The party said the allegations from its leader’s former classmates, published in the Guardian, are part of an effort to ‘discredit’ him
November 19, 2025 12:05
The claim that Nigel Farage sang songs about gassing Jews and used racial slurs against fellow students as a teenager are “without foundation”, Reform UK has insisted.
A report in The Guardian interviewed several of the Reform UK leader’s school contemporaries at Dulwich College, a prestigious fee-paying school in south London.
Peter Ettedgui, the 61-year-old Emmy award-winning director and producer, told the paper: “He would sidle up to me and growl: ‘Hitler was right,’ or ‘Gas them,’ sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers”. He also claimed that Farage made racial slurs against black and Asian students.
But Ettedgui, whose grandparents fled Nazi Germany to the UK said that he never experienced antisemitism growing up, so was deeply shocked at “this vicious verbal abuse came out of Farage’s mouth”.
The article also suggests that on a Combined Cadet Force (CCF) trip, Farage encouraged students to join in singing a song about Jews being gassed.
“[Farage] did teach the younger members of the CCF the infamous ‘Gas ’em all’ song, or at least led the singing of it on CCF coaches to training areas,” one student claimed.
Professor Dave Edmonds, 61, another Jewish pupil at Dulwich, claimed that although he could not recall “being on the receiving end of antisemitic remarks”, the Reform UK leader “made outrageous comments about the war”.
“I don’t think Jews were his main racial preoccupation. He was generally obsessed, as he is now, with the erosion of Britishness,” he said.
The professor also claims that Farage used “the W-word for what we now call people of Afro-Caribbean origin and the P-word for those of south Asian origin”.
In his book on Farage in 2022, political journalist Michael Crick had obtained a letter from an English teacher at Dulwich College who objected to a decision to make Farage a prefect when he was 17, describing him as having “publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views”.
However, Crick also quoted the master of Dulwich, who claimed that Farage “got up the noses of the teaching staff for reasons that are his chirpiness and cheekiness. They wanted to expel him. I think it was naughtiness rather than racism” and also noted that the experiences of other students at Dulwich differed, noting that Farage had friends from ethnic minority backgrounds.
Reform UK issued a robust denial of the claims made in The Guardian, saying: “These allegations are entirely without foundation. The Guardian has produced no contemporaneous record or corroborating evidence to support these disputed recollections from nearly 50 years ago.”
A statement from the party continued: “It is no coincidence that this newspaper seeks to discredit Reform UK – a party that has led in over 150 consecutive opinion polls and whose leader bookmakers now have as the favourite to be the next Prime Minister.
“We fully expect these cynical attempts to smear Reform and mislead the public to intensify further as we move closer to the next election.”
In a briefing with Westminster journalists on Wednesday, a Reform UK spokesperson reiterated their denials. Asked whether Farage would condemn the sort of language attributed to him if he heard it, the spokesperson said "yes".
And, in an opinion piece for the JC on the anniversary of October 7, and in the aftermath of the Heaton Park terror attack, Farage lamented the normalisation of antisemitism across the United Kingdom, which he said had “infected the institutions of our country”.
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