By Dan Jacobs

View our entire research piece on Farage which includes details of historic allegations and explanations of why they are antisemitic.

The story people are arguing about with regard to Nigel Farage is not just whether he said one vile thing at 17, or whether he used one loaded word at 58. It is whether there is a through-line. A disposition. A comfort with ideas that, in Britain, sit right on the seam where “ordinary political complaint” turns into anti-Jewish suspicion.

Farage’s defenders want the story to be one of youthful idiocy followed by decades of normal political life. His critics think the shape is different: early, overt antisemitic bullying and flirtation with fascist aesthetics, followed by an adult career that learns the limits of respectable speech and adjusts accordingly. Less “Gas them”, more “globalists”. Less “Hitler was right”, more “Soros” and “Goldman Sachs”. Less crude hatred, more plausible deniability.

If you put the allegations, the public record, and his own responses side by side, that second story looks hard to avoid.

School allegations:

Starting with Dulwich College, late 1970s to early 1980s. Recent Guardian reporting has pushed this back into the centre of public view, and not just because of one anonymous quote. It is because of volume, consistency, and the existence of a contemporaneous document.

Chloë Deakin, then a young teacher, wrote a letter in June 1981 opposing Farage’s appointment as a prefect. She described staffroom concerns about “publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views” and an allegation that Farage and others marched through a Sussex village at cadet camp shouting Hitler Youth songs. She has now spoken publicly, saying “of course he abused pupils”, and the Guardian says it has spoken to more than 30 contemporaries who allege racist and antisemitic abuse during his school years.

The details vary by witness. Some allegations are of targeted antisemitic taunts (“Hitler was right”, “Gas ’em”), songs about gassing Jews, Nazi salutes, doodling National Front insignia, and a general preoccupation with far-right groups. The Guardian’s earlier long investigation sets out the range of testimony and also notes something important: some people do not recall certain specific claims, including the Hitler Youth songs at cadet camp.

When you have a contemporaneous letter recording that multiple staff raised alarms, and you have an expanding group of contemporaries making broadly convergent claims about racist and antisemitic behaviour, the honest reading is that Farage’s adolescent posture was not a harmless bit of edgy contrarianism. Even if you set aside any single disputed anecdote, the core allegation remains: he used antisemitic language and intimidation as a way of marking dominance and belonging.

Farage’s response, over the years and again in 2025, has been to deny malice, deny targeted intent, and treat it as banter or a political smear. The Reform deputy leader has dismissed the allegations as “made-up twaddle”, and Farage’s lawyers have said suggestions he engaged in racist or antisemitic behaviour are “categorically denied”. In his latest denial he calls them "made up fantasies".

The point is what the denial does. It refuses the moral gravity of what is being alleged. It also sets up pattern he shifted to as an adult: keep everything in a zone where the speaker can insist it is being misread.

Adult career: the upgrade from slur to code

If the school allegations are about explicit antisemitism, the adult record is mostly about tropes, associations, and recurring framing choices.

One clear example is his 2017 “Jewish lobby” remarks on LBC, criticised by Jewish organisations because “Jewish lobby” talk has a long history as a story about Jewish power and control. He later tried to clarify the remarks, but the clarifications did not remove the core idea that a Jewish lobby exists and is powerful.

Then there is his Soros fixation. You can criticise George Soros on policy grounds; plenty of people do. The issue is the familiar script Farage repeatedly leans into: Soros as puppet-master, shadow operator, or hidden engine of demographic change. He voiced this kind of framing in a far-right media ecosystem, including Alex Jones’s Infowars, where “globalist”, “New World Order”, shadowy elites and banking plots are standard content, and where those themes are historically entangled with antisemitic conspiracism. The reporting on Farage’s appearances and language has been criticised in precisely those terms.

There is also the pattern of platform choices. The Guardian reported that Farage repeatedly appeared on the US web radio show of Rick Wiles (TruNews), a broadcaster known for explicit antisemitic rhetoric. Even if you grant Farage the benefit of ignorance, repeated long interviews on that platform are a choice. This lends legitimacy and says: this venue is within bounds.

And then there is “globalist”. The word has ordinary meanings in some contexts. It also has a well-established life in far-right subcultures as a wink-and-nod substitute for Jews, especially when paired with stories about financiers, unelected elites, and shadow governance. Farage called the Jewish Conservative former minister Grant Shapps a “globalist”, prompting criticism from Jewish groups.

Taken one by one, defenders can always reply: you are over-reading. He means “elite”, he means “internationalist”, he means “bankers”, he means “EU technocrats”, he means “NGOs”. The trouble is repetition. He keeps returning to the same cluster of ideas, the same symbolic villains, the same insinuating architecture. The “benefit of the doubt” argument wears thin when the doubt is always doing the same work.

Keeping it “acceptable”

Farage’s skill has never been simply provocation. It is calibration.

He has long been proud of keeping the BNP at arm’s length. He has presented himself as the man who can absorb the angry fringe and make it electoral rather than street-level. That can look, to some observers, like responsibility. It can also look like management: keep the openly racist and antisemitic material out in the open, keep the energy, translate the themes into respectable speech, and punish anyone who says the quiet part too loudly.

That is the political function of dog whistles. They are not only about persuading new voters. They are also about disciplining a coalition. They tell the hardcore that the leader shares their intuitions, while giving the mainstream a sentence they can repeat at dinner: “He didn’t say Jews. He said globalists.”

His denials fit this. They are rarely confessional. They rarely concede harm. They are framed around intent and legality and misquotation. That is the language of a politician who understands reputational risk and manages it aggressively.

What we can reasonably conclude

None of this requires a courtroom standard of proof. This is political and moral judgement, built from reported allegations, contemporaneous documentation, and a public record of repeated tropes and platform choices.

The school allegations, on their own, already sketch a young Farage with an attraction to fascist posturing and antisemitic cruelty. His adult career then shows a man who keeps circling the same themes in smarter form: Jewish power as “lobby”, Jewish-coded villains as “globalists”, the puppet-master story attached to Soros, the “financial cabal” mood music, delivered in venues where antisemitism is part of the ecosystem.

If you are looking for a single smoking gun that ends all arguments, you will be disappointed. That is the point of plausible deniability. The stronger case is cumulative: a pattern across decades, plus a consistent refusal to take responsibility when challenged.

On that cumulative reading, it is reasonable to say this looks like lifelong antisemitism, refined rather than abandoned. The crude schoolboy hatred is alleged to have existed. The adult public figure rarely uses crude language, but he keeps reaching for the same conspiracy-adjacent frames, and he does it in ways that Jewish communal organisations have repeatedly warned about.

His record shows how antisemitism survives under modern conditions. It does not always arrive wearing a swastika. Often it arrives wearing a suit, smiling for the cameras, talking about “globalists”, and insisting that anyone who hears the undertone is hysterical.