A Sensible Centrist’s Guide to Hope Not Hate
Hope Not Hate is a self-described “anti-fascist” pressure group based in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 2004 by communist-affiliated Nick Lowles after the antecedent group, Searchlight, of which Lowles was a co-editor, abused its charitable status by engaging in political activism.
This group markets itself as a “charitable organisation,” that claims “non-sectarian” and “non-partisan” status but is free as a private limited company to disseminate biased political messaging, maintain close ties to Labour, other far-left NGOs, and cooperate with the British civil service.
By leveraging their claimed neutrality, Hope Not Hate has been able to disseminate exclusively anti-right-wing editorial content under the guise of a broadchurch “anti-extremist” mission. To do this, it employs motte-and-bailey argumentation that blurs any distinction between “anti-extremism” and “anti-fascism”.
They conflate these two terms and seamlessly switch between them depending on the situation and context. This muddying of the waters allows the organisation to effectively ignore any and all other forms of “extremism” such as the genuine threats to life posed by radical Islam, which by an overwhelming margin, remains the most significant domestic threat to the UK.
Differences over this state cooperation led to the official divorce between Searchlight and Hope Not Hate in 2011. However, principally, these two organisations remain ideologically synchronous, and each continues to maintain a far-left bent, a facet well reflected in Lowles’ track record of Zionist, communist, and anti-national collaboration.
In early 2019, shortly before the suspension of Labour MP Chris Williamson, Lowles offered his support to and called for the party to adopt policy from the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly known as Poale Zion. It is a Marxist-Zionist movement that precludes non-Jews from full membership.
Despite touting democracy as a core value, Hope Not Hate has previously collaborated with “Best for Britain,” an anti-Brexit campaign that sought to overturn the result of the 2016 EU referendum, before rebranding as an “internationalist” political group.
Additionally, there is a prolonged history of cooperation between the various arms of the state and so-called ‘research organisations’ like Hope Not Hate and Searchlight. They have received funding from a variety of sources, such as NGOs, trade unions, and even directly from the Home Office; funding rubber-stamped directly by the Conservative government; funding used to bitterly slander them in a humiliating display epitomises the self-flagellant nature of the Tory government, entirely submissive to these kinds of organisations.
One must ask, why? Why has Hope Not Hate been receiving government funding from the Home Office? To answer this question, we must establish that the transparent function of Hope Not Hate acts to delegitimise critical voices and attack unorthodox, non-regime-compliant sentiment through overt defamation and libel of opposition by peddling politically charged, partisan ‘reports’ and ‘investigations’ under the false guise of science.
A likely theory is that Hope Not Hate serves as a cutout for MI5, as there is a clear-shared incentive between the organisation and the UK’s intelligence machinery. By collecting information on private citizens, compiling it, and then repackaging and disseminating said information in the form of these dossiers and reports, a task that would fall outside their remit as an arm of the civil service, the shared incentive becomes clear. While the specific nature of their government fund remains unclear, it is ultimately irrelevant so long as those mutual interests remain in place.
Of these reports, Hope Not Hate’s most recent is the latest in a series of annuals titled “State of Hate,” which invoke ersatz, nonsensical claims about many influencers in the mainstream and online right whose alleged threat is underpinned by a manufactured notion of ‘the rising tide of far-right extremism’.
One notable target of Hope Not Hate’s vitriol is Neema Parvini, also known by his online handle ‘Academic Agent’, a published author, academic, and recent GB News feature who has been subject to a series of serious claims in the March report, which unjustly characterises his views as “extreme” and portrays him as a “far-right activist” who is “aligned with the scientific racism community”.
These claims are asserted wholly without evidence and serve only to directly contradict Dr. Parvini’s published works, who on the topic of race writes: “The evidence overwhelmingly suggests, despite typical variations in physical and mental abilities within groups, biologically speaking, people everywhere are essentially the same in their natural capacities, even if not wholly identical.” Further clarifying, “people vary much more within groups than between groups.” (Shakespeare’s Moral Compass, p. 55).
This issue is also addressed in Dr. Parvini’s latest work, ‘Prophets of Doom’, where he offers an alternative interpretation of de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaine, where the previous unscientific racial categorizations are replaced by poetic ideals entirely decoupled from notions of scientific racism.
These are the only two instances where Parvini nominally addresses the topic of race across a literary corpus comprising eight books in a career spanning 14 years of mainstream publication. In short, this is but one example of many poorly sourced, libellous, and defamatory claims published by Hope Not Hate that are entirely spurious and thoroughly illegitimate.
The 137-page report features an array of public figures, from “right-wing” Tories (as opposed to regular centrists and even left-leaning ones) to the most unserious and delusional of political players and pundits in the conspiracy theorist sphere. This is a not-so-subtle and underhanded tactic of false association that attempts to instil a cognitive bias in the reader. It sets out to discredit and delegitimise the opponents of these far-left-adjacent organs.
