Neo-Nazi safari

New Statesman​

3 days ago

Photo by Hollie Adams/Reuters
In the 1980s, Bill Buford began work on Among the Thugs, an immersive account of the thrill of football hooliganism – or, as Buford more prosaically put it, an investigation into 'why young males in England were rioting every Saturday'. It has since been hailed as a classic study of violence and sport, of the paramilitary grandstand, but also for its insights into radicalisation and pack mentality.
When he first went undercover in the British far right in 2023, in the project that has become Year of the Rat, Harry Shukman didn't know what kind of violent potential he might find. But, as he writes in the book's introduction, his investigation has been lent a sharper salience by the events of last summer: not the weekly, rhythmic violence of the football terraces, but one fell spate. Why in August of 2024 did young males in England embark on their greatest exhibition of far-right rioting since the Second World War?
Shukman's investigation took place over the calendar year of 2023. Working with the anti-fascist campaign group Hope not Hate, he became 'Chris', an apparent sympathiser who allows himself to be led down the spiral of the far-right network, down into its rancid depths. Parts of his findings were broadcast as the Channel 4 documentary Undercover: Exposing the Far Right in October 2024. But this courageous and diligent book is the full account of Shukman's subterranean year. He is interested in what would bring otherwise everyday people to commit themselves to such doomed political ostracism, and on the more powerful interests urging extreme ideas about race, IQ and human reproduction into the mainstream. The result is a close and gripping inspection of the character of the far right and threat it poses.
Though each of Shukman's chapters cover a specific far-right group or sub-group, his book divides broadly into two halves, covering two roughly defined realms of far-right politics. The first is what we might call its proletarian, or at least quotidian aspect, hidden within British civic society. Shukman is interested in the extremists scattered among the eccentrics of everyday life, not so much reds under the bed, but the fascists among the fruitcakes. This leads him first to a group called the 'Basketweavers'. Advertising itself as a free discussion forum, and organised on secretive online forums like Discord, 'Chris' must answer an allusive political questionnaire to gain entry (asked his political views he replies that he is a 'a nationalist and a traditionalist' hoping to meet similar, innuendo enough to pass muster). This gives him access to the weavers' meet-ups in pubs, where participants are free to trade in conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism and racism.
Via the network he meets at the 'Basketweavers', Shukman's persona is able to gain invitation to further gatherings and groupings: a conference in Estonia, bringing together race scientists and manosphere influencers; an English activist group called Identity England; Britain First, a political party led by Paul Golding. Each faction has its own aesthetics – conferences like the one in Estonia attempt to appear as suave and academic as they can manage, while Britain First is ultimately heir to the kind of alleyway racism we've known from the National Front to the BNP, complete with coke-sniffing heavies and hooligan-firm veterans straight out of Buford. But several common themes do emerge across these geographies and generations.
The first is that very masculine combination of a self-pity and aggression – and it is striking how few female characters crop up in this portion of the book. Whether at the piss-up or the political demo, each of these groups is marshalled through a form of petty hierarchy more familiar to the sixth-form common room than the Sturmabteilung. At Basketweaver events, participants are egged on to cross taboo thresholds ('Say it! Say n*****! N*****!'), while the awkward and sexually inexperienced, particularly virgins, are viciously mocked. First encountering him in Estonia, Shukman introduces us to the fascinating figure of Ryan, who projects a sub-Andrew Tate lifestyle of fast cars and fast (but strictly Caucasian) women, and who touts pick-up tips to desperate young men, bringing them under his thrall. Nights out after far-right conferences often conclude with a visit to the massage parlour or the strip club. And even active members of the far right remain stranded in the swamp of adolescent sexual milestones: Shukman quotes from the autobiography of one Holocaust denier, who blames 'the late loss of [his] virginity' for placing him at odds with society from early on.
But a further common theme, not disconnected from these whimpers of neglect, was how little threat I felt from the networks and characters Shukman describes – certainly not as much as him, who exposed himself to great physical threat to report on them. Throughout the book he emphasises the intellectual networks fomenting these sites of activity, connected by phoney academics like Neema Parvini who circulate the Great Replacement theories these men then regurgitate. But whenever he gets down to head count, Shukman couldn't truly scare me. Discussing the Basketweavers, Shukman writes of an 'enormous' organisation of 'more than 2,000 members worldwide, with hundreds of them in the UK'. But he then tries to present this as an increase on Patriotic Alternative, at one time 'perhaps Britain's biggest far-right group, [with] a membership of a few hundred', which sounds quite similar to 'hundreds' to me. 'The membership of Identity England is moribund,' he concedes more straightforwardly, 'with approximately a dozen activists.' Britain First 'has represented one of the biggest far-right electoral threats', he writes elsewhere, before adding that, despite Golding's ludicrous claim of '20,000 members', there 'are around forty inner-circle activists'.
