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'We should have empathy': Expert in the far-right on how to handle extremism | LBC
May 8, 2025
Journalist Harry Shukman speaks to James O'Brien about his year undercover with the far right.
He is the author of 'Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right'.
Speaking to LBC he paints a picture of what day-to-day life in these groups is like, citing both the funny moments and the worrying ones.
Listen to the full show on Global Player: https://app.af.globalplayer.com/Br0x/LBCYouTubeListenLive
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0:00
Harry Shookman is a journalist and latterly working for Hope Not Hate and infiltrating far-right groups
0:09
In fact, he spent pretty much a whole year undercover in the British far-right
0:14
And he joins me now because you have told the story in a new book, Harry, Year of the Rat
0:19
I'm so stupid. It took me five minutes to work out why it was called Year of the Rat
0:26
Sorry. My friend Johnny said, make sure you ask him about the time that he thought he'd been busted when the big bloke got into the car with him
0:34
So that's my first question. That would be when Andy Frayn, nicknamed Nightmare, a former football hooligan with the Chelsea Headhunters and Combat 18 terrorist, got into the passenger seat of my car
0:51
Obviously very worried about what might happen. It turned out he just wanted a lift to the pub and he spoke about the curry he'd had the night before
0:59
But one of the different occasions at which I found myself hanging out with people who had a very violent past
1:07
You reveal quite a lot about the tricks of the trade, don't you
1:12
Cameras, wires, holes in clothing. Could you have made it easier for people to spot future Harry Shook
1:19
You must have worried about it. Yeah, I did think about this quite a lot. the equipment that we used is available in every high street spy store
1:28
and journalists in the past have been quite open about what kind of equipment they use, how it works
1:34
There have been a lot of memoirs by former News of the World journalists
1:39
big Amazon Prime documentary about the fake shake, going into lavish detail about how cameras are stored and where
1:48
And ultimately, the far right is becoming increasingly sophisticated I met people one of the occasions I was nearly rumbled, people who knew about what kind of camera I was wearing at the time, not knowing I was wearing one and where to look for it
2:03
So I think that there needs to be probably a bit more of a catch up in what kind of equipment journalists use and to know that actually these kinds of devices have been around for years
2:14
Fair enough. Nine different groups. How did you pick them? So we started with a group called the Basket Weavers, a organisation trying to build community among young racist men
2:28
This was advertised on the website of a disgraced academic and it was seen as a way in that would be less risky for me, a bit less of a, you know, these the people involved in this group weren't violent
2:42
the things they believed in might have been but they certainly weren't going out committing doing
2:47
anything violent and it went from there um and the way in for you was during the pandemic i think
2:54
wasn't it or that was when your curiosity and was piqued and your frustration was exacerbated
3:00
yes certainly at the time the pandemic was much more on people's minds than it was
3:03
than it is now um and you were seeing people team up in ways that would have previously been
3:09
considered unthinkable anti-vaccine activists and far-right extremists working together and that was what really interested me in the far scene as it was growing at the time So I mean I guess this is true of an awful lot of work done by people like you How do you ensure it gets in front of people who would actually benefit from seeing it So I find
3:37
it incredibly engaging. I find your courage extraordinary. I find some of the dangers that
3:42
you exposed yourself to unbelievable. And I completely share your views of racism and your
3:48
fascination with how these tentacles spread but how do you reach people who are likely to be
3:54
helped by your work as opposed to simply fascinated yeah that's a good question and i'm trying to
4:00
be open about the fact um that what i did um was maybe a little bit grubby hence the title year of
4:09
the rats you know i don't want to give anyone the impression that i'm sitting on some big moral high
4:13
horse you know i i undercover journalism can be a little bit mucky sometimes um and i just wanted
4:20
to be open to to show that the people who are featured in this book rank and file members of
4:26
far-right organizations you know they are human beings um i did find myself um in conversation
4:33
conversations with them that weren't entirely about extremist views um you know the leaders of
4:38
far-right groups are one thing you know i've i encountered i think a lot of grifters a lot of
4:43
people who are very cynically motivated, looking to exploit their members. But a lot of the people I met, they came to these organisations
4:51
for perhaps human reasons or reasons that we should empathise with instead of really hate
5:01
I think we have to offer slightly more hopeful reasons for people
5:05
to not choose to join activism like this. I took a call just before 12 noon from a lad in Manchester called Ben who was talking about his brother
5:15
And he was describing an online rabbit hole down which his brother had gone
5:20
And it suddenly occurred to me and I said to him that he was speaking with a lot of love
5:25
He was speaking with a sense of loss and even sometimes almost felt that his brother was getting something positive out of simply being part of something
5:36
And there were times, I think, while you were undercover that you were slightly surprised by some of the emotions that you felt
5:42
Yeah, absolutely. Not just guilt at meeting people who I knew that I would ultimately have to say, look, I'm not who you think I am
5:50
My name's not Chris. I'm actually a journalist. But also, I think I encountered a lot of people, young men in particular, who were very lonely, who were joining groups to look for community
6:01
to look for... Life had not panned out the way that they had hoped it to be
6:07
The relationships they had expected, the friendships they had expected from adult life
6:12
hadn't materialised for them. And that's why I think that we should have a lot of empathy
6:18
for the people who find themselves in groups like this while being very aware and alert to the politics that they espouse
6:27
And it's not immediately obvious what that politics is when people are in the foothills of these organisations
6:32