The publication make scant effort to separate elected members of parliament from former members of proscribed terrorist organisations, however the fact that both are contained within the same report is an inherently disingenuous tactic, and it is these groupings that are then paired with frequent appeals to the scientific sensibilities of their readership, leveraging first-hand survey findings and trendy, in-vogue design choices that lend a false sense of legitimacy to an otherwise entirely disreputable publication.
However, it is Hope Not Hate’s own survey findings that underscore a much deeper truth about how ignorant the political class is of prevailing thought; it exemplifies how they are becoming increasingly at odds with the British public, 48% of those surveyed agreed more than Britain’s multicultural society isn’t working and different communities generally live separate lives. The same percentage said they would favour having a “strong and decisive leader” over the existing liberal democracy, and 43% of Britons agreed the country is in a state of decline. They also claim a staggering 27% agreed that “globalist elites are encouraging immigration into Europe as part of a plot to weaken European identity.”.
If these figures are to be believed, this demonstrates in full the ever-growing misalignment and disconnect between an alienated population and their elected representatives. This was recently exemplified with yet another attack by Hope Not Hate that resulted in the immediate suspension of Beau Dade from the Reform Party following a hit piece in response to an article on reducing immigration. This shows even the mechanisms intended to contain right-leaning sentiment are failing and becoming increasingly visible. We now find ourselves in a situation where the most ‘right-wing’ mainstream party will instantly bend the knee to an organisation with the less-than-subtle intention of undermining their growing electoral prospects.
Through its actions and associations, Hope Not Hate is an organisation has shown to be deeply problematic, apparently existing to aid the British security state in delegitimising uncontrolled political opposition. It spreads falsehood, disinformation, and makes frequent use of deceptive linguistic tooling to those ends. At a deeper level, it serves to suppress the ongoing re-emergence of a more explicit English identity steeped in deep-rooted ethnocultural precedent; a process which contradicts the aspirations of the current elite, both in their prioritisation of minoritarian interests over the democratic will and international interests over the national interest.
It’s not the economy, stupid
Although it seems so distant, the current political landscape is a direct product of 2016. Without specific reference to the victory of Donald Trump, the Brexit referendum, and the rise of anti-immigration parties across the Western world, it’s impossible to sufficiently contextualise the obvious sense of insecurity characteristic of contemporary left-leaning politics and political analysis.
Every twenty years or so, the Western Left convinces itself it can finally do away with its native working class supporters and fully re-align itself along socially liberal lines, catering to the interests of ethnic and sexual minorities, immigrants, women, graduates, the underclass, and the progressive elements of the haute bourgeoisie.
These attempts at fully actualising a rainbow coalition of the oppressed and their allies rarely work out, backfiring and resulting in catastrophic electoral defeats.
Realising it’s jumped the gun on their replacement, the Western Left is once again begrudgingly going cap-in-hand to those it momentarily considered obsolete, hoping to win them over for election time, and hold onto them whilst in government.
The Left’s ‘bipolar’ relationship with its traditional voters has arguably been the central driving force behind its ideological development for the past 40 years. Categories like ‘Blairite’ and ‘New Democrat’ can’t fully be grasped without reference to the strategies by left-leaning parties to ease the anxieties of native working and middle class voters.
In a similar way, Keir Starmer and Joe Biden have undertaken initiatives of their own. The former is scarcely filmed or photographed without a Union Jack whilst the latter plays into his roots in order to present as a scrappy, charmingly cantankerous working class Irishman. As Biden’s successor, Kamala Harris clearly intends to continue this process, leaning heavily on V.P. pick Tim Walz’s ‘White Dude’ minstrel act and various forms of cosmetic patriotism.
However, whilst the comparative lack of political imagination is evident, and the general disinterest in being ideologically creative is obvious, ongoing rapprochement strategies are desperately trying to formulate a convincing counter-narrative to scupper the enduring threat of the populist right.
Confronted with an insurgent New Right on both sides of the Atlantic, the counter-narrative of the Third Way suggested the liberal revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s had crystallised. Despite the profuse sense of hopelessness, the Left had successfully dislodged the traditional moral and cultural tapestry which underpinned Western societies. Rather, they claimed that the activists had simply grown-up, encumbered with adult responsibilities and considerations, which (until fairly recently) went hand-in-hand with fiscally conservative politics.
Of course, this narrative was never entirely true. In no small part, the rise of the New Right was a reaction against the excesses of the social movements of previous decades, although this tendency was sub-ordinated by the right’s shift towards socalled neoliberalism; social conservatism was a present but ultimately secondary characteristic.
