There may well be, somewhere in this nation of ours, a long-established succession of sensitive, emotionally aware 14-year-olds who can appreciate and denounce the impact of bullying. But, honestly, none of them went to my school.
It doesn’t sound like there were many of this cadre at Dulwich College half a century ago either. At least, not if we believe the recent Guardian ‘scoop’ which claims, thanks to the testimony of Nigel Farage’s fellow pupils (much of which was made public years ago), that the Reform leader was a racist, hate-fuelled youth who taunted anyone of a different faith or ethnicity. It all sounds pretty familiar to me, though my 1990s education was spent at a rickety northern state school rather than in a fee-paying establishment in the poshest part of south London.
Regardless of how much money parents throw at their children’s education, there’s little they can do to either stop their child getting bullied or to prevent them from becoming a bully. This is because children and young teenagers have yet to develop any moral code whatsoever. If there was any axiom to codify in my playground in Chester way back in the Britpop era, it was this: if it’s funny enough then absolutely no consideration need be given as to how the victim might feel.
The only abuse considered off limits during lunchbreak at my school was saying anything pertaining to the colour of someone’s skin. Even at the age of 12, my friends and I knew that was wrong. Though how we could exclude that kind of abuse but still find it funny to mimic Japanese voices or scrawl ‘you big queer’ on the exercise books of anyone we thought deserved it is a deeply unpleasant mystery. Trust me, there would have been transphobic abuse too if anyone had known what that was back then.
I recently found out that a guy in my year who I was reasonably close to has since ‘come out’. I can’t help but wince at how he must have felt in my school, a place where kids took their social cues from the overwhelmingly white and lower middle class district immediately beyond the school gates. Three decades ago Chester and the Wirral were places, much like most of small-town England at the time, where homophobic slurs were a quotidian staple. Using the words ‘poof’, ‘queer’ or ‘bent’ was the default to describe anything from a bad haircut to, bizarrely, a poor choice of girl to snog in the park.
I’ve been both bullied (in primary school) and something of a bully myself in the latter years of my education. Having the Teflon tough hide to laugh off any amount of piss-taking was held in very high regard in my social circle and we baited each other endlessly. But the only element of that environment that I’ve taken into the adult world is a sharp tongue and a genuine curiosity about anyone who went to a private school. Everything less pleasant got washed away with a diet of soft drugs, Joni Mitchell and a few Herman Hesse novels.
To condemn Farage now for being a stupid, nasty teen makes about as much sense as boycotting the BBC because they used to give screen time to Jim Davidson
Farage has denied that he racially abused anybody. But I find it strange that he is so reluctant to make this issue go away by simply owning up to the fact that, like so many teens, he might well have said things that he wasn’t mature enough to even begin to think through properly. It’s absurd to accuse him of being somehow a seasoned ideologue of the fascist far-right at the age of 14. Even Enoch Powell was too busy memorising Homer in the original at that age to indulge in racist playground taunts.
For victims of the most serious school bullying, the effects can be lifelong and very damaging to future relationships and careers. But people do recover – usually by making sure they go on to have a much more successful life than the bully who tormented them. Farage, it seems, is in the rare position of being the bully who has succeeded. What better way to mark that triumph than by being open to the fact that he was, decades ago, probably just another unpleasant and insecure teen who was willing to say pretty much anything in order to avoid having other bullies turn on him.
Vile behaviour in young teenage boys is not, and cannot be, fuelled by a genuinely bigoted outlook. Kids of 14 don’t have ideologies. They just want to make their mates laugh. How they choose to do that can, in retrospect, look as problematic as an episode of The Black And White Minstrel Show. To condemn Farage now for being a stupid, nasty 14-year-old makes about as much sense as boycotting the BBC because they used to give screen time to Jim Davidson. It all smacks of the desperate. If Farage’s opponents want to ‘get’ him, they really need to do a bit better than this.
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