Review: Undercover in the British far right

Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right

Harry Shukman

Chatto & Windus, £20, pp320

Sometime around the turn of the century, I spent a few days following the then British National Party leader Nick Griffin. It was both a dispiriting and reassuring assignment, because while it was depressing to speak to people who seemed so motivated by paranoia and hatred, it was a sort of comfort to see close up how poor their organisation was and how unimpressive its activists.

Some years later, a former paratrooper, who I interviewed in the piece, wrote to The Observer complaining that he was really working undercover for the South Yorkshire police. There was no way of establishing the truth of that claim, but it did make me think that the far right was probably riddled with informers as well as incompetents, and as a consequence I tended to take slightly less seriously the periodic warnings that the bogeyman of neofascism was on the march again.

I recalled these thoughts while reading Harry Shukman’s compelling account of the year he spent undercover infiltrating a number of far-right groups. The participants he encounters among half-disguised organisations such as the Basketweavers, a network of young men with incel sympathies, or more obvious outfits such as Britain First still seem as weird and clueless as those I met more than two decades ago. There are two young podcasters who practise semen retention, staring into the sun and drinking turpentine in order to cleanse themselves. Or the canvasser who believes that Stonehenge is a Victorian fake.

Yet despite all this lunatic eccentricity, there is little question that the background mood music has taken a turn towards something darker and more threatening. Much of that is to do with Donald Trump’s second presidency in the US, which has not only produced a rightwing authoritarian-leaning government, but also empowered far-right fellow travellers both in the US and abroad, including in the UK.

Shukman notes that academics tend to speak about the “radical” and “extreme” right, the difference being that the former at least pays lip service to the democratic process, even if it seeks to undermine it, whereas the latter rejects democracy in toto. Skirting such distinctions, he sticks to “far right”, a designation under which he lumps everything from proud neo-Nazis to Reform.

I’m not sure how helpful this broad-brush approach is in identifying the most concerning trends and figures, and it may even have the counterproductive effect of further alienating Reform voters, arguably the largest electoral block at this moment in time, from mainstream politics.

But this catholic definition of the far right does have the benefit of establishing links in policy and, in some instances, personnel between the different strands of political activity to the right of the Conservative party.

Bearing a false identity, Shukman, who comes from a Jewish family, places himself in some hairy situations rigged up with a secret camera. At one point he becomes convinced that a particularly aggressive and gym-pumped leader of some deranged groupuscule is staring at his camera. On several occasions he is asked, half-jokingly, if he is an undercover spy for the anti-fascist campaign group Hope Not Hate (he is).

He meets many people who are overtly antisemitic, and is sometimes encouraged to join in their racist rhetoric. It’s unfair to say that everyone is anti-Jewish on the far right; many are instead anti-Muslim. There seems to be some ideological disagreement in these circles about whether to focus animosity on Muslims, on the basis of numbers and cultural difference, or on Jews, on account of their supposed influence and political control. A common compromise seems to be to do both.

Shukman travels between forlorn English pubs and drunken conferences in European cities, seeking to gain access to the innermost circles of the new far right. All the characters that feature share the same dream: getting their hands on a transformative slice of the fortunes of sympathetic Silicon Valley billionaires.

There is some evidence of success in this endeavour, particularly among that sector of the far right that is obsessed with genetics, intelligence and eugenics. The author is to be commended for his efforts, which must have taken courage and determination, not because he was necessarily under physical threat (even if that danger can never be discounted), but because it’s seldom pleasant to pretend to be someone else and to suppress one’s own thoughts and feelings.

Although it’s always wise to know what extreme political activists are up to, it’s also worth asking how effective such exposés are. Do these people and groups go away with their heads hung in shame after the truth is revealed, or do they simply metamorphose into still more paranoid and conspiratorial forms?

As democratic politics continues to come under ever more criticism and strain, such questions are likely to grow in strategic importance.

Photograph Wiktor Szymanowicz/Getty Images

Order Year of the Rat at observershop.co.uk for a special 20% launch offer. Delivery charges may apply