Originally Posted by Glenn.
(Post 11458217)
RACIST & XENOPHOBIC REMARKS
Farage said on LBC Radio in 2014: “I was asked if a group of Romanian men moved in next to you, would you be concerned? And if you lived in London, I think you would be”. Upon being asked whether he would object to living next door to German children, he replied “You know what the difference is”.
He claimed in 2014 that parts of Britain were “unrecognisable” and “like a foreign land”. He had also claimed he felt “awkward” when he heard people speaking other languages on the train.
When asked in a 2014 interview with Newsweek Europe who he thought should be allowed to come to the UK, he said: “People who do not have HIV, to be frank. That’s a good start. And people with a skill.” During the 2015 General Election campaign, he deployed misleading statistics about foreigners with HIV in a TV debate.
Farage unveiled his infamous Breaking Point poster in the lead up to the EU referendum, which was compared to Nazi propaganda. Farage refused to apologise for it.
During the Referendum Farage collaborated with Leave.EU, the unofficial Brexit campaign run by Farage’s longtime ally Arron Banks and co-founded by Brexit Party chairman Richard Tice, which relentlessly sought to link immigrants and Muslims to violence and societal decline. Both Farage and Tice have distanced themselves from Leave.EU since the Referendum, as multiple scandals have struck the outfit.
Farage is a well-known admirer of Enoch Powell, who is infamous for the “Rivers of Blood” speech. Farage asked Powell for his support in a by-election in 1994, and drove Powell to a UKIP rally in 1993, writing “That meeting, with a man who had achieved so much and sacrificed so much for his principles, awoke all sorts of aspirations in me which I had not even acknowledged before. It inspired me.” Farage also claimed in 2008 that “While his language may seem out of date now, his principles remain good and true”, and that “I would never say that Powell was racist in any way at all. Had we listened to him, we would have much better race relations now than we have got”. He has elsewhere agreed with a section of the Rivers of Blood speech, claiming that the “basic principle” was correct, spoke glowingly of Powell, and has even recited sections of the speech from memory.
Farage formerly had a column at Breitbart, the far-right, anti-immigrant “news” outlet, formerly owned by his longtime ally Steve Bannon and formerly headed in the UK by his ex-aide Raheem Kassam.
Farage blamed immigration for making him late to one of his own speaking events, stating “That has nothing to do with professionalism, what it does have to do with is a country in which the population is going through the roof chiefly because of open-door immigration and the fact that the M4 is not as navigable as it used to be.”
Farage defended a UKIP candidate’s use of the slur “ch*nky”, stating “If you and your mates were going out for a Chinese, what do you say you’re going for?”
Following the Westminster attack, Farage spoke of a “fifth column living inside these European countries” on Fox News. “If you open your door to uncontrolled immigration from Middle Eastern countries, you are inviting in terrorism”, said Farage. He has elsewhere made “fifth column” comments in the wake of the 2015 Paris attack, here and here.
DANGEROUS AND DIVISIVE
Just after the Referendum result was announced, Farage stated that Brexit had been won “without a single bullet being fired”, just over a week after Jo Cox MP was assassinated.
In 2017, Farage claimed he would “don khaki, pick up a rifle and head for the front lines” if May failed to deliver Brexit “properly”, claiming “there will be widespread public anger in this country on a scale and in a way we have never seen before”.
In September of this year Farage told a rally of supporters in Newport, South Wales that “once Brexit is done, we will take the knife” to “overpaid pen-pushers in Whitehall”. Farage later claimed that he “should have said ‘take the axe’, which is a more traditional term for cuts”.
SEXISM
Farage defended Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” remarks as “locker room banter” and “alpha-male boasting”.
Farage told women to “sit in the corner” if they wanted to breastfeed their children, in order not to be “openly ostentatious”.
He claimed that, in banking, women were “worth far less” than men if they chose to have a family: “If a woman with a client base has a child and takes two or three years off work, she is worth far less to her employer when she comes back than when she went away because that client base won’t be stuck as rigidly to her”. Upon being asked if this was fair, he replied: “I can’t change biology”.
