Claim a6cbab0bChecked 09 Jul 2026
TrueOn the truth scale
“You appear to have a loathing for the very concept of the existence of nation states.”
Reasoning & Evidence09 Jul 2026
The claim is accurate. The sentence appears verbatim in a published full transcript of Nigel Farage’s European Parliament speech attacking Herman Van Rompuy on 24 February 2010, and the European Parliament’s official record confirms Farage spoke in that debate. A scholarly article reproducing the speech text includes the exact line: “You appear to have a loathing for the very concept of the existence of nation states; perhaps that is because you come from Belgium...”. (hudoc.echr.coe.int) Sources: European Parliament, verbatim/minutes of the 24 February 2010 plenary debate; Redescriptions, “Insults in the European Parliament: Between Self-Rationalisation and Intercultural Turbulence.”
From article
Except towards [Herman Van Rompuy,] the president of the European Council? You told him to his face he had ‘the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk’.3On February 24, 2010, he told Herman Van Rompuy, the first full-time president of the European Council: ‘We were told that, when we had a president, we’d see a giant global political figure. … I’m afraid what we got was you. … I don’t want to be rude, but … you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk. … You appear to have a loathing for the very concept of the existence of nation states. Perhaps that’s because you come from Belgium, which of course is pretty much a non-country.’
Sources opened+ 156 search hits considered
| [1] | europarl.europa.eu |
| [2] | euractiv.com |
| [3] | hudoc.echr.coe.int |
| [4] | journal-redescriptions.org |