On 4th October 2023, we held a public meeting titled ‘Conspiracy Theories, the Far Right, and The Light’. Here we present:

• The speech by CSSD representatives, James Beecher and Emma Calcutt
• The speech by David Renton
• A film which collates the footage we have from the event (sadly, due to technical issues, we do not have complete footage of the whole event).

Before those, biographies of our three speakers:

• David Renton has written several books on the far right, including “Fascism: History and Theory” republished for it’s twentieth anniversary in 2020, “Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism” published in 2022, and “The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right” published in 2019. Renton received a PhD for his thesis on fascism and anti-fascism in Britain after the second world war.

• Emma Calcutt is originally from the West Midlands, Emma studied Development Studies, Politics & Arabic at SOAS, spent 5 years in Syria and 2 years in Indonesia.
  She has had a life long interest in anti-racism, and as well as Community Solidarity Stroud District, also works with Stroud Against Racism.
• James Beecher has lived in Stroud for almost his entire life. In 2011-12 he was the Chair of Stroud Against the Cuts when it ran a successful campaign to keep health clinics and district hospitals like Stroud’s across Gloucestershire from being moved out of the NHS. He works at a local community bike workshop, has been involved in a variety of direct action anti-war, environmental and social justice movements, and is a founder member of Community Solidarity Stroud District.

The speech by CSSD representatives, James Beecher and Emma Calcutt

We’re going to talk about four things

1. What we mean by “conspiracy theories
2. What we mean by “the far right”
3. How “The Light” paper promotes both of these things, and
4. Why we think these issues cannot be ignored, and some ideas we have about how to tackle them. We don’t think we have all the answers and we’d like to hear your ideas too.

Before we get started – a warning. While some of you will be familiar with the terrible content of The Light, and it can be uncomfortable to quote it out loud, we feel it’s necessary to the arguments we are making to provide quotations.

Life is hard, and hugely unequal. It is entirely unsurprising that people are distrustful of government, authorities and institutions.

But that doesn’t mean any claim about government or other institutions is true. When we talk about “conspiracy theories” what we mean is perhaps better described as “conspiracy beliefs”. This is where there is limited or no evidence for the theory. Indeed, the absence of evidence or the existence of evidence that contradicts the theory is treated as evidence that the theory is correct – that the conspiracy is suppressing evidence.

The example we’ve written about at length is the claim that global warming and climate change are hoaxes or scams as part of a conspiracy to decimate the human population and control what remains of it. This conspiracy involves not only ignoring but seeing as part of the conspiracy the enormous volumes of evidence that human societies since the era of colonialism and industrialisation – and in particular the burning of fossil fuels – have contributed to global warming, and that this is leading to changes in the climate, and to suffering and death.

Example headlines in The Light paper include “global warming lies, deceit and hypocrisy”, “challenge climate emergency theories”, and – on a recent frontpage accompanied by two charts easily shown to be grossly misleading, “No climate crisis”.

We need to take this seriously: when publications like “The Light” attempt to sow doubt about climate change, they undermine the social movements that are protesting, demanding action and making change. They divide our communities as we try to reduce our contributions to global warming, and build our capacity to respond to the crises to come as the climate breaks down. One of the risks of those crises is that the far-right will seek to build from them.

When we express concern about the far right, we aren’t only concerned about The Light newspaper.

In 2010 – long before our group existed – the British National Party – the most electorally successful far right party in England of recent decades – sought to site its communications office at Salmon Springs in Stroud. Then BNP leader Nick Griffin had visited a pub in Painswick the year before, at the peak of the BNP’s popularity – it received nearly 1 million votes in the 2009 elections for MEPs. An 18 year old poured a pint of Guinness over Griffin, and BNP goons beat him up in response. The BNP dropped their plans for a media office here after community opposition including a public meeting of 120 people – not dissimilar to tonight’s meeting.

There’s a popular idea that Griffin and the BNP fell apart after his support for Holocaust denial aired on an episode of BBC Question Time, but in my opinion the way in which Griffin was granted this platform has only aided a drift to far right ideas and policies in English politics – even if the BNP did not benefit themselves.

