“Let’s be blunt about this. It’s about the Germans, whether in the shape of the Nazis or Kaiser Bill. The Kaiser was absolutely beastly. This was going to be a form of European enslavement that would have been very, very unpleasant.”
“There are approximately fifty empires that have been recognisable since man was around. Forty-nine of them have broken up with the former colonies hating the former oppressor. And we’ve got the Commonwealth.”
In November 2018, a hundred years after the Armistice, I sat down with Nigel Farage to talk about the First World War. The video has been private for eight years. This is the full interview back online for the first time.
We discussed why Britain fought.
“We fought the First World War because the Germans wanted to have an empire that included the whole of Europe. Terrible loss of life, should never have happened, we shouldn’t have got involved? Rubbish. Our reason to go into the war, in both cases, was to protect the sovereignty, independence and democracy of European nation states. A point I think ought to be well remembered.”
We discussed the claim that the poppy is a racist symbol.
“Forty per cent of our total military force on land, sea and air in the 14–18 war and the 39–45 war came from the colonies. And here’s the amazing thing: they were all volunteers. To them, anything they don’t agree with has to be given a label of some description – racist or misogynist or whatever it might be. But they are an absolutely tiny minority. There are 35 million people today wearing poppies.”
We discussed his family’s connection to the Great War.
“My grandfather was a volunteer in August 1914. He was wounded. But it was almost a forbidden subject. Harry Patch, the last living man who fought on the Western Front, said the first time he ever talked about it was just after his hundredth birthday. He’d been married for sixty-eight years. Never discussed it with his wife, never discussed it with his children or grandchildren.”
And we discussed the left’s rewriting of British history.
“There was a time in the Blair government when we had to apologise for virtually everything. I don’t think it’s working. We didn’t forge this empire through the sword in the way that most European powers did. Compare ourselves to France and Belgium and Italy, Spain, Portugal, and look at how they conducted themselves on the world stage. In relative terms, I think we’re the good guys.”
