Which side are you on? Talking to an infiltrator of far right protests

 “Mass-Deportations Now” was the statement in block capitals on a twenty-person-wide purple banner when UKIP came to demonstrate in Nottingham this summer, drawing in around a hundred supporters near the castle.

 But in that UKIP crowd was an anomaly – not the seven foot tall Robin Hood statue but an infiltrator. An infiltrator who, by their own admission, can blend into a far-right crowd because they’re old, white, and bald. I’ll refer to this person as ‘George’ – a pseudonym to protect their identity.

George isn’t part of UKIP or the far-right – he’s someone with a history of campaigning against prejudice, so when I heard he’d managed to get into the UKIP demonstration my ears pricked up. Especially in light of local elections, the rise of the far-right, and the recent England flag makeover of roundabouts across the country.

“It's not infiltrating like Hope Not Hate have done,” George says. “Where you are in an environment with them, you are betraying them, and you're isolated with violent criminal terrorist people.”

If terms like ‘criminal’ or ‘terrorist’ seem hyperbolic, it's worth remembering the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right terrorist, and the foiled murder plot of another Labour MP Rosie Cooper by a far-right terrorist, which Hope Not Hate helped prevent.

Although George readily admits that the infiltration he’s done is tame in comparison to what others have done, he does tell me what can go wrong.

“Hardcore organisers know about infiltrators and they know how to spot them. You ask something and suddenly they go, ‘Why are you asking?’- that's the scary moment.”

Has it ever happened to George? “There was only one time when somebody said ‘You're not one of us are you?’ and I went ‘Well what's one of us mate?’ and you have to front it out.”

So how did the recent UKIP demonstration in Nottingham pan out?

“What he [Nick Tenconi, UKIP leader] was saying was: number one, Keir Starmer is a communist, and is imposing a Muslim caliphate. Number two, all those protesters [the counter-protesters against UKIP] are cancer, they need to be cut out and deported along with the criminals.”

That's a lot to take in, and it's one criticism of listening to someone with extreme views, whereby you will inevitably hear extreme things without being any the wiser. Whilst that contention is debatable, it does seem more interesting to hear what the followers think rather than the leaders. George spoke to some people who attended.

“I said ‘Why did you come here?’ and he goes ‘My dad was in UKIP and we got an email, so we knew that they were coming, but we didn't know anything about the group or the guy that's taken over’. I asked ‘What did you think of it?’ and they both said ‘Rubbish - and what about them stupid crosses?’”

The protesters are talking about the eight foot tall wooden crucifixes that were an oddly prominent feature, though not so odd when you consider that UKIP are a Christian nationalist party - even if they’re more likely to deport the Second Coming than embrace them. The conversation soon moves from events this summer to last summer.

After the tragic deaths of six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar in Southport, as well as injuries to six other children and two adults, protests and counter-protests swept the nation, fuelled by false claims that the killer was a Muslim refugee.

Nottingham was one of the cities that saw these protests occur. I stood amongst the 300 people counter-protesting, and George was there too – moving between those opposing migration and those supporting it.

“Last summer, I'd seen what happened, place after place…” George recalls. “They (anti-immigration protesters) actually won. The terrible scenes, where an asylum seeker hotel was set on fire, got very close to really seriously injuring people. Nottingham has got a long reputation of doing it slightly differently, and I'm quite proud of that.”

I ask George what he means about Nottingham doing it differently.

“It goes right back to the 1970s when a local entrepreneur, for want of a better word, funded a National Front office.”

The National Front is a far-right political party that, under several layers of dust, is still wheezing along, originally formed by merging the League of Empire Loyalists, the British National Party, and the Racial Preservation Society – which should give you more than enough to understand what they stand for.

”At that time the National Front was almost making a breakthrough and could, a bit like Reform now, have suddenly become a major competitor to the Conservatives,” says George.

“We had good opposition generally – trade unionists, socialists, anti-fascists. And a significant Black and Asian population which was also not going to take it. That combination set a reputation that Nottingham wasn't the place to come to if you were a far-right organization.”

Last summer Nottingham showed that it still wasn’t the place. After a tense emotional stand-off by the Brian Clough statue, there were subsequent anti-immigrant protests across Nottinghamshire.

“A week later they'd organised to target solicitors in West Bridgford who'd helped immigrants. I think about twenty turned up there. There were about several hundred counter-protesters. Then a week later, they planned another demonstration at the Brian Clough statue – four of them there. You don't have to be a genius to work out that they were demoralised. It was a successful counter-protest.”

Though George is keen to state that successful counter-protests are not inevitable.

“We've won over and over before, but we can lose as well,” he says.

Throughout the conversation with George I’m still drawn to why he does it and what he’s able to get from infiltrating protests.

“I don't actually believe the vast majority of the far-right – the ones who are attracted to the demonstrations, attracted to the asylum seeker hotels – are hugely different from a lot of other people,” he explains. “I actually talk to them. ‘Why are you doing it?’ They say ‘I can't get a job’ or ‘cost of living’ or ‘this government’. I agree - I'm frustrated. Most people are frustrated.”

It’s a frustration built upon decades of widening inequality, seemingly never-ending austerity, and trust in the government falling to an all-time low. What’s left is the perfect breeding ground for populist parties like UKIP and Reform built on a platform of ‘really listening to people’s concerns’ attracting a wide range of people - people who know what these parties really stand for and people who simply don’t.

In September the Unite the Kingdom rally marched through London, the largest far-right demonstration in British history. In attendance was Nick Tenconi, going from a meagre hundred people in his Nottingham UKIP protest to standing shoulder-to-shoulder with approximately 150,000 people.

Other far-right figures present were airing such extreme views as kicking out all religions other than Christianity and the Great Replacement conspiracy theory (the idea that white people are being replaced by or becoming extinct due to non-white people). In short, calling for a rapid retroactive end to multi-culturalism.

That’s why back in Nottingham during the UKIP demonstration, counter-protesters could be heard chanting “Nazi scum”, because under the thin veneer of ‘protecting women and children’ there is usually blatant white nationalism hiding in plain sight.

“You'll never outdo the far-right,” says George. “If you say, ‘We're going to stop the boats’, then somebody else will go ‘We should be sinking the boats’.”

It’s worth pointing out that the small boats crisis has been a consequence of Brexit, whereby irregular migrants can no longer be returned to the first safe EU country they had entered.

So whilst it’s never been more important to listen and talk to each other, it's important to remember that listening is not the same as abandoning our values, and appeasing the far-right typically only leads to further more disastrous lurches to the right. Let’s keep challenging these extreme views and let’s make sure that Nottingham remains ‘not the place’.