Daniel Trilling is the author of books on refugees in Europe and the far right in Britain.
One of the main differences between today’s far right and the fascism of the mid-20th century is the absence of a uniformed paramilitary street wing. The anti-migrant protests in Dover and Portsmouth at the weekend mark an attempt to create one – or at least to project the image of one.
One of the most striking images in Resistance, Steve McQueen’s survey of protest photography in 20th-century Britain (at Modern Two in Edinburgh until 4 January), is a blurry, black and white shot of Christabel Pankhurst, Flora Drummond and Emmeline Pankhurst in the dock at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in 1908. The three suffragettes, on trial for incitement to disorder for a...
One way of thinking about fascism is to see it as historically specific: a reactionary mass movement produced by the economic and social chaos that engulfed Europe after the First World War. Fascism promised national rebirth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home and conquest abroad; to achieve this required public consent to the undoing of democracy. Where fascism took root, it...
Irecently came across a Labour Party pamphlet from 2010. ‘Every one of us needs to roll up our sleeves and get to work to build strong and tolerant communities,’ it reads, ‘arguing the case for the politics of solidarity and hope, as opposed to the politics of division and defeat.’ It was among the papers I’d gathered while working on a book about the British...
While far-right activists like Tommy Robinson may inflame a situation, the ideological fuel for the riots comes from ostensibly more respectable sources. Islamophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment has been a staple of Britain’s right-wing press for decades, but we are emerging from a period in which a Conservative government made right-wing populism a central part of its platform.
Julia Ebner discusses her experiences going undercover in various extremist groups, including White Supremacists, German Neo-Nazis and ‘Trad Wives’, as described in her new book,...
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