How do you defeat the far-right? That’s a question that’s becoming increasingly hard to answer, according to the head of Britain’s leading anti-racism campaign group, Hope Not Hate.
Nick Lowles, whose organisation helped mastermind the destruction of the far-right BNP, told me that the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in some ways poses a much bigger, more difficult and dangerous threat than was ever posed by the party formerly led by Nick Griffin.
“Back in 1999 the British National Party, led by a man who was a Holocaust denier,, thought that Britain shouldn’t have gone to war with Germany and believed that black people were genetically inferior to whites, he… dropped the BNP’s repatriation policy because he they felt they couldn’t even sell it to their own supporters anymore,” Lowles said in an interview with me for Byline Times.
“And now we’re facing a situation where a party that is leading in the polls can literally in the space of two weeks, have two policies that could be deporting a million people from this country, and there’s very little pushback in the media or in political circles”.
Lowles, whose brilliant new book ‘How to Defeat the Far Right’ was published on Thursday, said the media and other political parties were helping to mainstream Reform’s “extreme” ideas.
He also expressed his frustration at what he described as the “silence” from Keir Starmer over the ongoing surge of far-right political parties and protests.
“I wrote to the Prime Minister myself… articulating my frustration with that strategy, because at the time when people needed leadership there was silence,” Lowles told me.
“And the trouble is for the far right, that silence just emboldened them further.”
Lowles’ intervention comes as the Prime Minister prepares to deliver a speech on Friday responding to the growing pressure for him to take a tougher line against Reform.
His speech will be his most explicit attack yet on the politics of Farage and will likely assuage concerns among some Labour MPs. However, he is also expected to double down on some of his previous anti-migration rhetoric, albeit not in as controversial terms as his widely-criticised ‘Island of Strangers’ speech.
As ever with Starmer, such mixed messaging risks dulling its impact, especially as the speech is also expected to outline some of the more positive things the Government is doing, including its plans announced earlier today to invest more cash in deprived communities.
As Lowles pointed out in our discussion, it is tackling such deprivation, rather than yet more self-defeating appeals to anti-migrant sentiment, that is the real solution to the rise of Reform and the far-right.
With support for Reform highest in high-deprivation, but *low-migration* areas, it is tackling the former that is the real key to stamp out Farage’s support, rather than yet more promises to ‘Stop the Boats’ or ‘Smash the Gangs’.
Such a realisation appears to be slow coming to the Government however, with today’s papers full of yet more speculation as to if and when Downing Street will ever get round to scrapping the two child benefit cap.
The truth is that scrapping this policy, which even the Government’s own studies reportedly show is now the main driver of child poverty in the UK, would do more to convince poorer families that the Labour party is on their side than any amount of chasing Reform’s tail on immigration.
You can watch the full recording of my interview with Nick Lowles at the top of this post.
