The greatest victory of the far-right has been to prevent us calling them far-right.
Over the weekend, there were protests outside an asylum hotel in Epping, triggered by an Ethiopian asylum seeker being charged with trying to kiss a schoolgirl. He denies any wrongdoing.
Many organisers and participants are signed-up members of far right groups. One of the administrators for the Facebook group “Epping Says No” is a former member of the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative, who later joined splinter group Homeland. Members of WhiteVanguard, another neo-Nazi group, were seen at a protest handing out leaflets. The former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson is threatening to join a protest this week.
When the Times newspaper stood outside an asylum hotel in Norfolk this week, a car filled with young men drove by. One leant out the window and shouted: “We’re going to kill you all.”
These protests deserve the same treatment as the protests we saw a year ago, which metastasised into full-on race-riots. They need condemnation. They require us to hold the line and keep far-right politics in the gutter where it belongs.
This is a two-stage process. At one level we have the outright Nazis who participate in these events. They should be condemned, censured and ostracised. They should be treated like the thugs they are. But at the second level we have the non-ideological, everyday people who attend these demos. Perhaps they saw a leaflet somewhere about children no longer being safe. Perhaps they believed what they read about asylum seekers in a right-wing tabloid.
These people are obviously different to members of fascist organisations, but they are wrong and they should be told they’re wrong, without the patronising tip-toeing nonsense which currently defines our approach to them. White Brits are accused of sexual assault every day. We don’t see protestors outside their hotels. Why should asylum seekers be defined by the worst behaviour or the worst of their group? The only possible reason is prejudice and racism.
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Times are hard. Inflation and economic stagnation have decimated people’s spending power. But asylum seekers are not the ones to blame for this situation. Just 0.6 per cent of the UK population consists of people who came to the country seeking asylum. Adjusted by population size, we only received the 20th highest number of asylum applications in Europe, with 12.5 applications per 10,000 residents.
This crisis has been invented. It is a myth, a fiction. It is the fairytale the far-right made up to convert people’s frustrations over economic pain into resentment of newcomers: the oldest trick in the fascist playbook.
This is the message Reform UK spreads in its unique space on the margin of the mainstream and the far-right.
Last week, deputy leader Richard Tice commented on the story about the Afghan safe route in the following way: “We may be letting in sex offenders, potential terrorists and criminals.” This is the standard formulation. Asylum seekers are never presented as people fleeing oppression or war. They are invariably presented as criminals and rapists.
Party leader Nigel Farage then plays a very delicate game. He ensures he has plausible deniability by condemning far-right thugs, but then encourages the protests.
Last year, when rioters were trying to burn asylum seekers alive, he said he was “totally appalled by the levels of violence”. But he had in fact stoked those riots by saying: “I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us. Something is going horribly wrong in our once beautiful country.”
This year he says “there were some bad eggs that turned up at Epping”. But, as usual, he stokes the protests by saying: “We are letting in every week… many hundreds of undocumented young males, many of whom come from cultures in which women and young girls are not even treated as second-class citizens.”
This is the narrative frame which is then adopted by the broadcasters and mainstream politicians. Moderate Conservative James Cleverly appeared on the Today programme this morning. The very first question he was asked was: “Do you have sympathy for people who’ve been protesting outside asylum hotels?” What an extraordinary question. No one seems to ask it of the people protesting over Gaza or the young people at Just Stop Oil demonstrations.
His answer was even more extraordinary. Cleverly condemned any rioting, but decided that the blame lay with “agitators both on the left and right” who were “descending on these communities to try to stir things up”. He was drawing a moral equivalence between Nazis and counter-demonstrations by a group called Stand Up to Racism. How did we reach a point where racists and anti-racists are considered politically equivalent in the mind of a mainstream politician? What kind of moral relativity has he succumbed to in order to make this statement?
With that caveat out the way, Cleverly went out of his way to express his sympathies. “I understand the desire to protest,” he said. “I do understand why local people are frustrated.”
He is not alone. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told Cabinet yesterday that immigration – along with other factors – was having a “profound impact on society” and that the “social fabric” had to be repaired. Home Office minister Seema Malhotra told the BBC that “we recognise people’s frustrations… People are angry, and I feel angry too.” Keir Starmer took to X, a social media site infested with the far-right, to reassure people that “we’re cracking down on migrants working illegally”.
You can see the entire landscape of moral decline at moments like this, the geological survey of our national radicalisation. It involves outright neo-Nazis, their cheerleaders in Parliament, the gullible protestors who adopt their agenda, the centre-right politicians who equate them with anti-racists and the centre-left politicians who pretend they have valid concerns because they do not have the courage to call them what they are.
Cowering in the corner will not save us from the far-right. Paying superficial lip-service to their prejudices will not defeat them. The only way to battle this ideology is to challenge it, to refute it, to speak firmly and passionately against it, to ostracise it, to make it socially shameful, to reject its narrative, to tear the poison out at the root.
Unless we have politicians and journalists prepared to do that, we will continue to sink into this poisonous swamp.
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