’s life post-Dulwich College life. For he writes that just as a mosquito requires stagnant pools of water in which to thrive, so his former classmates provide the perfect breeding ground for the toxic bigotry that has recently reemerged in British society. He despaired at the sight of a man whose racist prejudices have accelerated since his student days being hailed as a returning hero at a reunion event. Most disappointing for him was to see an old and close friend embracing the politics of Boris Johnson.[8] It is probably just a morsel of hope that the current Labour cabinet is the first in British history to have been entirely state school educated, but maybe that is a start in tackling this toxic sludge at the heart of British society.
Farage’s explanation for and defence of the racist allegations about him during his Dulwich days have all the characteristics of the slippery evasiveness that defines his public life (traits which faux anti-establishment figures like him always claim to see in political elites pleading the banter defence or the fallback position of blaming wokeness; shifting from denial to non-denial (“ I did not intentionally hurt anyone” – analyse that) to the darker, conspiratorial, gaslighting narratives of the motivations of those coming forward decades after the alleged events in the way that a serial sexual offender like Jimmy Savile would accuse his prey of ambulance chasing and lying for financial benefit.
That is the first line of defence that Farage offers: that the accusers are all liars which as one of his Jewish accusers points out is an antisemitic trope: that Jews lie about their own suffering in pursuit of some devious, unstated end.[9]
The second is that he cannot be held responsible for something he did as a child, which according to Jonathan Freedland, is the reason why some Jewish community officials are prepared to cut Farage some slack despite the gratuitous tone and nature of the antisemitic abuse he inflicted upon Peter Ettedgui. However, that the Jew baiter of Dulwich College of the 1970s cannot be accused of antisemitism in 2025 falls down on examination of his more recent pronouncements concerning Jewry. In 2017, the Board of Deputies for British Jews said he had “crossed the line into well-known antisemitic tropes “, after he had nodded that Israel had both the Republican and Democratic parties “in their pockets”. Farage replied “In terms of money and influence they are a very powerful lobby” explaining that “there are about six million Jewish people living in America, so as a percentage it’s quite big.”[10]
So.a word to the wise for Palestine advocates. By all means criticise how lobby/interest groups like AIPAC operate in the USA and UK Lawyers for Israel works in Britain but refrain from wading into tall tales about Israel or a faceless, amorphous “Israel lobby” or Zionist Occupation Government capture of the US and UK governments (the basis for the latter alleged occupation is the fact that Keir Starmer’s wife is Jewish). By all means criticise the pro-Israel default positions of both the UK and US governments but avoid conspiracist myths around Israeli capture of these governments. They are not the same phenomena and believing the latter narrative puts you in the Faragiste orbit.
In the following three years Farage was checking every available box in the Jew baiter’s credo. The Board of Deputies in 2020 denounced him for trading “in dog whistles and tropes. He fulminated against “globalists”, “cultural Marxists”, Goldman Sachs and the perennial hate figure for those who see his hidden hand behind the destruction of nation states and their replacement by global government – George Soros. In a 2020 interview for Newsweek, Nine Jobs Nigel who started out as a commodities trader in the City of London took aim at “unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives based on secret recommendations from the big banks.”[11]
As the 2020s progressed, Farage mired himself deeper in the ordure of the American far right sitting alongside Alex Jones of Infowars as they celebrated the greatest hits of antisemitic conspiracism from the Bilderberg group to New World Order. He was no less ingratiated by at least six times by Rick Wiles, a far-right pastor who would later brand the impeachment of Donald Trump as a “Jew coup”[12]
It was said of former Labour Cabinet Minister and Labour Left icon of the 1980s Tony Benn by former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson that he “immatured with age”. In a sense, Nigel Farage has matured in that his youthful racist bullying has metastasized into vintage Farage port of nativist nationalist demagoguery which has already led the UK to the needless disaster of Brexit and which is shifting the Overton window on immigration and multiculturalism in at least some parts of an increasingly culturally divided society. Where Farage has, of course, not matured is in the ability to reflect on actions such as that of his schoolboy racist bullying or even the strategic value of a full apology (even if appearing insincere to his detractors.) His ‘man of the people’ shtick, his entitled confident demeanour which soon turns snarly when put under scrutiny and his arbitrary and authoritarian style of party leadership were all birthed at Dulwich College.
But even if he does not get the keys to 10 Downing Street in 2029, he can bask in what may even be a greater triumph for him than Brexit – the shifting in the terms of debate and discourse of immigration policy at the heights of government. He is, in the words of Musa Okwonga, a Pied Piper leading his followers to a future of exhilaration. But he has enabled a Labour government to bend their migration policies to his will to such an extent that “record numbers of overseas-trained doctors are quitting the UK, leaving the NHS at risk of huge gaps in its workforce, with hostility towards migrants blamed for the exodus”.[13]
What more plans has Nigel got in store for us?
This article is dedicated to the victims of bullying, be it racial, sexist, homophonic, transphobic or on any grounds of difference.
References
[1] Michael Crick (2022) One Party After Another, The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage. London: Simon & Schuster pp.27-28.
[2] Danile Boffey, Henry Dyer, and Mark Blacklock Farage rejects claims of abuse at school: ‘I never tried to hurt anybody’. The Guardian, 25th November 2025 p.14
[3] Former classmates reject claim by Farage his remarks were ‘banter’. The Guardian 26th November 2025
[4] Ibid
[5] Daniel Boffey, Khan says Farage claims are reminders of slurs he faced as child. The Guardian 29th November 2025, p.7
[6] Racism claims against Farage are no surprise. Guardian Letters 26th November 2025.
[7] Musa Okwonga, I had to put up with Farage types at Eton. Guardian Journal, 25th November 2025.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Jonathan Freedland. These Farage allegations matter – look at who he is today. Guardian Journal. 29th November 2025 pp.1-2
[10] Ibid, p.2.
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
[13] Okwonga, op cit
This article is dedicated to the victims of bullying, be it racial, sexist, homophonic, transphobic or on any grounds of difference.
References
[1] Michael Crick (2022) One Party After Another, The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage. London: Simon & Schuster pp.27-28.
[2] Danile Boffey, Henry Dyer, and Mark Blacklock Farage rejects claims of abuse at school: ‘I never tried to hurt anybody’. The Guardian, 25th November 2025 p.14
[3] Former classmates reject claim by Farage his remarks were ‘banter’. The Guardian 26th November 2025
[4] Ibid
[5] Daniel Boffey, Khan says Farage claims are reminders of slurs he faced as child. The Guardian 29th November 2025, p.7
[6] Racism claims against Farage are no surprise. Guardian Letters 26th November 2025.
[7] Musa Okwonga, I had to put up with Farage types at Eton. Guardian Journal, 25th November 2025.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Jonathan Freedland. These Farage allegations matter – look at who he is today. Guardian Journal. 29th November 2025 pp.1-2
[10] Ibid, p.2.
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
[13] Okwonga, op cit
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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