How to defeat Britain’s far right

如何击败英国的极右翼势力

Today in Focus

2025-09-29

38 分钟
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Hope Not Hate founder Nick Lowles has spent decades researching, infiltrating and helping communities to combat far-right groups. But now, he says, ‘they have their sights on our multicultural society’. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus
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  • This is The Guardian.

  • Today, how to defeat the far right.

  • So we're on...

  • this one particular day the BMP were meeting in a pub in Hollywood and the weather outside was 90 degrees.

  • It was a sweltering day in the summer of 2001 and instead of enjoying the sunshine Nick Lowles was sweating in the back of a van in a pub car park in Oldham in Greater Manchester.

  • Now we were sitting in a van for probably about seven hours and it was like sitting in a coke can.

  • It was unbelievable.

  • We ended up, we were sitting in our boxer shorts, we were so hot.

  • Two months earlier, race riots had erupted across the town and the BMP,

  • the far-right British National Party, sensed an opportunity.

  • Inside the pub, Nick Griffin, the BMP's leader,

  • a Holocaust denier who wanted Britain to be, quote, 99% white, was holding a meeting.

  • Outside, the other Nick, let's call him the good Nick, wanted to know who was going to show up.

  • That's why, along with a colleague from the anti-fascist group Searchlight,

  • he was sat silently in his pants with a long lens trained on the pub entrance.

  • People were coming up trying to peer in to see if anyone was inside.

  • It was kind of one-way window so we could see out clearly, but they obviously couldn't see it.

  • But of course, in those sorts of situations, you never know whether it's going to work or not.

  • Nick held his breath as a man from a neo-Nazi group approached the blackout windows.

  • One of the people who had been involved with Combat 18 was peering in.