A photo shows Nigel Farage accompanying National Front member Martin Webster.
We don’t know who the person next to Mr Webster is, but it almost certainly isn’t Mr Farage. There is no evidence to suggest Mr Farage was ever a National Front member.
A picture, which people are claiming shows a young Nigel Farage with prominent former National Front member Martin Webster, has been shared thousands of times across Facebook and other social media. The picture is being used to argue that Mr Farage was a member of the far-right British political party.
The photo does show Mr Webster leaving court surrounded by a group of followers in 1979.
However, similarly to Channel 4’s Factcheck, while we have been unable to confirm who the person next to Webster is, a number of people with knowledge of the National Front at that time have said that they do not believe it to be Mr Farage. Nor do they recall him ever being a member of the National Front.
Joseph Pearce, a former National Front member, told Full Fact he couldn’t say for sure but—given his own heavy involvement with the party at the time, and the fact that he had not heard of Mr Farage then—he would be surprised if the person shown was Mr Farage.
Gerry Gable, editor of Searchlight—a magazine that investigates and opposes fascism, antisemitism and racism in Britain and abroad—and now working with Northampton University’s Searchlight project, said that all those in the photo were known National Front members, but he didn’t know their names. Gable added there is no evidence to suggest Mr Farage was a National Front member.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false as there is no evidence to suggest Mr Farage was a member of the National Front.
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