A few weeks ago the BBC launched a new radio/podcast series exploring ‘Conspiracyland’. The series focuses on The Light paper. Accompanying the series, the BBC published an article reporting some of the “links with the British far-right” in The Light.
We’ve written about antisemitism, transphobia and homophobia, and denial of climate change in The Light. In this article we talk about what links these things together. We provide information on how The Light features the ideas, organisations, and personalities of the far right. Some of this information appeared in the recently published BBC article, but much of it did not. Even our article cannot include every example.
The Light isn’t a simple far right publication – it’s not the case that every article is from the far right. Yet, the Light often provides space for, points to, and includes adverts from far right individuals or organisations. The paper effectively functions as public relations / advertising for the far right. It does this by concealing the far right nature of organisations and individuals, and mixing their content with other content. By reaching audiences that would normally reject the far right, it appears to be providing a useful recruitment tool.
We want to make sure people are aware of the background of the people and organisations being promoted. We want to stop them from being sucked into working with these groups. The content that is by, or points to, the far right is not always recognisable as being far right. This isn’t about swastikas or jackboots. That’s not the way that most of the modern far right conduct themselves, at least in the UK and other English-speaking countries. We want to challenge the way the far right are using The Light to recruit people through presentation of an ‘alternative’ or softer image.
What is in this article?
The Light contains lots of different types of content. Much of it is nasty or misleading, or right wing but not far right. We’ll continue to cover other problems with content in The Light in future articles. In this article, we’re only looking at far right content (footnote 1). We’ve included individuals and organisations that focus on ‘othering’ groups of people. Extreme nationalism – or white supremacy across larger geographic areas – are hallmarks of the far right. Far right organisations and individuals promote racism and bigotry including antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia and hatred of people from other parts of the world. These problems can appear all across society, but the far right focuses on organising around these ideas, and using them to create scapegoats to explain all societal problems. Far right groups seek to exclude or eliminate their enemies from geographic areas, and threaten or engage in violence to achieve their aims (footnote 2).
Anne Marie Waters of ‘For Britain’
As one example, The Light has featured Anne Marie Waters (AMW) several times. Until recently, AMW was leader of the ‘For Britain’ political party. In 2017, she sought to be leader of UKIP (the UK Independence Party). She was a co-founder and key figure of Pegida UK. Pegida was a Europe-wide, anti-Muslim street movement (footnote 3).
Anne Marie Waters (AMW) has extreme views on Muslims and on immigration. It’s not only us that consider her far right. Her views are so extreme that other right-wingers found her too extreme for UKIP. Even former UKIP leader Nigel Farage called her and her supporters “Nazis and racists”.
Readers of The Light might not know who AMW is, but the editor Darren Smith doesn’t have the same excuse. In Issue 9 Smith published a sympathetic interview with AMW, headlined “Far Right Fascists Or Old School Conservatives?”. Smith attempts to present her as the latter – describing the party as one “that wants to preserve its country’s traditions, borders, ancient values”. The article doesn’t mention any of AMW’s far right rhetoric. Smith obviously knows about the reaction to AMW, but conceals her view that “immigration will have to stop”. He does not reference her opinions that “A lot of people need to be deported. Many mosques need to be closed down. It really has to get tough.””
Other far right individuals and organisations
Anne Marie Waters isn’t the only far right figure/organisation that has been featured or celebrated by the paper. Indeed, one of AMW’s articles in The Light is all about promoting Tommy Robinson. Robinson is one of the most well known far right activists in Britain. He was the founder of the violent far right street movement the ‘English Defence League’. Before this he was a member of the far right British National Party. With AMW he was a co-founder of far right Islamophobic organisation Pegida UK.
Issue 34 – the most recent issue at the time of writing – contains a sycophantic interview with far right social media personality/troll Katie Hopkins. Hopkins is known for racist rants that cost her jobs with mainstream right-wing media outlets. Infamous examples including comparing migrants to cockroaches and calling for a “final solution” for Muslims, using a term the Nazis used to describe their genocide of Jewish people. Hopkins left MailOnline ‘by mutual consent’ in 2017 after giving a speech attacking Muslims to far right groups. She was reported to have told her audience they should ‘arm themselves’ and ‘fight for their country’, against “institutionalised discrimination against whites”. The interview with her in The Light is headlined “Loving and laughing across Britain”. She is presented as a member of the “truth movement” as she attacks “leftist wokedom”. No mention is made of her history of racist and bigoted comments. She refers to being ‘banned from South Africa’ as a badge of honour, but doesn’t mention that this was “for spreading racial hatred”. Just as with its reporting of Graham Hart’s conviction for inciting racial hatred against Jewish people in the UK, The Light conceals the vile nature of extreme racism – and fails utterly to condemn it.
