Did you know that the UK defeated fascism on Wednesday? Blink and you might have missed it, but newspapers were swift to record The Battle of Britain, August 7, 2024 — history ready to be clipped and filed away, handed to the grandkids one day. 

“Night anti-hate marchers faced down the thugs”, ran The Daily Mail’s front page, The Times’ equivalent reading “Thousands take to street to confront far right”. Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, took to X to proclaim: “The history of our town is working class people who have driven the far right out of town over and over again for 100 years. Our community sent that message again last night.”

But where was this “far right”? The existential threat that had been so valiantly “driven out” by groups such as “Grannies Against Fascism” and the legions of millennial hipsters that had gathered in Walthamstow? 

Earlier that day the borough’s MP Stella Creasy delivered a video message on X. Sporting large shades — perhaps hiding weary eyes; the sort Churchill might have had ahead of D-Day — she updated locals on “how to get home safely tonight”. In spite of the hazardous conditions, probably not dissimilar to those experienced by Londoners during the Blitz, Walthamstow’s warriors later braved the outdoors to show fascism what for. 

Their fortitude was all the more commendable given the endless stream of TV broadcasts about tens of far right units deployed to different parts of the UK. ITV’s Paul Brand spoke of 6,000 police officers “on standby”, while shops boarded up their windows. Taking to X, one brave soldier, by the name of “Paddy Tofu”, wrote “The last time I actively stood against the fash was in my 20s”. He confessed that, now in his 50s, he felt less confident in his combat skills. “Still going tho”, he ended. That’s the spirit! As Vera Lynn put it,  “we’ll meet again”!

To anyone with fully-functioning eyesight, there were, at most, handfuls of unsavoury souls dotted around the country

But as Paddy Tofu stood on the frontlines, shoulder to shoulder with his courageous comrades, the Far Right appeared to have gone mysteriously AWOL — and with it, reality too. To anyone with fully-functioning eyesight, there were, at most, handfuls of unsavoury souls dotted around the country. Some of the Far Right — “four or five”, reported Pink News — reared their fascistic heads in Brighton. Photos of them being confronted by “anti-fascists” didn’t exactly look like the Allies (hypothetically) storming into Hitler’s bunker. The Far Right Four (or five?) gave the impression that one or other of them might say “Tommy Robinson tells it as it is!” after a few pints and own a Princess Diana mug. But was this “the Far Right” aka members of a growing and vast network of fascists? Going on headlines alone, you might believe Wednesday saw the thwarting of the “Brighton Anschluss”.

These days I do tend to wonder how many modern “anti-fascists”, some sporting balaclavas (the surefire sign of being on the right side of history), know about World War II and other periods they invoke. We are warned more about history than ever before — yet almost always with the effect of minimising it. The meaning of words — fascism, Nazi, far right — have been totally rewritten.

At the helm of this revisionism is the Establishment — the media and a Government that lied and continues to lie to Brits about how big the far right threat is. The Labour Party is quite prepared to conflate teenage boys smashing the window of Greggs (as happened in some of the riots) with the few extreme ideological right-wing nutters Britain has, should it help boost “far right” numbers.

Exaggerations around the size of the far right are hardly new. In 2023, a report commissioned by the Conservative government warned that Prevent (the UK’s counter terrorism service) “has a double standard when dealing with the Extreme Right-Wing and Islamism. Prevent takes an extensive approach to the Extreme Right-Wing, capturing a variety of influences that, at times, has been so broad it has included mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, right-wing leaning commentary that have no meaningful connection to terrorism or radicalisation”, whereas it has increased the threshold for Islamist extremism. It’s noteworthy that, in 2021, referrals for Extreme Right-Wing ideology were higher than Islamist referrals (25 per cent and 22 per cent, respectively), even though Islamist extremism is still the UK’s largest threat — by far.

Often it feels as if the diversity paradigm has been embedded into counter-terror strategy; as though, in trying to seem inclusive and determined to combat “Islamophobia”, the authorities, media and politicians “overcompensate” by exaggerating Far Right numbers (“LOOK HOW MUCH WE CALL OUT THEM TOO!”).

But where was the Far Right yesterday, and in general? Does this neo-Nazi collective have a name or lair? A “Far Right Caliphate”? Could members be deradicalised from whatever it is they’ve been programmed into? These are the questions that won’t be asked, never mind answered, by the Establishment, desperate to have its “big, bad wolf”, even though lack of one should surely be a cause for celebration.

The Establishment’s hyping up of “the far right” is not only a type of “misinformation”, but dangerous on multiple fronts — not least as a pretext for mission creep, whereby anyone guilty of mildly conservative sentiment could be next in line for Starmer, who needs to prove a “Far Right” collective, soaring in size. 

Inaccuracy also affects how counter-terrorism resources are allocated, leading to blindspots in what people the security services decide to monitor. It could mean an intelligence agent was taken off a research project about, say, the extremist Islamic militia Ansar al- Sharia, to study men who follow Tommy Robinson on X. 

I mention this militia specifically because, in 2012, Khairi Saadallah, a Libyan asylum seeker who “was trained to fight and fought (for a period of at least 8 months), as a member of the now-proscribed group, went on to murder three men who’d met in a Reading park (2020). The swift manner in which he executed his victims, indicative of the fact he had been trained to kill, was commented upon in sentencing remarks.

Saadallah was referred to Prevent four times and known by intelligence services, but never deported back to “unsafe” Libya. Cases like his are surely most pressing for the political class to consider. But Starmer is preoccupied creating 500 new prison spaces for rioters.

In any normal era, politicians and the media would admit that Wednesday was the product of hype — understandably among normal people, who had witnessed the riots over the weekend, but with suspicious credulity among our political and media classes. Yet in any normal era news outlets/ MPs wouldn’t have been so misleading about the scale of the Far Right in the first place. Thugs, however violent, racist and mad, are not the same thing as the fascistic collective they spoke of — as though its size and strategy were parallel to Daesh’s.

Instead, a new narrative was spun about Wednesday. It was a victory for the anti-fascists, said a media apparently modelling itself on North Korean broadcasting. Nothing was said about a “fake list” of rioters nor HOPE not Hate’s Nick Lowles spreading unfounded rumours of an acid attack on a Muslim woman. Meanwhile the country has been locking up “the far right” while releasing people convicted of crimes up to and including manslaughter. A real confrontation with authoritarians may be sooner than we think.