In 2024, the new government was brave enough to send the spreaders of hate to prison. Even though the far right rattled their cages and complained about so-called ‘two-tier policing,’ almost every one of them pleaded guilty. The evidence was damning. It was not the police but the courts who did the sentencing. Yet again the far right had missed the real target for their indignation. Since the Brexit referendum in 2016 Pandora’s Jar has well and truly opened. Millions fell for the lie that the UK, once set free from the bureaucracy of the EU, would rise like a lion and be a dominant force in the world. Those days have gone. The empire is dead. Britain now fools itself that it has influence. The only real similarity with those countries that now dominate, e.g., China, India, Russia, and the USA, is their dependence upon cheap labour and technology to survive.
However, no one in power can admit this, and thus they play their population for fools. Those who expose reality are shot down. ‘Don’t listen to the experts,’ they say. Not because the experts are wrong but because they are inconvenient. ‘Our country is full,’ they bellow, while stripping it with austerity and loading it with debt. ‘Our country is righteous,’ they snort, while selling arms to dictators and psychopaths.
Instead of the population seeing the reality being played out before them, they are divided. Divided by a spectre that is haunting not only the UK but the whole planet. That spectre is corporate fascism. Its power derives from discord. Unity is their enemy. Fractionation is required. This is Britain, in broad daylight. Play on the emotions, not the cognitive. Keep the intellectual separate. Hate and mistrust do not derive from critical thinking but from the bowels of the mind.
The following is but one very explicit way in which that division is at play. How creating a complex interplay of folk devils leads those who do not adopt critical thinking into a dark place that rips out the heart of a civil society. It becomes the cancer that metastasizes. How do the powerful best control us? When we are weak and becoming weaker, that is how.
A man drives past a roundabout in Birmingham, raises his hand, and mimes pulling the trigger of a gun at a journalist. It is broad daylight. He does this because he feels he can. Because he believes he has the right to terrorise, to intimidate, to send a message: you are not safe here.
This is the Britain the far right is creating – one where hate doesn’t whisper in dark corners; it marches proudly in the open. And it is poisoning the country from the inside out.
Last summer’s rioting showed how quickly that poison spreads. After the Southport attack, rumours flew that far-right protesters were heading into a majority-Muslim part of Birmingham. Fear overtook reason. Locals, convinced they had been abandoned by the authorities, came onto the streets to defend themselves. “They thought the only way to protect themselves and the community was by coming out in force,” said Naeem Yousef, a resident who watched his city unravel.
Journalists who came to report were surrounded by masked men, sworn at, and shoved away from the chaos. A man carrying a knife tried to slash their van’s tyre as they fled. White residents were told to stay indoors; some feared they would be hunted as “the enemy”. “They were looking for who they thought was the enemy – white people,” said Gerry Moynihan, who decided not to leave his house that day.
This is what far-right hate does. It doesn’t just attack minorities; it destabilises entire communities, turns fear into a reflex, and convinces ordinary people that violence is the only language left.
And these incidents are not one-offs. They sit on the same continuum as the Finsbury Park mosque attack in 2017, where a far-right extremist murdered a man outside a place of worship. They are linked to the killing of MP Jo Cox by a white nationalist who shouted “Britain first” as he struck. They echo the sieges of hotels housing asylum seekers, where far-right mobs descend to terrorise some of the most vulnerable people in the country.
The far right insists this is about “free speech”. But miming shooting someone in the head isn’t free speech. Driving a van into worshippers isn’t free speech. Organising mobs to terrorise migrants isn’t free speech. These are acts of violence – whether physical or symbolic – designed to silence, dominate, and fracture the nation.
Even within communities targeted by far-right hate, anger simmers – and extremists thrive on it. Some Muslims in Birmingham spoke of frustration with immigration abuses in their own communities. But as one man put it: “They look at me as a foreigner or a migrant. I’m born here, 58, and they still see me as not one of them.” This is the genius of far-right politics: it offers no solutions, only permanent enemies, and it ensures that no one is ever truly “British enough” to be safe from its crosshairs.
Meanwhile, Muslims have become “the bogeyman”, blamed for crime, blamed for housing shortages, and blamed for everything the state has failed to fix. It’s the same tactic once used against Irish communities: keep the country distracted with hate, and no one notices that the real problems—collapsing public services, deepening inequality, and chronic underinvestment—remain unsolved.
Britain cannot survive like this. Hate is not an opinion to be debated; it is a toxin that seeps into everything. A country where people are too afraid to leave their homes, too afraid to speak, and too afraid to belong is not a free country.
The far right has to be dismantled. Not tolerated. Not platformed. Dismantled. That means severe punishment for hate crimes, dismantling online networks that radicalise young people, and holding politicians and media figures accountable when they launder extremist talking points into the mainstream.
Because the alternative is clear: a Britain where someone miming pulling the trigger of a gun at a journalist in broad daylight isn’t shocking at all. A Britain where hate becomes the air we breathe.
The far right are those who have succumbed. They have allowed themselves to be used by those pulling the strings. By Reform UK, By GB News. By the Daily Mail. By The Telegraph. By The Express. By The Sun. By the BBC. By Fox News. By elements of both the Conservative and Labour Parties. By billionaires and multimillionaires. By the ignorant. And by many others. They are puppets. And the saddest part of all. They do not even realise it.
The cleansing and healing process can only begin when they are gone. The day we begin to liberate our minds by holding each other’s hands instead of gripping each other’s throats is the day we start to mend.