Issue 27 features an obituary for ‘fearless campaigner’ Jeff Wyatt, former Deputy Leader of the For Britain party. The author is Niall McCrae, a former lecturer involved in far right organisation Hearts of Oak, with Tommy Robinson.
Niall McCrae is a regular contributor to The Light. Issue 9 features an article co-authored with Robin Tilbrook. Tilbrook is the founder of the far right “English Democrats” party, originally known as the English National Party. The English Democrats are “a far right-wing party known for its English nationalist and anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim attitudes” (footnote 4). Hope Not Hate note that “In recent years [the English Democrats party] has grown in size due to an influx of former members of the British National Party (BNP), many of whom are open nazis”. Issues 17 and 19 contain full page adverts for the ‘Workers of England’ “union”. This organisation is not a union but a front group for the English Democrats political party, as Hope Not Hate explain:
“The union’s General Secretary is a perennial candidate for the English Democrats and the WEU’s only other officers are the Chairman and the Treasurer of the English Democrats. […] The WEU uses the services of the law firm run by the leader … which has little experience in representing workers or understanding of trade unionism.”
Issue 9 includes an article (“Ten Steps To Mass Mind Control”) by someone with the pen-name “Lasha Darkmoon”. The pen-name Lasha Darkmoon is also used by a frequent contributor to Nazi websites. Their bigotry and conspiracies cover antisemitism and racism towards Muslim people and non-white migrants to Europe (footnote 5). The article itself describes Holocaust denial as “the number one heresy of our day”. Darkmoon suggests there is an effort to “discredit the Truth… labelled a ‘conspiracy theory’”. This is not the only example of The Light or its supporters tolerating or endorsing Holocaust denial. The Light previously defended a man convicted of inciting racial hatred for making violent threats to Jewish people. Their article presented no criticism of the gross ways in which he “question[ed] the official account of the Holocaust”. The people who distribute the paper in Stroud have twice hosted a podcaster who promoted Holocaust denier Nicholas Kollerstrom. They have also held two events where Sandi Adams has spoken, despite being informed by us that she hosted a Holocaust denial documentary and other antisemitism on her website.
Far right governments
This isn’t only about fringe individuals or organisations. The Light also sometimes celebrates politicians running governments – if they are of the far right. Issue 26 enthuses about “Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing bloc” celebrating a “historic” victory in Italian elections in late 2022. Meloni is the leader of the “Brothers of Italy” party. When young, she was a member of the youth wings of neo-fascist parties founded by followers of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. She is on record as praising Mussolini at the age of 19, and praising a minister in his government as recently as 2020. The article in The Light mocks factual reporting of these points, but makes little effort to hide its politics, approvingly quoting far right rhetoric from her speeches: “Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby; yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology; yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death, no to the violence of Islam; yes to safer borders, no to mass immigration; yes to work for our people.” The same article praises a “conservative and traditionalist tide” across Europe, citing Poland and Hungary as other examples – where far right governments also currently rule. Issue 27 features an article supporting the introduction of restrictions on access to abortion by the Orban/Fidesz government in Hungary. We could debate whether these governments merit the term ‘far right’, but they are certainly among the most right-wing governments seen in Europe in recent decades. Beyond Europe, the paper published an article supportive of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s false claims of election fraud. Bolsonaro has been described as “a caricature of the far right” and an “apologist for the most violent period of Brazil’s military dictatorship” (footnote 6). For a paper apparently opposed to authoritarian control and division, it’s revealing that it only has good things to say about these governments. It’s also revealing that The Light never criticises governments or politicians when they express hateful rhetoric towards or policies undermining the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people and migrants (footnote 7).
