Feeling sorry for Nigel Farage?

 Blimey, I never thought I'd write those words. But if you can't be honest, what are you? This morning, I read an article in the Guardian, which explored the claims that as a a teenager, Nigel Farage flirted with full blown fascism and admired the Hitler youth. I read the article and was fascinated reading the memories of teachers and fellow pupils of Nigel Farage. Some of them were, shall we say, worrying.  Here is one of the worse “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"

Farage is a couple of years younger than me, so we were at school in the same era. My Dad was a former RAF pilot and despised Nazi's and I would have been battered half to death, had I even squeaked such a thing. It was drummed into me that Nazisim and Fascism was despicable. We had  a Jewish family living over the road from us. I was in and out of their house all of the time. To this day, the older of the boys, Frank is a mate and lives up the road still. Through such people, I knew the real price of Fascism, so reading the article, I was horrified. Then I got to Farage's explanation.

“Let’s get one thing straight, I joined the Conservative party in 1978 and thought all of the far-right parties/movements to be ludicrous/barmy/dangerous. There were some hard left class-of-1968 masters [who] joined the college and several of us thoroughly enjoyed winding them up. Terms of abuse thrown around between 15-year-olds were limitless; there were no boundaries. I think red-haired boys fared especially badly.”

Now reading this, I found myself having a bit of a moral dilemma and feeling sorry for Farage. I recall being a schoolboy at Finchley Catholic High School in 1978. Political correctness had not been invented. The school banter was racist, sexist, homophobic and by todays standards completely unacceptible. I absolutely recognise Farage's sentiments about winding up teachers. For a moment, I felt myself to be a complete hypocrite for judging Farage. It is quite reasonable for him to point out that the standards of the time were very different. No one enjoyed winding up teachers more than I did.

But then I thought, hang on a second. Lets read his statement again. When I think of my behaviour I am horrified now. I do think that being a fifteen year old in 1978, clearly without a Dad like mine who instilled a sense of right and wrong in the way my Dad did, is a perfectly reasonable excuse. If Nigel Farage was now the Archbishop of Canterbury and there was another paragraph, explaining how life had taght him the error of his ways, I would be the first in the line defending him.

But Farage is not the Achbishop of Canterbury. He is the leader of a hard right party, which wants to deport perfectly law abiding citizens, who have spent their working lives in the UK, contributing to the UK with indefinite right to remain. People like the bassplayer in my band, for the last 25 years, who also happens to be the chief recording engineer at my studio. Farage is a man who wants to withdraw the UK from the European Court of Human rights. He doesn't want to reform the organisation, he wants to remove the protection of the court for all of us. The court is far from perfect, but once you remove legal protection for people from human rights abuses, we are all game. Just suppose Reform got a big majority, it all went wrong and then, rather than a Labour government, the UK electorate chose a hard left government. Farage and all his hard right fans would find themselves fair game. If Reform ever were to win a majority, I would expect the UK's politics to descend into chaos, which would open up an opportunity for a leftist government. Farage has a unique talent for falling out with people who agree with him, such as Rupert Lowe. God help the rest of us who don't. If a Reform government collapsed, then a hard leftist party could make a reasonable argument that Tories, Labour and Reform don't work, so they would become the new hope for the dissaffected millions of voters, who always get let down.

As I said, for a moment I felt sorry for Nigel Farage. It is clear, though, that he thinks his behaviour as a schoolboy was just fine. It is clear that he is on the hard right of British politics. It is clear that millions of hard working people would have their lives upeneded if he was elected and enacted his policies. I doubt that Farage is a Nazi, who would send Jews to gas chambers. I doubt he's a fascist, who would shoot train drivers when  the trains ran late. But I have no doubt at all that he is a beast of the Hard Right, a man who despises immigrants and doesn't conceal this. 

The Guardian article was a follow up to David Lammy's charge that Farage was a man who admired the Hitler youth. I really think that Lammy showed extreme naivity in this attack. He even made me feel sorry for Farage for a millisecond. If you are going to mount an effective attack on Farage and the polices that Reform spout, you have all the material you need in what he is saying right now. I am sure my former Headmaster at FCHS would have been more than happy to slag me off, if he were still alive and I was the leader of a party. There was plenty of material in my school file, which demonstrated that when I was 15 I was not fit to run a whelk stall, let alone a country. I would hope that anyone who judges me, does so on the basis of what I do now, not as a schoolboy. Likewise, I judge Farage on his statements now, not then. Sadly for Nigel, I think any reasonable person will conclude he's a racist and a charaltan.