We’ve seen the Conservative Government introduce the horrendous “hostile environment” that insists on identity checks of people racialised as other than British, and have led to the denial of healthcare treatment to hundreds of people – including those who have lived here for decades and members of the Windrush generation.

The current Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has recently been referring to undocumented migrants as an “existential challenge” to Europe and the US – echoing racist conspiracy theories of “White Genocide”, and the “Great Replacement Theory”. In Christmas 2021 these ideas were promoted in leaflets distributed locally by supporters of what was – as least until a recent split – Britain’s most active fascist organisation – Patriotic Alternative.

As today is the anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, it’s also worth mentioning that Oswald Mosley visited Stroud in the 1930s – there is a picture of him outside what was most recently the Electric Bike Shop on John St, apparently after staying in Cainscross House, the home of the leader of the West of England branch of Moseley’s British Union of Fascists.

In short – while it may unsettle ideas about Stroud’s current political culture, we shouldn’t be complacent about the possibility of the far-right organising here.

But we should also celebrate the antifascist opposition locally – not just to Nick Griffin and the BNP in 2009/10.

In 1962 a far right camp in Guiting Wood in the Cotswolds hosted a visit by the leader of the American Nazi Party. He was deported from the country after the camp ‘was stormed by 100 Cotswold villagers’ and a swastika flag ‘hauled down’’. The Daily Mirror reported that Mrs Ada Green from Cheltenham who was nearly eighty and a former district nurse at Guiting Power “Angrily… stamped around the camp site, waving her first at the grey-uniformed, jackbooted Nazis, shouting “Clear off, clear off!”

What about The Light, and our opposition to it?

The paper describes itself as a “truthpaper”, offering “the uncensored truth” as it casts itself as an “alternative” to the “mainstream media” and “tyranny”. 37 monthly issues have been published since September 2020. Its editor has claimed a monthly print run of 200,000 – distributed both directly to subscribers, and via stalls such as the one in Stroud High St. 

The latest issue credits 13 people involved in the production and distribution of the paper – though we don’t know how many of those roles are paid. We do know that the editor, Darren Nesbitt, is a Christian who describes his politics as “constitutionalist” – about “preserving what our ancestors have built up”. He’s also a proud flat-earther.

The Light isn’t a simple far right publication – it’s not the case that every article is from or promoting the far right. And we’re not saying that all the people who hand out the paper whether locally or elsewhere are far right.

We might describe it as a paper of the “cosmic right” – mixing ideas from a range of perspectives on the right including the far right with those from “hippy” and “alternative” communities. Others have referred to a phenomenon of “Conspirituality” where conspiratorial ideas about how the world works are blended with those from New Age or other forms of spirituality (including forms of Christianity) or “wellness influencers” with a particular approach to alternative health.

What we have written about extensively is how The Light provides space for, points to, and includes adverts from far right individuals or organisations. In our view, the paper effectively functions as public relations for the far right – mixing content from the far right with other content, or concealing its nature, so that audiences that might normally reject the far right instead come to see these individuals and organisations as valued members of their movement.

The paper has published several articles by Anne Marie Waters – leader of the ‘For Britain’ political party, described by former UKIP leader Nigel Farage as “Nazis and racists”. One of AMW’s articles in The Light is all about promoting Tommy Robinson – one of the most well known far right activists in Britain, a member of BNP before founding the violent street movement the ‘English Defence League’.

In Issue 31, The Light defended a protest which turned into a riot against asylum seekers being housed in a hotel in Liverpool. The article 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 was promoted by far right organisations including Patriotic Alternative, who had visited the hotel in the weeks before the riot, and delivered leaflets in the area.

The government’s dehumanising rhetoric about migrants or policies that restrict access to public services or involve invasive personal data collection or sharing as part of border controls aren’t criticised. Instead the paper attacks those seeking refuge, listing 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”. It is revealing that a paper that presents itself as opposing tyranny shows no solidarity with people forced to flee their home countries.

The attacks on oppressed and marginalised people don’t end there.

In Issue 36, from August this year, Robert C Smith – manager of a boutique investment bank – begins an article “Men are conquerors, if this were not true, America would never have been discovered”. He says that men have a “conqueror gene” and tells a story about how if he sees water he has to go in and tell the ocean “you are our bitch and we are not afraid of you” and goes on to say “I don’t expect you ladies to understand”. This is in an article primarily about denying global warming.