Under his leadership, UKIP’s 2010 manifesto had a policy to abolish statutory maternity pay (SMP). “Rather than playing the ‘money-go-round’ with the attendant administrative burden, Ukip would abolish SMP entirely and simply allow parents who stay at home with their children to claim a weekly parental allowance set at the same level as the basic cash benefit proposed in our welfare policy (in other words, around £64 per week for parents aged 25 and above) regardless of how long they are off work and regardless of the other spouse’s income”.
In 2010, when asked about women’s football, Farage gave the following answer: “Here’s the bigger question. Do we think, chaps, when we’re there in the front line, when the balloon goes up, with fixed bayonets, when the whistle’s about to blow to go over the top, do we actually want to be there with women beside us? Do we? What an extraordinarily bizarre idea! I certainly don’t think so. But maybe it’s because I’ve got so many women pregnant over the years that I have a different view. I find it very difficult to think that we could stand up and run over the top together, into the machine guns or whatever. Men and women are different – thank God!”
DISHONESTY
In 2013 Farage claimed “I have never ever said ‘Britain is full’, I’ve never ever used that term” after calling for the government to offer refuge to Syrian Christians caught in the war. “That is not inconsistent with my position that says it is total madness, in two days time, to open up our borders to hundreds of thousands of people from Romania and Bulgaria”, said Farage. However, a video soon surfaced of him using the phrase “Britain is full” just months earlier.
In May 2016, Farage said he would back a second referendum if the margin of victory for the winning side was small. Farage told the Mirror “In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it”.
In May 2019 The Metro reported that Farage had been labelled a “terrible, terrible human being” by a pub landlord, who alleged that Farage had fled the scene of a head-on car crash. “He didn’t even bother to see if me and my little boy were OK. He just upped and left”, he said, and went on to ban Farage from his Kent pub.
ELITE
Farage is the son of a wealthy stockbroker, and attended Dulwich College, one of the most elite schools in the country, which several family members had also attended. Farage went on to send his sons to boarding school.
He became a City metals trader after reportedly being offered the job by a man he met on a golf course. Despite repeatedly railing against politicians for never having worked a “proper job”, Farage described his work as:
“alcoholic like you cannot believe and, frankly, we were pretty amateur. There were terrible cockups in the afternoon, contracts bought instead of sold, some priced wrongly (decimal points and all those zeros can be tricky after a three-hour lunch), the wrong metal bought for the wrong client. When the mistakes came to light, usually the next day, we would just shrug our shoulders”.
“The trading room – full of cigarette smoke, smart suit jackets on the backs of chairs and long desks packed with multi-line phones – was close to the London Metals Exchange and to Coates wine bar, God help us, where we often went at 11.30 in the morning for sharpeners”.
“In the 1980s things hadn’t really changed much since P.G .Wodehouse’s book Psmith in the City. The character created by Wodehouse – like me, an old boy at Dulwich College – said that people in the City spend their mornings choosing where to go for lunch then their afternoons telling everyone how good it was.”
In 2016 Farage threw a party at the Ritz, during which he decried the “career, professional political class” to a room full of billionaires and multi-millionaires.
Despite claiming to be “skint” in 2017, the International Business Times estimated that he had a net worth of £2.4m the previous year. Farage also claimed in 2017 that he would not relinquish his pension from the EU.
In July 2018, The Guardian reported that Farage was the highest earning MEP outside the European Parliament of any of the 73 British MEPs, the seventh-highest earning MEP overall. The same article also claimed that, through his media work, he had earned between £524,000 and £700,000 in the previous four years.
This year Farage took a private plane to Strasbourg and stated he “can’t remember” how much it cost, claiming to have paid it himself. He later tweeted that he had been reimbursed by an unnamed businessman.
In May this year Channel 4 alleged that Arron Banks had given £450,000 to Farage following the Referendum, used to pay his £13,000 monthly rent for his Chelsea townhouse, and even provide him with a Land Rover Discovery with a driver. Farage evaded questions on the matter.
The Guardian reported in July 2019 that Farage is being paid at least £26,900 a month by his media company Thorn in the Side, which he founded to handle income from his media appearances and lectures.
In 2013, The Mirrorrevealed that Farage had set up an offshore trust fund on the Isle of Man, claiming that his “financial advisors recommended I did it”, and admitting it was a “mistake”, and that “I am not blaming them it was my fault”. In 2016 he also refused to release his tax returns, unlike a number of high-profile politicians, in the wake of the Panama Papers tax avoidance scandal
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