Farage, Trump, and the risks for UK universities
Image sourced from: Mirror Online at https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farage-says-can-help-34374181
When rhetoric rhymes: Farage, Trump, and the risks for UK universities
Nigel Farage’s address to Reform UK’s annual conference in Birmingham on 5 September 2025 was a clear signal that universities are being re-cast as political antagonists rather than public assets. In a line that will reverberate across the sector, he said universities were “poisoning the minds” of students with a “twisted interpretation of history” (Reform UK conference, Birmingham, 5 September 2025, Times Higher Education).
The wording is not incidental. It mirrors the American culture-war lexicon that has already reshaped US policy on schools and universities during and since the Trump presidency. And it sits alongside Farage’s earlier broadcast claim that “many of our universities… have become absolutely drunk on foreign money, be it grants from China or foreign students” (GB News monologue, 14 May 2024). The combination universities as indoctrinators and as compromised by overseas funding creates a frame in which higher education appears both culturally suspect and financially “captured”. That is the predicate for intervention.
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