The leaders are sometimes quite opaque, I think. Absolutely. The leader of a group called Britain First is a man called Paul Golding
6:41
habituate of His Majesty's prison system. And he keeps a lot from his members
6:49
even people who are paid activists within his organisation He might not tell them quite how extreme his views really are It was only after spending the best part of a year with him that I learned exactly what he really thinks
7:05
And I think that that's why undercover reporting on the far right is justified
7:09
because these people are putting on a mask. And that's even what one prominent eugenicist who
7:16
works in Westminster told me. So everyone puts on the mask. That's how it works. And I think it
7:21
makes sense to try and you know turn those tactics back on them um eugenics are enjoying something of a
7:26
of a comeback at the moment aren't they i think so um people the richest man in the world elon
7:32
musk has been talking about the need for for smart people to have babies and i think that
7:37
um ideas about um which uh which races are superior than others um the need to um maintain
7:45
different types of traits, how to do that. Sadly, very popular ideas in Silicon Valley
7:53
And, you know, we're very worried about their spread on this side of the Atlantic. And some breakthrough, and you've written about Andrew Sabisky
7:59
who came in under sort of Dominic Cummings' patronage to Downing Street himself
8:04
And he was on the record as claiming that there was a far greater percentage
8:08
of blacks than whites in the range of particularly low IQs. it what's the relationship between racism and eugenics is it an attempt to cloak base bigotry
8:21
in the language of intellectuals that's what we found that um certainly in the wider world of
8:28
race science or science that um aims to advance uh racist opinions um is that uh typically um
8:37
It's jargonistic language that is aimed to justify a very old form of prejudice, using the trappings of academia to try and get people to believe that races are different from one another, that there are some that are inferior to each other, to try and justify ultimately segregation
8:59
And I mean, there's a sort of pyramid in place as well, isn't there? Not all nine of the organizations that you speak to are in any way linked or anything like that. But there is a kind of puppet master, a latter day version of the Pioneer Fund that you really get to the heart of
9:19
Yes, there's this group called the Pioneer Fund, and it was set up in the 1930s in the States. And it's one of its first acts was to try and help Nazi Germany broadcast its propaganda in the US
9:35
It became one of the biggest sources of funding for race science, not just in the US, but, you know, it also gave a lot of money in this country
9:43
And it exists in a new form under this group called the Human Diversity Foundation
9:49
And this is one of the big findings of the work that I did at Hope Not Hate
9:52
And it shows that there is a very well-funded, well-connected effort to try and spread race science into the mainstream
10:00
to policy makers, to billionaire elites who can try and make these ideas more popular
10:07
One of the things I took from your work, and it took me by surprise
10:10
was a better understanding of the extraordinary amount of effort that is put into trying to portray places like my hometown of London
10:18
my hometown since I was 19 as bad as unhappy places with all the talk of no zones and all of the abuse directed at Sadiq Khan for the perceived crime of being too integrated or being a Muslim and of course what I understood
10:33
was that they can't bear the idea that people can actually live peacefully and happily together it's
10:39
a key part of the ideology of some of the people you encounter if not all that in fact I'll quote
10:45
one of them, Jared Taylor, on a podcast saying there is no possibility of blacks and whites
10:51
living peacefully together. So I never fully understood why they had such a problem with
10:56
the places that proved they were wrong. But of course, it's self evident
11:00
I think you're really right to pull up that topic. I think it's becoming increasingly popular in the British mainstream. I mean, the idea that there are some forms of some types of
11:10
people in this country who no matter how many generations ago their ancestors arrived
11:15
They'll never be considered fully British. And unfortunately, I think you can see that idea spreading right now among the Reform Party. Their election manifesto, still on their website, calls for the withdrawal of citizenship from British citizens if they're of foreign descent, if they commit crimes
11:34
It doesn't specify what type of crimes. But I think it advances this idea that that you there will always be some people who, you know, third, fourth, fifth generation Brits can never be considered part of this country
11:46
And, you know, that to me speaks about the creation of a real two tier justice system that reform wants to, you know, alleges Keir Starmer is always trying to create
11:56
So I think that's an abolition of equality before the law, as you said, isn't it
12:01
I'm pretty simply put and part of a much, usually a much broader project
12:06
Why you, Harry? Why did you take this upon yourself to do
12:11
I become very interested in and concerned about the rise of the far right
12:16
I'd been experimenting with undercover reporting some years before. And I thought that I had been able to make connections
12:26
You know, I'm male, I'm white. I can fit into these groups
12:31
And I wanted to see exactly what I could find out. Were you the least surprised person in the country
12:37
when the racist riots broke out in various towns last summer? I was so sad, so dispirited
12:46
I had this awful sinking feeling because when the rioters set up on the Holiday Inn Express in Tamworth
12:53
I had been with Britain First the previous year, handing out leaflets for their by-election candidate
13:01
saying shut down the Tamworth migrant hotel. You know, the type of violence that we saw in last summer
13:10
didn't take place in a vacuum. You know, there was a reason why people thought
13:14
after the horrific stabbing of three young girls in Southport that it would be, you know, the right thing to do
13:20
to go and smash up, set fire to, try and murder asylum seekers and migrants
13:25
in, you know, 100 miles away in a hotel. Well, I've seen how these kind of ideas spread
13:32
and I think that we have to be really aware of it and what to do about it
13:38
What do you do next? You can't go undercover again, can you? No, I don't want to
13:43
We're keeping a very close eye on the far right in this country
13:49
which is unfortunately growing. We have to do everything we can to try and unmask it
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