Incitement to violence
The above examples are accompanied by rhetoric close to incitement to violence in some articles. Issue 25 contains a full page article from the far right US website ‘red pill revolution’ titled “Awaken your inner warrior”. The article comes complete with a bizarre photo of a topless bearded man grimacing at readers. It begins “Friend, you and I are not part of a new breed. We belong to a very old one, a proud and noble warrior race”. The reference to race is notable. The article goes on “we are now faced with a new kind of enemy. Also, we have little left to lose, which is bad news for Them.” Issue 26 contains another call to arms from the same website. This time it presents a ridiculous racist conspiracy theory that refugees are being transported to act as an army. The authors write, “if they are planning to confront us, perhaps using the thousands of young men ‘of conscriptable age’ shipped into the country under the label of ‘refugees’, to subdue what they may choose to call ‘unrest’… well… God help them. We may be peaceful, but we are still warriors.” In Issue 29 another article from the same source argues: “You know who you are, scum. This time there will be no forgiveness, no amnesty, because you have offended the divine spirit that dwells in God’s people. Your offences must be avenged, according to natural law”.
Hate for asylum seekers and refugees
Perhaps the most revealing article in The Light on this topic is a piece in Issue 31. The article defends a protest which turned into a riot against asylum seekers being housed in a hotel in Liverpool. The article makes considerable effort to conceal the far right organisations and ideas related to this protest. It opens by suggesting that the term ‘far right’ is nothing but a ‘trope’ which has been ‘rendered utterly meaningless’. Yet, the violent protest the article defends is widely known to have been promoted by far right organisations including Patriotic Alternative (PA). Hope Not Hate describe PA as “the largest and most active fascist movement operating in the UK today”. Patriotic Alternative had visited the hotel in the weeks before the riot, delivered leaflets in the area, and promoted the demonstration on social media platform Telegram. A prominent member of the group was at the protest. While concealing the involvement of the far right, the article reproduces classic far right themes. The author writes of “huge numbers arriving” and presents asylum seekers as an economic burden and threat to “children and communities”. There is no information about the lives of the people living in the hotel. These included a Christian who fled Iran who explains that the Iranian government “has killed a number of my personal friends”. He wrote about the impact of the violent protest at the hotel, saying “I wanted to talk to the protestors, but I couldn’t. The sad thing is, now my friends are all afraid to go outside.”
The piece defending the protest at the hotel is consistent with other articles in The Light. The centrepiece of Issue 27 denies that people seek asylum from war, torture or oppresssion. It lists the term “asylum seeker” as an example of “newspeak” in the style of Orwell’s 1984. The “Oldspeak Definition” offered by The Light is “government enabled economic migrant”. Issue 26 contains an article presenting all asylum seekers as only “economic migrants”. It is revealing that a paper that presents itself as opposing tyranny shows no solidarity with people who flee their home countries. Meanwhile, dehumanising rhetoric about asylum seekers and refugees by politicians is never condemned by the paper. Government policies that restrict access to public services or involve invasive personal data collection or sharing as part of border controls aren’t featured in the paper.
Conclusion – don’t be fooled
The supporters of The Light often claim they are “neither left nor right”. The content of the paper shows otherwise. To feature one or two of these articles might have been a mistake. After all, the organisations and individuals aren’t upfront about being on the far right. But the number of articles represents a clear pattern (footnote 8). It appears obvious that the paper is doing this deliberately. It endorses far right individuals and organisations, and provides them with a route to new audiences. It doesn’t seem believable that the editor doesn’t realise what he is doing. How are the editorial team of The Light identifying pieces to publish? Do they never consider authors’ previous work when choosing whether to promote them? If this pattern of far right content is an accident or mistake, what does that say about the coverage of other topics in The Light?
Don’t be fooled. Make sure your friends know what’s behind The Light and where it wants to lead them. We invite people to join us in making clear our opposition to The Light being handed out in Stroud by signing our statement at tinyurl.com/TheLightStatement.
What about the people who hand out “The Light” in Stroud and other towns around the country? Not all of them are far right, yet they are still handing out this paper. At least one has chosen not to hand out specific issues. We invite them all to reconsider handing out this paper. As we wrote in our first piece in January 2021: “We ask that you take the time to listen, to research the subject. We ask that you think very carefully about whether you want to continue reading, sharing – even writing for – The Light.” Whatever we think of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it was dealt with, none of us should have anything to do with a paper that promotes the far right.
Footnotes
Footnote 1:
The Light and its supporters often argue that it is an unfair “slur” to refer to anything as “far right”, or that political terms like left and right aren’t of any use. We disagree – for us ‘far right’ is a useful term to describe individuals, organisations or ideas. Arguing that the term far right is unacceptable is strange given the paper often accuses others of being Nazis. An article in Issue 28 claims to help people understand “the road to fascism”. The December 2020 Issue argues the UK government’s response to the pandemic to that date was ‘Just like the Nazis’. Issue 12 has an article claiming an ongoing ‘Nazification of the NHS’. A further piece in Issue 28 casts The Light and its supporters as part of a “worldwide resistance to today’s Nazi goons”. We don’t think these claims are correct, but they show that The Light is happy to accuse others of being far right to make a rhetorical point when they want to.
