You’re not convincing me that I should get out of my American bubble, UK. What’s this I hear? You might end up making Nigel Farage your prime minister? Haven’t you noticed how the US is self-destructing after electing a flaming buffoon to the presidency? Don’t repeat our mistake.
The latest revelation is that Farage’s behavior as a schoolboy. He was a goose-stepping bully singing Hitler youth songs!
When he was 17, a teacher wrote a letter protesting the prospect of Farage being appointed prefect at his school. She was in disbelief that he was even considered for the role.
She wrote: “You will recall that at the recent and lengthy meeting about the selection of prefects, the remark by a colleague that Farage was a ‘fascist but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect’ invoked considerable reaction from members of the [staff] common room.
“Another colleague, who teaches the boy, described his publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views, and he cited a particular incident in which Farage was so offensive to a boy in his set that he had to be removed from his lesson …
“Yet another colleague described how, at a [combined cadet force] camp organised by the college, Farage and others had marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler Youth songs; and when it was suggested by a master that 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 expressed by boys of that age are deep-seated and are meant.”
The letter concluded: “You will appreciate that I regard this as a very serious matter. I have often heard you tell our senior boys that they are the nation’s future leaders. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that these leaders are enlightened and compassionate.”
He was, of course, appointed to the position anyway.
We should all learn from this: don’t let young people with fascist impulses get away with it. They don’t get better, except in the sense of getting better at concealing it for a time, but give them a little bit of power and the viciousness reemerges. Nigel Farage is the UK’s Stephen Miller wearing clown paint.
The letter expresses dismay that Farage hasn’t even apologized. I don’t give a damn whether he can put up a facade of regret — his actual identity as a racist and anti-semite was exposed, and no amount of “I’m sowwy” would make up for it.
Some UK citizens are retaining a sense of humor about it all, though.
“APPARENTLY it costs the NHS over E300,000 a year to remove foreign objects from people’s rectums. Why aren’t we removing British objects instead? was Brexit all for nothing?
– Gerry Paton, London”
Humor seems to be all we have left, unfortunately. This is the era when entire countries turn themselves into a joke.
We’ve already had Boris Johnson and Liz Truss as Prime Minister, thanks to the lunacy of Tory Party MPs and members, propped up by the tribalist adherence to Brexit.
Unfortunately far too many people think that shifting further right will solve all the problems introduced by 15 years of right-wing governments, because they are mind-numbingly stupid. Maybe the fact that Tory MPs and donors are jumping ship to Reform will eventually sink in, but I don’t expect Farage’s racism will make that much difference. A few more reminders that Farage wants to introduce an American-style health insurance system might help, though.
“APPARENTLY it costs the NHS over E300,000 a year to remove foreign objects from people’s rectums. Why aren’t we removing British objects instead? ”
That is pretty damn funny. But Nigel Farage supporters wouldn’t get it anymore than Republicans here would. I suspect Farage has a few more active brain neurons than Trump. Though I’d want to see how his bathroom is decorated to make sure.
I had the impression(s) that Farage is identified with Brexit, and Brexit is recognized as a disaster.
Some Britbody please explain to me what I’ve missed.
The problem is that there’s pretty slim pickings left. The Torys are obviously out, and as long as Labour insists on being a Tory Light (ring any democratic bells, anyone?) there isn’t much hope for them either. Can Corbyns new party get the traction needed to offer up an alternative?
this does seem like the perfect moment in history for third parties to supplant tories & labour, from an outside view, but i imagine those crusty old parties have systems in place to make that harder than it should be, like what we have here.
ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:UK_House_of_Commons_composition
KG: I’m sure seeing a version of the MAGA playbook.
Farage and Robinson are supposedly mutually antipathetic, no?
(Robinson is Bad Cop and Farage is Good Cop? Too cynical?)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/28/tommy-robinson-says-he-found-jesus-in-prison-churches-disagree-about-how-to-respond
↓
Since Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, emerged from prison last May, bearded and wearing a wooden cross around his neck, churches have been uncertain how to respond to incipient Christian nationalism on the far right of British politics. Some church members have wanted to push back unequivocally against racism and xenophobia, saying it has no place in Christianity; others have warned that any direct response risks amplifying the far right’s message.
