By Mark Gullick
06/05/2023
The communist enforcer Hope Not Hate is the British equivalent of America’s Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. It releases an annual report (downloadable here), entitled State of Hate, the aim of which claims to be to provide “the most comprehensive and analytical guide to the state of far-right extremism in Britain today.” This year’s report is certainly both analytical and comprehensive, but it lacks one key element: far-right extremism.
State Of Hate notes, for example, an alarming jump of 11 per cent in terrorism convictions:
Last year (2022) 20 people were convicted of terrorism-related offences, up from 18 in 2020.
(Note: These figures include only white British offenders.)
Twenty people. But with the exception of a man who threw petrol bombs at a migrant center, then killed himself, all of were involved in online activity, paraphernalia, and literature, i.e., speech. The literature is almost always The Anarchist’s Cookbook and The White Resistance Manual, both freely available on the internet. There were nine teenagers sentenced, one of whom had a “Nazi dagger.” One group had a partially printed 3D gun.
Hope Not Hate is all too obviously longing for a Timothy McVeigh or an Anders Behring Breivik, and all it has is a rogues’ gallery of low-IQ misfits talking about bomb manuals in adolescent chat-rooms. For Hope Not Hate, the problem is not that there is too much “far-right” violence — it is that there is nowhere near enough.
Hope Not Hate’s review of identifiable groups shows similar desperation. Vanguard Britannia, for example, is described as “a fascist group that engages in stickering and graffiti.” This is hardly a British version of The Proud Boys or The Oath Keepers (which were actually Alt-Lite and ostentatiously multiracial, but did have a street presence).
A report on “far-right extremism” needs a bigger threat than graffiti, and the way Hope Not Hate manufactures this threat is by a now familiar misuse of language.
The term “far right” is the British equivalent of the Biden administration’s mantra of “White Supremacy.” The U.K. has occasionally produced organizations who could reasonably be described as far right, from Mosley’s British Union of Fascists to the National Front and British National Party in the 1970s and 1980s, and the term has some residual meaning. Mostly, though, it is a label, a token reduced to meaninglessness in the manner recognized by Orwell with regards to “fascist” in his essay Politics and the English Language. Enoch Powell, talking to Dick Cavett in 1969, made the same point about the word “racist,” which, said Powell, “is a term of abuse and it works best the less defined it is.”
Hope Not Hate does give a definition of “far right,” but one which still leaves the term so elastic as to easily accommodate as many as possible for their purposes:
The far right is an umbrella term that encompasses those individuals and organizations whose political outlook is more extreme or hardline than those of the centre right of the mainstream political spectrum.
But when you find feminist Kellie-Jay Keen, ex-Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam, Baroness Cox, and Conservative Woman magazine in the same report on far-right extremism and terrorism as soccer fans British Street Commandos, the North East Infidels, and Tommy Robinson, you are entitled to the opinion that the qualifying criteria for entry to the far right are broad.
The report’s section Profiling the Far Right best illustrates Hope Not Hate’s problem in trying to conjure a far-right terrorist threat from a handful of fairly anodyne conservative voices. Its profiles include Nigel Farage; YouTubers Katie Hopkins, Carl Benjamin, and Paul Joseph Watson; Turning Point UK; GB News; and the Reform and Reclaim parties, led by a property investment mogul and an actor respectively.
This is not so much an extremist bloc as the guest-list at a very agreeable, middle-class dinner party in London’s Hampstead suburb (= Greenwich, CT).
Immigration is the report’s main focus, and the harassment of “migrants” aka illegal immigrants is the jewel in the crown of State Of Hate 2023. In fact, there have been various small, local demonstrations outside hotels rented out by the Home Office to house migrants, as well as visits to some hotels by citizen journalists, but these are predictably portrayed in State Of Hate as torchlight parades and Gestapo raids. Thus Steve Laws, interviewed for VDARE.com here, merely films illegal arrivals. But he gets a full-page spread in State Of Hate, in which he is described as a “migrant hunter.”
The report, however, has added a new protected characteristic this year, and it is one which may lead to intersectional conflict. Protests against “drag-queen story hour” are rare in Britain, but rarity is what Hope Not Hate has to magnify. Yet there is a difficulty: many of these protests have been by Muslims. The Left does not want to know that Islam is far more conservative than the tattooed Nazis they imagine they see everywhere.
And Muslims also act in an inconvenient way for Hope Not Hate’s purposes in the case of Andrew Tate.
Tate (who is part-black, not that this is mentioned) is the subject of a whole section of State Of Hate. Unfortunately for Hope Not Hate in that he has not only praised Islam for some years, but recently even converted to the faith. Among the blizzard of polling data in State Of Hate is the fact that 61% of Muslim schoolboys polled admire Tate, which it calls “by far the biggest level of support among any sub-group in our poll.”
As Nietzsche wrote in The Antichrist(§59): “Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with men….”
Elon Musk is also a target of State Of Hate for buying Twitter and subsequently reinstating some banned accounts — including Tate’s.
Two major subtexts of State Of Hate’s concerns are conflated in a section on conspiracy theories:
Over 2022, the UK’s loose COVID-denial movement increasingly drew energy from other issues that could be absorbed into its overarching narrative: a narrative about an elite cabal or “New World Order” pulling the strings of world events.
This is a very strange statement. With the World Economic Forum, George Soros, Davos, Bilderberg, and BlackRock all hidden in plain sight, it is hard to make an argument against such an elite cabal existing. Organizations such as Hope Not Hate, of course, yearn for a globalist order because they believe they would play a part in it. And they are probably justified in that belief.
Editor of State Of Hate Nick Lowles has to walk a fine diplomatic line in that he must keep British Jewry happy, as they laid down the template for victimhood, and also ensure that Islamophobia has a healthy presence in the report. But whereas Jews are curiously conspicuous by their absence in State Of Hate, there is a large section on a Parliamentary caucus, the New Issues Group, deemed to be anti-Islamic.
Also drawing fire from State Of Hate is the recently released government-commissioned Shawcross Report on the functioning of the Prevent scheme, a government program originally designed to counter Islamic extremism. As the program developed and doubtless under pressure from the Muslim Council of Great Britain (the equivalent of CAIR in the USA), its focus shifted to the “far right.” The Shawcross Report [PDF] recommends the focus be shifted back to Islam, as statistics would ordinarily demand. Needless to say, this is being denounced as yet another example of Islamophobia.
What State Of Hate shows, apart from being a handy directory for the journalist, is how atomized the right is in Britain. The Left may have different subsets but, like teams in a sports league, although they differ, they are all doing essentially the same thing. The right is composed of disparate voices. Various sects won’t speak to others, there is no consensus which might lead to the sharing of resources, and uniting the right is like herding cats.
So the annual report on British “far-right extremism” is Hamlet without the prince.
Hope Not Hate communists are nothing if skilled media tacticians, and they know that a simple semantic modification to the term “far right,” the suggestion of affiliation between wholly different individuals and organizations under that blanket term, and their connections with the right people (Hope Not Hate partly funded by politicians, celebrities, and trade unions) will maintain the illusion of threat.
There is a lot of money, and political power, in manufactured dysfunction.
Mark Gullick has a PhD in philosophy. Originally from London, he has relocated to Costa Rica. He has also written for TakiMag, New English Review, Counter Currents (including a monthly UNION JACKAL column on general political and cultural topics), Standpoint and The Brazen Head.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.