Footnote 2:
We do think it’s important to be as clear as possible about what is and isn’t far right. Our definition is based on Sam Moore and Alex Roberts’ excellent book “Post Internet Far Right”. The book explores the ideas that motivate the political parties, protest movements, internet personalities and individuals that make up the far right. Their definition is “‘Those forms of political behaviour that work on or advocate for the reproduction of capitalist social roles and relations on the basis of ethnic nationalism, racism, xenophobia or antisemitism, and often through the application of violent means at odds with principles of formal equality and thus at least publicly unavailable to the liberal state’.”
Footnote 3:
Anne Marie Waters was once a member of the Labour Party. This doesn’t get her a free pass, nor anyone else. Others have made the political journey from Labour and socialist parties to the far right. For example, Sir Oswald Mosley was once a Labour minister and went on to found and lead the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s.
Footnote 4:
In 2017, Tilbrook made a complaint about the description ‘far right’. The Independent Press Standards Organisation found that the Yorkshire Post had shown “sufficient examples of activities and speech associated with the English Democrats in support of its characterisation of the party as ‘far-right’”.
Footnote 5:
Examples of articles by Lasha Darkmoon include: “Rape Jihad: Dark Days for Europe” (web archive link) and “The Migrant Invasion of Europe and the Dawn of a New Multicultural Dystopia” (web archive link). Though these were not republished in The Light, it’s reasonable to ask how the editorial team of The Light identifies pieces to publish. We also think its fair that publishers should consider authors’ previous work when choosing whether to promote them. Both issues are particularly important when publishing a piece arguing in favour of Holocaust denial.
Footnote 6:
Groups of indigenous people in Brazil have asked the International Criminal Court to investigate whether the recent far right president Jair Bolsonaro’s actions “constitute crimes against humanity.” These actions include weakening environmental protections, encouraging private development of the Amazon, and the displacement of Indigenous people. But The Light chooses to side with Bolsonaro instead of indigenous people and other victims of his government. Issue 28 repeats Bolsonaro’s false claims that his recent loss in the Brazilian presidential election was due to fraud. The article is taken from American far right site The Gateway Pundit, which has a history of publishing untrue stories and conspiracy theories. The reality is that it is Bolsonaro who has been found to have committed “election violations”. He used “government communication channels to promote his campaign and [for] sowing doubts about the vote.” As a result he has been barred from running for political office until 2030.
Footnote 7:
It isn’t just right wing politicians from countries other than the UK that are praised. Issue 31 even manages to provide a full page article endorsing the ideas of recent Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss. There is no critique of her very right wing politics. No mention of the terrible impact on people from her short tenure as Prime Minister. Instead, the piece welcomes her fantastical claims to be ‘anti-establishment’, even as she has been member of the political party that has been in government for the past 13 years.
Footnote 8:
There are links to many other right wing publications and websites. These are often referenced as “reliable” sources of information. An article in Issue 27 cites and links to US far right media Breitbart, founded by the former Chief Strategist for Donald Trump – Steve Bannon. In 2016 Bannon himself described the outlet as “the platform for the alt-right”. The term ‘alt-right’ is used to self-describe an attempted coalition and rebrand among far right forces in the USA and globally. The article linking to Breitbart attacks what it calls the “Hollywood woke agenda”. Apparently “Female characters are godlike, while men have been downgraded to clumsy fools” in all Hollywood films. (we have to ask how anyone who reads this stuff can take it seriously?!). Other groups advertised include “Project Veritas” – an American group which engages in fraud to discredit liberal organisations and trade unions. “SaveUsNow” is the political party of convicted shooter and conspiracy theorist Mark Steele. Issue 26 includes an article by “The Voice of Wales”, run by two Swansea-based UKIP members. The site had its YouTube account removed after accusations of racism. There are many more examples we cannot fit into a single article. Perhaps the worst thing the paper regularly points people to is the video sharing platform Bitchute. Hope Not Hate says Bitchute is “knowingly playing host to terrorist propaganda and incitement to violence.” Support for the platform is at least complacent about the prevalence of far right hate speech, Holocaust denial and glorification, and videos posted by mass shooters. At worst, the paper is aiming for people to find and engage with this content.
Community Solidarity Stroud District 