Grappling with a new threat from the right, similarly drawing on cultural discontent and siphoning support from the native working class, the Left is trying to use the same playbook, minus any of the context which gives it any credibility or sense.
Bemoaning the alleged capitulation of the centre to the so-called far right in The Guardian, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown argued:
Brown’s article is one of many left-wing think pieces and op-eds which have tried to recast right-wing populism – a movement motivated first and foremost by opposition to immigration and its demographic ramifications – as a misdirected reaction to a cluster of ‘real’ problems which the Left tactically concedes to have ignored: declining standards of living, economic inequality, deindustrialisation, social mobility, and/or a lack of educational opportunities.
Typically, the primary factor is something economical, although a social issue that specifically isn’t immigration can be thrown into the mix too, such as the spiritual deficits of secularism, emasculation anxiety, social alienation, and unaddressed mental health problems.
In their own musing on the issue, Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar and Aaron Bastani concluded deindustrialisation, consumerism, and cultural Americanisation (in other terms, not immigration) should be primarily blamed for the loss of social cohesion, oddly using the provincial towns of Southern France and Northern Italy (that is, the strongholds of the National Rally and the Brothers of Italy respectively) as places with a sense of community severely lacking in England.
Putting aside the fact the concept of community is treated as abstract and present-tense in left-wing commentary, or the fact it’s OK to talk about the scourge of foreign culture insofar it originates from America, or that England has its loose equivalents, the fact these picturesque settlements are voting for anti-immigration parties indicates how the inhabitants (either based on an influx of arrivals in their community or elsewhere) can infer that immigration is a threat to the very delicate and complex social harmony required for such places to exist. You could say good things are hard to create but easy to destroy!
Whatever the specifics, the Left is caught between its true constituents (immigrants and their descendants) and its tactical constituents (working and middle class ethnic natives).Not wanting to speak ill of immigration out of fear of offending the former, yet realising the importance of the latter to the integrity of its temporary (but necessary) coalition, it needs to decrease the salience of immigration by shifting the public’s focus, leveraging its media influence to push politically-convenient revisionist narratives.
The vote to leave the European Union was initially written-off as an emotional spasm, which was redefined as a more sympathetic but ultimately instinctive bout of political discontent, before finally being redefined as a desperate but rational economic decision motivated by declining living standards (as understood in purely materialistic terms).
Some attributed this to deindustrialisation, others attributed it to housing prices; some touted austerity whilst others pointed to the cost of living. Whatever the case, it didn’t really matter. Politics was being neatly steered back to safe, technical questions, the likes of which could only be solved by the same managerial class which felt threatened by the result.
A similar process happened following Trump’s victory. The White Male backlash at having a Black president (and the plausible threat of having a female president) became another iteration of the paranoid style in American politics, which was revised into a vague disaffection with Washington, finally boxed as an unrefined but understandable protest vote against the offshoring and automation of American industry and jobs.
Consequently, the Biden administration quietly left many of Trump’s trade policies in place and seriously started to entertain decoupling from China, making it a central and pronounced component of the Democrats’ party platform, alongside a more visible association with trade unionism.
Following the riots in the UK and the state election results in Germany, in which the Alternative for Deutschland won in Thuringia and achieved very close seconds in Saxony and Brandenburg, attempts at misdirection have already begun, from Starmer’s flat-out denial that discontent over immigration created circumstances ripe for public disorder to the sudden recasting of the German right’s successes as a reaction to regional inequality and name-calling, rather than Germany bearing the brunt of unwanted immigration into Europe.
In all the aforementioned instances, it’s not that the primary factor behind was initially misunderstood. The Left attacked voters as racist and xenophobic prior to these events and in their immediate aftermath, so they evidently understood the ethno-racial motivation.
Nor can it be said that the cluster of various socioeconomic factors attributed as the driving force of recent rightward shifts in the electorate are being plucked at random. The calculated selection is part of the style.
Right-wing populism is obviously motivated by economic discontent, but so is every political uprising. Even at the best of times, the economy matters to everyone, so it can’t sufficiently explain the behaviour of specific subsets of the electorate on its own.
Rather, it’s the fact that these concerns are secondary to immigration is not publicly acknowledged by the Left, even after ten years of political development, and attempts to revise the motivations behind these movements persist with such stubborn tenacity shows the modus operandi of contemporary left-leaning so-called ideas.
No insights or solutions, only new and innovative ways to distract from the elephant in the room: immigration. Primacy matters, especially when political capital is finite. We needn’t let the importance of economic reform fall by the wayside, but we shouldn’t allow it to be used as an obvious mechanism for deferring a major issue, wrapped-up as level-headed, ‘sensible’ analysis of current political circumstances.
Photo Credit.