Nigel Farage has claimed Enoch Powell was right to oppose “vast community change” in the UK. The Reform UK leader has been accused of making racist and pro-Hitler comments when at school. He suggested that those who have made the allegations were angered over support he had voiced for some of Mr Powell’s arguments. Mr Farage said: “If you look at what they said, none of them said I directly attacked or abused them. What they do say very clearly is they had different political views to me.
“That I thought Enoch Powell was right about the Common market, which I did, in the referendum, which was a minority position, but I held it all the way back then, and I thought he was right to talk about not having vast community change. That was a source of big political debate, back in the late 1970s.” There is nothing to suggest that Mr Farage still supports the views of Mr Powell.
The former Wolverhampton MP delivered what became known as his “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, after which he was dismissed from the shadow cabinet by the then Conservative leader Edward Heath.
He compared Britain to a nation heaping its own funeral pyre, saying: “Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood.”
He also said a constituent of his thought that within 20 years “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”.
Some of Mr Farage’s former classmates at Dulwich College in London have claimed he joked about gas chambers, and put someone in detention because of the colour of their skin.
The former UKIP leader offered an apology to Peter Ettedgui, who was 13 at the time.
He told The Guardian last week that Mr Farage would tell him “Hitler was right”, or “Gas them”, before hissing to replicate the sound of the gas chambers.
The Reform leader said: “One person says they were hurt, and if they feel they were hurt, I am genuinely sorry, but I’d never ever ever have said or done anything like that directly to a human being.”
