How Long Do We Stay Silent While Racism Passes for Respectable Discourse?

Earlier this week, Nigel Farage took aim at Glaswegian schoolchildren who speak English as an additional language.

I remember clearly the racist abuse the Asian children at school suffered on our way to school and in the playground. I remember one of the many times it happened around the time that the Roots series about Black slavery in the US was playing on the TV. I remember we were watching one evening, and I turned, and my mother was in tears, she got so upset at the way Black people were treated. We did not learn about slavery in history, so it was a revelation. If the National Front was on the news, we would also suffer the next day, and days after that.

So it was anger-making to see Farage freely targeting Glaswegian schoolchildren. It is unthinkable to say nothing and let this pass. But it seems that Farage has form in targeting immigrant schoolchildren.

In today’s Guardian newspaper, Yinka Bankole, one of 28 former pupils and a teacher who have accused him of racism or antisemitism, describes how Farage targeted him at school as a child. This is an abbreviated extract from his first person testimony:

I will never forget the look of hatred Nigel Farage had for me at school, simply for existing.

My parents came from Nigeria in the 1950s to work in this country, my mother in nursing and my father in healthcare. Like so many immigrants of that generation, they came to serve and to build a life here.

I arrived at Dulwich College aged nine, in the most junior class, while Farage was a 17-year-old in the upper school. One day he spotted me in the playground, towered over me and demanded to know where I was from. After my confused answers came his response: “That is the way back to Africa”, with a hand gesture pointing far away.

Once he had marked me out as a target, he would wait at the lower school gate in the mornings to repeat it. I will leave others to decide whether this was “malicious or non malicious”, “with intent or without intent”. I know how it felt to me.

I remember the look in his eyes. There was no recognition of my humanity, only hostility to how I looked. Farage now suggests it is impossible to recall events from four decades ago. I would ask instead: can a victim ever forget. I still recognise his walk on television as the same walk that used to approach me at the school gate.

I left after a year. I dread to think what might have happened had I stayed longer and he had even more authority.

For years I tried to live quietly, following my late mother’s peaceful, “just get on with it” attitude to life, so common among immigrants. I began writing these memories in a private memoir to her. I did not plan to share them publicly. But watching the perpetrator deny or dismiss the hurt on national television was the trigger. At some point, even the most private, peaceful person feels compelled to speak out.

At Positive Action in Housing, we work with over 4,300 refugee, migrant and minority ethnic families each year. When someone like Farage is repeatedly platformed to talk about “culture”, “immigration” and “English as a second language”, it translates directly into harm. Parents hear their children being told to “go back” where they came from. Children who speak more than one language are made to feel like a problem, not an asset to this society.

That is why I have spoken out, and why I am now challenging broadcasters and regulators about the decision to treat Nigel Farage as a neutral commentator on immigrants and minority children.

When survivors like Yinka are forced, after forty years, to relive childhood abuse because, in his words, the perpetrator is denying or downplaying it in front of the nation, this is not a culture war talking point. It is a warning about what happens when we normalise racist discourse, provide it a platform, never interrogate falsehoods about migration, define racism as “concern” and then call it legitimate “debate”. Well we have had enough.

Robina Qureshi