Robinson was “led to Christ” while in prison, according to Rikki Doolan, a minister at the Spirit Embassy church in Tottenham, north London, which has a large component of worshippers with west African heritage. Three weeks before his release, Doolan – a former Ukip candidate in local elections – paid Robinson a visit. “We spoke about the gospel, and he received Jesus Christ as his personal lord and saviour, right there in the prison,” Doolan said later.
After his release, Robinson told the far right Visegrad 24 media platform that he had “looked deeply over the past few years about what we are fighting for and what made Britain, and it is Christianity. We are a Christian culture”.
Mr Paton has part of the right idea, but isn’t emphasizing the NHS’s best role. The NHS has not concentrated nearly enough on removing British heads from British rectums. There is, admittedly, a diagnostic difficulty with members of the
National FrontReform UK party, including Mr Farage, that might explain this: Their heads are so deeply embedded in their rectums that they’re coming back out of their shoulders.If you really want to understand UK politics, invest half an hour of your time in this:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0526722/
which, although played for laughs, is distressingly accurate (from the perspective of one who lived in a former rotten borough, and agreed by two politics faculty at the University of London).
I do notice slant, mind you:
“Farage and others had marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night”
Not one of those busy noisy Sussex villages very late at night, presumably.
The global rise of the reichwing and the way the Overton window has been pushed out so that candidates who were once utterly unthinkable are now taken seriously as possible national leaders is truly disturbing and a seriously toxic trend.
^ Farage is just one example out of many here.
The Brutish elite school system is a breeding ground for born to rule fascists. The strong feeding on the weak is encouraged. You have to ask what kind of a school admin would appoint an obvious Nazi as a prefect. Sounds a lot like my school where my final 3 years were a reign of terror with floggings, often public, as an intimidation tactic. You could be caned for trivial offenses such as being on the end of a line or wearing a tie the wrong shade of blue. The reign of terror came to an end 2 years after I left. A mother who was particularly angry at the repeated caning of her son confronted the headmaster in his office. When he proceeded to insult and abuse her son in front of her she did what any mother would do, grabbed the sadist by the head and slammed his face into his desk breaking, his nose. The main daily newspaper of the day did a page 3 story on the event and other crimes against the children in their care.
The one good thing about the school apart from some teachers who did their best to protect students from him was the prefects. Nazis were not allowed. I was in my senior year there when the first moon landing happened. We had all waited in the assembly hall for the live broadcast until it was delayed and everyone was sent back to class. Except for us. The prefects had a TV set in their room so we all decided a flogging was worth the risk to see history being made so we all locked ourselves in and watched it.
I resolved that when I had children any teacher that laid a hand on them would not be able to again. Thankfully by the time my son started school the cane was banned.
‘fascist but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect’ invoked considerable reaction from members of the [staff] common room.
Good! A pity the crazies held the power though.
@12 garydargan: ‘grabbed the sadist by the head and slammed his face into his desk breaking, his nose’
‘No, don’t, violence is bad. I shake a stern finger at you’ I say. Once. Quietly.
The problem is the BBC and most of the rest of the British media have decided Farage as PM is the outcome they want.
Jommelbourne @ 14
The BBC is now run and operated by pro-Tory wankers. The question is, do they feel loyalty to the old bastard party or will they embrace the new bastard party?
“The BBC is now run and operated by pro-Tory wankers.”
No. This factually false.
Actually, it is true.
https://www.compassonline.org.uk/self-censorship-at-the-bbc-exposes-the-power-of-right-wing-narratives/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bbc/
https://bylinetimes.com/2021/10/11/bbc-institutional-culture-of-brexit-self-censorship/
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/celebritynews/andrew-marr-bbc-impartiality-insane-self-censorship-b1082960.html
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250228-the-bbcs-surrender-to-pro-israel-lobbying-a-history-of-censorship-and-bias/
Oh, and I’d like to point out one very disturbing example buried in the Andrew Marr interview — the resignation of a BBC director after it was revealed that he had personally brokered an £800,000 loan guarantee for Boris Johnson — and another in the Byline Times article — in 2021 both the BBC Director and Chairman were very public about supporting the Tories, with the Director donating over £400,000 to the party.
