Farage has yet to publicly address the allegations
The prime minister and multiple cabinet ministers, have described the new allegations of racism against Nigel Farage from his school days as “repulsive” and are calling on the Reform leader to address the claims.
The Guardian said that in legal letters, Farage emphatically denied saying anything racist or antisemitic when he was a teenager, however he has yet to publicly address the allegations.
Keir Starmer told journalists that Farage “needs to explain the comments, or alleged comments that were made, and he needs to do that as soon as possible”.
On Tuesday, The Guardian reported that more than a dozen of Farage’s classmates from Dulwich College described a pattern of “deeply offensive” behaviour by him throughout his teenage years.
One Jewish former classmate, the Bafta-winning film director Peter Ettedgui, told The Guardian Farage “would sidle up to me and growl: ‘Hitler was right,’ or ‘Gas them’.
He said he also heard Farage calling other student racist slurs, including “‘P**i’ or ‘W*g’, and urging them to ‘go home’”.
Starmer gave a damning assessment of Farage’s handling of racism within Reform more broadly, calling him “spineless”.
Starmer criticised Farage’s response to Reform MP Sarah Pochin’s comments that seeing Black and Asian people in adverts “drives me mad”.
The PM said that Pochin’s comments were “clearly racist” and “Nigel Farage has done absolutely nothing about it”.
The comments are Starmer’s strongest condemnation yet of the Reform leader.
Liz Kendall, the secretary for science and innovation and technology, told The Guardian she was appalled by allegations.
The Welsh secretary, Jo Stevens, asked how far the Reform leader had changed his views. “People can form their own judgment on what kind of character he is,” Stevens said.
In response to Starmer’s calls in the House of Commons for Farage to address the allegations at PMQs, a Reform spokesperson said: “If things like this happened a very, very long time ago, you can’t necessarily recollect what happened.”
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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