Farage slammed for saying Enoch Powell was right

In a new interview, Nigel Farage has said he thought Enoch Powell was right. Specifically, he said Powell was right about the common market. This hasn’t stopped critics from seizing on the comments, however:

Nigel Farage uses his post-Budget press conference to say Enoch Powell was right.

Why are we not even surprised anymore? pic.twitter.com/I4QbCY6UOO

— Labour Press (@labourpress) November 26, 2025

The situation is a sign of two things:

• Finding himself under-pressure, Farage is losing his ability to do effective political messaging.
• The other political parties have worked out how to fight Farage on his own level.

Propaganda wars

Farage has been on the back foot for several reasons. Among his problems, 20 classmates and teachers came out to say he was essentially a Hitler youth. As one Peter Ettedgui said:

[Farage] 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 […] I’d never experienced antisemitism growing up, so the first time that this vicious verbal abuse came out of Farage’s mouth was deeply shocking. But I wasn’t his only target. I’d hear him calling other students ‘P*ki’ or ‘W*g’, and urging them to ‘go home’.

Farage responded to all this in the most muddled way imaginable. In an interview, he didn’t deny the allegations of racism, but he did argue he would “never, ever do it in a hurtful or insulting way”.

In the clip at the top, 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.

If you’re unfamiliar with Powell, he’s the former Tory MP who made the infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in which he argued people of varying ethnicities cannot live alongside one another without descending into barbarism.

You’ve got to imagine that Farage’s advisors were watching this response screaming: ‘Why did he bring up Enoch Powell!? Nobody told him to bring up Enoch Powell!‘. The fact that he did bring up Powell set Labour and others up for an easy slam dunk:

Today, @Nigel_Farage reiterated his belief that Enoch Powell ‘was right’.

If you are a Sikh, he’s talking about you – about how ‘wearing turbans whilst driving a bus would disrupt Britain’.

If you are black, he’s talking about you – how when you moved in next door to white… pic.twitter.com/QpsAV9tOka

— Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 (@reformexposed) November 26, 2025

And well, well, well, what do we have here?

Did you know that in 1994 Farage wrote to Enoch Powell wanting his support for UKIP and wanted him to stand as a UKIP candidate- action not words tell you who someone is.

— shirley anne smith (@oscarhero1801) November 25, 2025

Powell fan boy

As reported by the Guardian in 2014:

Nigel Farage once asked for the endorsement of the former Conservative MP Enoch Powell, who warned that immigration could lead to ‘rivers of blood’ in 1968.

Letters unearthed from a university archive by the Telegraph found Farage unsuccessfully requested the backing of the rightwinger Powell in 1994 and Ukip later twice asked the politician to stand as a candidate for the party.

Farage has long openly admired Powell, once calling him his political hero. While acknowledging that Powell got it wrong about people of different nationalities and races being unable to mix, the Ukip leader has said the central thrust of Powell’s arguments about immigration hold true.

They added:

A Ukip aide said Farage had asked for the endorsement because of Powell’s position as a renowned eurosceptic, having urged Tories to vote Labour to keep Britain out of the EEC. It was nothing to do with Powell’s rivers of blood ideas, he added.

The idea that UKIP wanted Powell because of his Euro-scepticism is silly when you consider Powell is infamously Mr Rivers of Blood. It would be like commissioning Hitler to paint a mural and then being surprised when people asked: ‘Isn’t he the Third Reich guy?‘

Either UKIP were incredibly naive, or they wanted to sign up Powell to signal to voters that they agreed with his extremist position. Some might think that this is what Farage is doing today; that he’s referencing Powell specifically to dog whistle to the growing far-right movement in the UK.

Problems

The problem for Reform is that they almost certainly can’t win a majority on an openly far-right platform, which may be why their polling seems to have peaked earlier this year before going into reverse.

Farage and his crew took their poll lead as a sign that voters backed everything they think, whereas actually they seem have benefitted from the backlash to Starmer. This is creating a situation in which Farage is struggling to work out where the line is, as we’ve seen many times recently:

Five women have asked for an apology from Nigel Farage after he suggested they were not victims of grooming gangs.

They described the comments by the Reform leader as “degrading and humiliating”, and accused him of “ignorance” of the issues.

— Clainy (@Clainy6) October 29, 2025

In other words, he’s being made to dance in the same way that Reform spent most of this year making Keir Starmer dance. And he has four more years of this before the next election.

Featured image via Gage Skidmore (Flickr)