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The events of last summer show how small groups can still rally mobs to their side. And Shukman's unsparing scrutiny is clearly necessary – he writes at one point of a previous Hope not Hate investigation which revealed two members of the Royal Navy to be far-right activists, including one serving on a nuclear submarine. But though at times escalating to the scale of a far-right pogrom, the distinctive thing about the August riots was their organic, localised nature, involving individuals with little or no history of far-right involvement. And to pep up the threat from the groups he has investigated, Shukman unwisely extends his definition of far right to take in Nigel Farage ('Far-right activity in the UK takes a number of forms… These range from large parties, like Reform UK…'). While we should never shy away from what is paranoid and extreme about Farageism, there are clear differences between it and a group like Identity England. The latter is more of a sociological than a political phenomenon, involving not the clash of coherent ideological forces but the mutation of more elusive and self-selecting human neuroses.
The second half of Shukman's investigation is more threatening, interesting itself in hyper-elite incarnations of far-right ideology. This is a world of dark money and dark ideas: the IQ-derived race science promoted by quack research institutions like 'Aporia', which, posing as another potential financier, Shukman reveals has received funding from the Silicon Valley powerbroker Andrew Conru. Then there is the super-wealthy couple and parents of four, Simone and Malcolm Collins, purported pro-natalists who, Shukman reveals by again feigning personal interest in their projects, are also very interested in IQ, and make use of experimental screening technology to test their embryos for intelligence. Their goal is to sustain global humanity's cognition through the preservation of a boffin caste who can settle in exclusive, hyper-intelligent communities. (They claim to have had talks with the government of the Isle of Man to discuss establishing one such community on its territory.)
In common with the foot soldiers of the British far right, the Collinses are self-deluding and bizarre (at one very funny point in what is a surprisingly witty book, Malcolm claims that for over a decade he drank 45 beers a day, every day, which Shukman calculates as 'a beer every twenty minutes… a preposterous amount of cans'). But even if these are hobby horses, luxury bigotries, the difference is their connection to the powerful which, in the ideologically accelerationist space of Silicon Valley, is tremendous. And not just in America: through the character of Andrew Sabisky, one of Dominic Cummings' original squad of 'weirdos and misfits', Shukman shows the spread of similar ideas into the British elite. Sabisky was introduced to Boris Johnson's No 10 before being rapidly ejected when his history of publishing on evolutionary racism was unveiled. But Shukman perhaps leans slightly too much on Sabisky's braggadocio when the latter claims he's still in contact with Conservative Party intellectuals and even Westminster itself (a Conservative source told Shukman that this wasn't true).
Shukman's reporting is bold and assiduous, and provides rare documentary insight. His reasons for going undercover – that it is the only way to capture these people with true candour – is justified by his results. His writing is precise and direct, brightened by an off-key, deadpan humour (after describing a character called Sam, whose girlfriend dumped him after he embraced racial genetics, and who now refuses to date Asian or Jewish women, Shukman simply adds, 'Sam is still looking for a partner'). And his approach is elevated by an interest in the psychological state of his subjects, not their political instincts, but their pre-political conditioning. 'I was struck by their loneliness,' he writes. 'Many of them are indeed lonely, and share their disappointment that the friendships and relationships they expected from life have yet to materialise.' He quotes one Basketweaver: 'I spent most of my formative years being rejected by people.'
But ultimately Shukman's distance from the men he writes about is too great to overcome. In Among the Thugs, Bill Buford sought to understand football violence by doing it, releasing himself to the crushing mass. While Shukman released himself to the spiral of the far-right network, he couldn't abandon his consciousness to the spiral of their thinking, to the kind of impotence that longs desperately for prepotence. Understanding that sublimation has engaged and dismayed some of our very greatest minds. It is not to Shukman's discredit that he has not cracked it. Even if these politics remain opaque, we understand their shape and patterns better than we did before.
Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right
Harry Shukman
Chatto & Windus, 320pp, £20
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[See also: Southport and the rage of England]
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