Keir Starmer has called on Nigel Farage to address allegations of racism in Reform UK, and antisemitic and xenophobic comments and bullying allegedly made by Farage while he was at school. Farage has denied the accusations.
A few weeks before the allegations about Farage emerged, Reform MP Sarah Pochin was accused of racism after saying that it “drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people”. Farage said that while Pochin’s comments were “ugly”, they did not amount to racism, explaining: “If I thought that the intention behind it was racist, I would have taken a lot more action than I have to date. And that is because I don’t.”
This reaction suggests that, to some extent, it is still a taboo to be seen as racist. But is this taboo losing its strength? As scholars of the social psychology of racism, we think so.