Is it really true, chrislawson?
Care to name the alleged pro-Tory wankers that supposedly run the BBC?
Wait, are you telling me Monty Python’s Upper Class Twit of the Year skit was a documentary?!
It never fails to weird me out how long that took – one of the few things eastern germany did right was to outlaw this kind of shit right at the beginning, mostly because it was associated with nazis and imperials, but still.
Well, thanks to UK libel law (with which I’m quite familiar) I think it would be a very poor idea to actually name any pro-Tory wankers who are running the BBC. It would also disserve our host. Aside from the obvious ones — those appointed to their posts prior to the last election, who were (at least according to both a wide spectrum of British press and their own public statements) not just pro-Tory, but actual Tory. And not wets.
The BBC — like any large organization based on “acquistion, control, and/or dissemination of information” — has an incredibly diverse management. Despite the best efforts of every government to have ever tried (and I don’t exclude either the “commie bastards” or the Middle East), those who are good enough at handling information and/or the people who do directly to avoid being sacked for incompetence within months no matter their political backing are just not uniform. This is why pointing at senior manager X as a counterexample to “run by pro-Tory wankers” is at most a distraction. As an illustration, remember who the lead voice of the BBC for Burma (and, partially, India) during WW2 was — a former colonial policeman in Burma named Eric Blair, who had only a couple years previously been fighting (and seriously wounded) in Spain on behalf of the leftist/communist opponents to Franco. He’s much better known by another name,† but it’s difficult to even imagine a less-Tory individual at a time that the UK government was far more Tory (and far more class-obsessed) than even the Johnson government was.
So, this longwinded answer to Morales’s debater-style demand for specific identifications is “this is not the place for that discussion; and even if it was, there are plenty of other credible sources backing up both the general tendency and some individual identifications, even those that don’t specifically identify any individuals as pro-Tory wankers.” And all of that said, the BBC is still far less captive to particular ideologies than any of our equivalent media organizations, whether “broadcast” or broader-based.
† You’re already on the ‘net, looking this up (if you don’t already know) will be educational.
TBH Farage’s behaviour as a schoolboy would be irrelevant if he hadn’t, as an adult, denied everything and lied about the string of well documented incidents. (If he’d said something along the lines of “We all do bloody stupid things as teenagers and if my behaviour caused anyone distress then I apologise unreservedly” it would have blown over in days).
The strikes against Farage are legion and far too numerous to list here. Suffice to say that the Chancellor alluded to him being a Russian asset during her budget speech and he’s been a bit quiet since Nathan Gill got banged up for 10 years for accepting Russian bribe money to come out with the same pro-Russian lines as Farage.
My personal opinion is that he’s a traitor who is unlikely to get into high office because there are far too many skeletons rattling around in his closet. (Not that I think he wants it – I think he’s mainly in it for the money).
But then again, people said much the same about Trump.
Jaws.
Fair enough.
True.
That’s the nub of it.
The insinuation is that it is biased, but, well, for your amusement:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/11/third-of-public-believes-bbc-has-left-wing-bias/
Nigel Farage… even as an adult he has left a slimy trail that shows who he really is.
Did you say “needs to go away”?
.
“The 2028 Presidential Election Based on Trump’s Approval Rating”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=u_KTwOpMLGI
-Let’s bury them so deep they are beneath the MOHO discontinuity!
I’m not across the BBC enough to properly comment there.
The ABC in Australia (our public boradcaster, not to be confused with the US ABC network) is not so much Liberal (our Tory/Republican equivalent), but more just cowed by many years of conservative governments holding the purse-strings to the point that it fals to the ‘balance’ fallacy between facts on the one hand and howling right-wing lunacy on the other.
Whenki comes to the BBC and bias British journoo Owen Jone shas some things to say here – BBC In MELTDOWN – For All The Wrong Reasons and recently~ish also also here – Why Trump REALLY Wants To Destroy The BBC – His Plan To Create Dictatorship EXPOSED
Oh and then when it comes to Farage, Owen has this