"The frontline is here, right now"
We speak to the woman behind the documentary exposing the many new faces of the far right - from rioters, to politicians, to foundations promoting dodgy science.
It’s a tense enough moment on its own. HOPE not Hate’s undercover journalist Harry Shukman is filming covertly inside an Athens restaurant, hoping, over a dry plate of fish, to extract the name of a Silicon Valley funder of the European far right.
Then, his handler Patrik Hermansson decides he too needs undercover pictures of the dinner, and strolls past the restaurant windows shooting from the hip on his phone. The tension ratchets up.
And what makes the situation even more compelling is that there is another camera in play. Documentary maker Havana Marking is hidden in the shadows, filming Hermansson filming Shukman. One small error could risk months of painstaking work by anti-fascist group HOPE not Hate – and put them in personal danger.
“It’s mad,” laughs Marking. “Three cameras filming each other. But the safety of Harry and safety of the mission were more important than the film. Nothing we could do would compromise that.
“And Patrik, who seems quite mild mannered in the film, can be quite strict about this. He kept me in my place and made sure we never veered into doing something risky.”
The result is ‘UNDERCOVER: Exposing the Far Right’, a 90-minute documentary - two years in the making - that details HOPE not Hate’s work in uncovering not only the shadowy funders of dodgy pseudoscience but the foot soldiers of the far right and those in between, such as Tommy Robinson.
Marking, known for films such as Afghan Star – which, in 2005, earned her the best director and audience award at the Sundance Film Festival and other awards – was given unprecedented access to Hope Note Hate’s necessarily security-conscious operations. UNDERCOVER was shown on Channel 4 in October - but organisers of the London Film Festival pulled it because of unspecified and unconfirmed safety concerns.
Marking says she usually found herself travelling to places like Afghanistan, the Balkans and Malaysia to make films about anti-democratic forces, but with the rise of the far right in the western countries that pride themselves on their democracy, “there was this dawning feeling that the frontline is here, right now. I knew I wanted to make a film here.”
She had originally been talking to HOPE not Hate founder Nick Lowles about a film on the 2001 race riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford. But Lowles was being threatened by Robinson outside his home and his personal details were being spread over the internet, and she realised she should be filming the present, not the past.
During the film, it emerges that 19-year-old far-right supporter Marco Roberto Gill from Helmshore in Rossendale had not only harassed Lowles over a 12-month period (by sending 48 food deliveries to his address and paying £300 to acquire his phone number.) He had also bought a gun, as the National Crime Agency tells Lowles.
Marking calls HOPE not Hate’s decision to give her access “incredibly brave”.
Lowles tells Marking how infiltration work is important for HOPE not Hate. In 2018 Jack Renshaw from Skelmersdale, a member of banned neo-Nazi group National Action, admitted plotting to kill West Lancashire MP Rosie Cooper with a machete after an informer revealed details to HOPE not Hate.
Shukman had been undercover before, spending a year pretending to be a supporter of the far-right party Britain First, but had never worn a camera. In UNDERCOVER he pretends to be “Chris from rural Cambridgeshire, a strategy consultant specialising in support function optimisation – something so tedious it doesn’t attract a second or third question”. He does it well enough to be uneasy about himself when reviewing footage of his performance.
Quietly stoking violence
Hermansson was undercover with the alt-right in the US when clashes broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and was close to the a white supremacist car drove into a crowd of counterprotestors, killing one person and injuring 35.
“The far right are dangerous. Their ideas encourage violence even if they’re not explicitly calling for it,” he says in UNDERCOVER.
That underlines one of the themes of Marking’s film – the hiding of real intentions. As it seeks to appeal to elites, the Human Diversity Foundation pretends there’s a scientific basis for its claims that wokeness is linked to mental ill health and that white people are more honest. In its appeal to disaffected voters, Britain First’s leader Paul Golding pretends to be just to the right of the Conservatives, as Shukman puts it, when actually he’s far more extreme. Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, pretends to be only concerned with Muslim immigrants, not others.
UNDERCOVER covers the riots this summer after the horrific murders of three Southport girls, illustrating what philospher Hannah Arendt called a “temporary alliance of the mob and the elite”. Determining the exact formula of that alliance will take further analysis - but Elon Musk and Nigel Farage were quick to offer their elite views, even as the riots were unfolding.
Marking says the skill of Robinson is in his understanding of social media and the internet, and his ability to take something like the Southport tragedy “that happens out of the blue and twist it within hours to his advantage”.
She adds: “It’s a combination of constant messages being sent out by media-savvy people and certain individuals who are able to twist and manipulate within seconds, and connect those messages to real world events.”
What is far less shadowy in the far right is the misogyny. Among the Southport rioters claiming to be doing nothing more than protecting women and girls, one was shortly afterwards arrested for domestic violence.
UNDERCOVER includes the words of Ryan Williams, host of far-right podcast The Absolute State of Britain, who says: “I just don’t think women should have access to money… They should be dependent on a man.”
Marking says misogyny is embedded in far-right ideology to the extent supporters don’t feel the need to explain it away, as they do racism through eugenics. “It’s completely taken as a given and it’s quite extraordinary the way it comes up repeatedly throughout the film.”
The misogyny takes two forms, she says. “One tactic, used forever, is this idea that women and children need defending and the far-right men are the people to do it, usually from brown foreigners.
“It works. It’s really effective, because of course no one wants children to be attacked and no one wants women to feel unsafe. It taps into an emotion that is real and understandable.
The second aspect of misogyny, she adds, is “How can we control everyone else who isn’t us? It’s horrible.”
Marking says the London Film Festival’s decision to pull the film seemed “very weak” and sent a message that smaller grassroots venues that wanted to show UNDERCOVER, but lacked the security of the Southbank Centre, may not be able to protect themselves if there were threats.
Since then, London bookshops and pubs have also reportedly cancelled events for the launch of a book about anti-racism and music written by Joe Mulhall of Hope Note Hate, who features prominently in UNDERCOVER. Marking says smaller venues cannot be blamed for their concerns and suggests the presence of police outside events.
“It shouldn’t be that just a phone call from a mad person or an angry person should be able to affect culture and society like that. So maybe we should be having discussions with the police, local authorities and the cultural institutions. They all need to come together on it.”
Those who do see UNDERCOVER will learn of HOPE not Hate’s contribution to Robinson’s imprisonment for contempt of court. Shukman and Hermansson’s undercover work disrupts the funding of the Human Diversity Foundation.
Marking says she hopes that people who might not fully know where they stand but might think people like Robinson have a point “can watch it and start to understand how those instincts are being manipulated”.
But she also observes that those on the progressive side can be distracted by single issue and identity politics from the importance of challenging the far right. “We’ve got to find ways in which we can unify and come together on certain things that are non-negotiable.”
UNDERCOVER: Exposing The Far Right is available on Channel 4.
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And the far left?
Just as bad in my view.
One problem is anything other than left is now deemed far right which is clearly not correct and a very crude categorisation
It’s polarised society and that is exceedingly unhelpful to all.
My question is - WHO or WHAT is behind the rise of the far right and misogyny? It has been happening in different countries in the same time period. They did not all wake up one morning with a magical belief in the same thing. There must be a source, a point of origin or a power broker somewhere.