Il leader britannico di estrema destra Nigel Farage ha esortato a chiarire i legami del partito con la Russia

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> #British far right leader Nigel Farage urged to clarify party’s ties with Russia
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> **The head of the Reform UK party faces mounting pressure after a colleague was sentenced to prison for accepting money from Ukrainian politicians acting on behalf of Moscow.**

> *By Cécile Ducourtieux (London, correspondent)*
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> *Published yesterday at 4:46 pm (Paris) • 3 min read*
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> Problems continue to mount for Nigel Farage, the leader of the far-right Reform UK party, who is leading in the polls in the United Kingdom. In mid-November, The Guardian published multiple testimonies about racist and antisemitic remarks the 61-year-old Brexit architect allegedly made while attending the private Dulwich College in south London during the 1980s. Twenty former classmates spoke to the newspaper, including documentary producer Peter Ettedgui, from a family of Holocaust survivors, who recalled, for example, a teenage Farage whispering in his ear, “Hitler was right,” and, “to the gas chambers.”
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> As early as 2013, journalist and author Michael Crick had unearthed a 1981 letter from a teacher at Dulwich College accusing the young Farage of being “racist” and “fascist.” Crick demanded an explanation, but Farage brushed it off, admitting that “of course” he said “some ridiculous things” in his youth.
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> Media scrutiny is becoming harder to avoid for the MP for Clacton-on-Sea, who is no longer a marginal and provocative figure but a credible candidate for prime minister. His party, Reform UK, is leading the ruling Labour Party by around 10 points in the polls. “These allegations are entirely without foundation,” a Reform UK spokesperson said on November 11. On November 24, under pressure from the controversy, Farage broke his silence, telling Sky News he had “never directly really tried to go and hurt anybody” with his comments.
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> **Urgent calls for an internal investigation**
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> Even more damaging for his party, in light of the international context, were urgent calls for an internal investigation into interference between Reform UK and Russia, after one of Farage’s colleagues, Nathan Gill, from Wales, was sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison on November 21 for accepting money from pro-Russian political figures in Ukraine.
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> Gill, 52, a former MEP from 2014 to 2020 and member of UKIP (the Eurosceptic party led by Farage in the 2010s), accepted a total of £40,000 (€45,512) in cash to make pro-Russian statements in the European Parliament or to the media. He pleaded guilty to eight counts of corruption between December 2018 and July 2019, when he was still an MEP.
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> At the time, he was in contact with Oleh Volochyn, a former attaché at the Ukrainian embassy in Russia, who was accused of treason by Ukrainian authorities in 2023 on suspicion of being a Moscow agent. Volochyn, acting on behalf of Viktor Medvedchuk, a former Ukrainian oligarch and close ally of Vladimir Putin, provided Gill with talking points that the latter repeated almost verbatim.
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> Gill was arrested by police at Manchester airport on September 13, 2021, as he was about to board a flight to Moscow. When delivering the sentence on November 21, Judge Bobbie Cheema-Grubb stated that Gill had abused his role as a Member of the European Parliament and contributed to eroding “public confidence in democracy.” Gill, who was also tasked by Volochyn with recruiting other lawmakers to relay Moscow’s propaganda in Europe, posed “a threat to national security,” said Dominic Murphy, head of counterterrorism at the Metropolitan Police.
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> **Admiration for Putin**
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> The Reform UK party condemned the acts as “treasonous, horrific, awful.” In any case, this is too good an opportunity for Labour leader Keir Starmer, who is trying to counter the rise of the radical right-wing party in the polls, so far without much success. While answering questions from MPs on the state of peace negotiations in Ukraine in the House of Commons on Tuesday, November 25, the leader said he was “shocked” by the affair.
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> Starmer urged Reform UK to launch an internal investigation into its ties with Russia: “Reform leadership should have the courage to launch an investigation. How on earth did that happen in their party? And what other links are there?” In a country marked by Russian attacks on its soil (notably the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, southwest of London, in March 2018), where 75% of public opinion supported aid to Ukraine, Reform UK was the party most ambiguous toward Moscow. In 2014, Farage said that Putin was the leader he admired most in the world, “as an operator, but not as a human being.” He also accused the European Union of provoking Russia, “if you poke the Russian bear with a stick, he will respond.”
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> Other political parties have joined Labour in calling for an internal investigation, which Farage has so far ruled out. The Conservatives, on the other hand, are keeping a low profile: While no Tory lawmaker has been convicted of corruption with Moscow, Russian money did flow into the party, notably during Boris Johnson’s tenure at Downing Street (2019-2022). This was apparently entirely legal: The donations were made by dual nationals (Russian and British), such as Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of Putin’s former finance minister. But they have regularly been described as naïve or risky by their political opponents and the media.
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> Cécile Ducourtieux (London, correspondent)

Why is it always the ones you suspect the most? 😀

“Far-right”

The Tories used to take Russian money. But they decided to stop after we’d been at war with them for a bit. Good old traitor Nigel still taking money to destabalise and ruin the UK.