These attitudes are consistent with the paper’s approach to women and feminism. In an issue from November last year, readers are told that “Patriarchy” is nothing but a “sexist insult”, rather than a way of examining the continued evidence and experience of women having less wealth and experiencing more violence, both at home and abroad. An article on films complains of “strong, miserable female leads with no personalities”, brought to us by sinister forces who want to “destroy society, confuse and blur gender roles, eradicate traditionalism…”

Hungarian PM Victor Orban is praised as a champion of “traditional family values” – as he rules a government that has ended legal recognition of transgender people, censored any “LGBT+ positive content” in movies, books or public advertisements and severely restrict sex education in school in the style of Section 28 – and passed legislation enabling him to impose states of emergency where he can rule by decree at will. So much for freedom.

A cartoon from the July 2022 issue features a parent asking their primary-school age child “how was school?”, and the child projectile vomiting a rainbow in response. This represents a grim disgust with LGBTQ+ people, and a bizarre conspiratorial fantasy that the content of primary school education is in some way overwhelmingly made up of content about LGBTQ people. In case the meaning of the cartoon isn’t clear, Page 7 of the same issue describes Pride month (in which it was issued) as “a rainbow-festooned festival of the Globohomo cult” – with the author of the piece writing “the question must surely be asked just how much longer can society stomach being force-fed this most degenerate form of diversity”. The cartoon was produced by Bob Moran who is described as “our best political cartoonist”. Moran was sacked by The Telegraph after he tweeted that palliative care doctor and pro-NHS campaigner Rachel Clarke “deserves to be verbally abused in public for the rest of her worthless existence. They all do.” 

What prompted our group – initially made up predominantly of Jewish people – to form was a piece in The Light paper’s November 2021 issue regarding an online radio host, Graham Hart, who was jailed for 32 months for even worse language. Hart pled guilty to eight counts of making a “programme in service with intent or likely to stir up racial hatred”. Hart broadcast that Jews were “like rats”, “filth” and needed to be “wiped out”. He asked listeners to send him a gun. He said “that although baby rats look cute, they grow to be adult rats and that in a similar way, young Jews should also be killed.” These are only a few examples of his disgusting comments.

The article in The Light mentioned none of this. Nor did it report the perspective of a single Jewish person. Instead it misled readers to present Hart as a sympathetic character, “entitled to” his opinions and asked “How does it harm anybody else for him to have a different view of history?”

This complacency and evasiveness have been replicated in many of the responses we’ve had to raising these issues – with our extensive evidence dismissed as “smears”, “nitpicking” or “based on one article”. In a piece that the most prominent local distributor of The Light wrote for the paper as a “riposte” to the BBC coverage of The Light’s promotion of the far right, he complained of “the assumptions that anything that can be labelled as “far right” is necessarily bad”. Isn’t that revealing?

Some responses been directly antisemitic, and this isn’t a surprise given antisemitism is a common feature for speakers invited to Stroud by either “Stroud Freedom Group” or related organising around the former shopfront space “The Beacon”. 

Our origins as a group lie in a letter written asking the Stroud Freedom Group to withdraw an invitation to Sandi Adams to speak at a rally in November 2020 – before CSSD existed, but written by several current members. We were concerned about antisemitic content on her website. Though she has deleted some of the posts we highlighted, she still hosts a page titled “The Crucifixion of Russia” – a documentary film for which the full title is “The Jewish Crucifixion of Russia”. The video concludes “Communism was always a Jewish tool, used to purge Christianity and freedom. Although it is believed the Soviets lost power years ago, the Jewish hand behind it is very much alive today”.

Rather than taking our concerns on board, and certainly making no apology, ‘Stroud Freedom Group’ instead chose to invite Sandi Adams to speak again in this town at a public meeting held at The Old Convent in December last year.

We do not want to overstate the risk locally, but neither do we want to be complacent.

Malakai Wheeler, an 18 year old who lived in Swindon but was studying at Marling school – was recently convicted of terrorism offences. He was arrested in May 2021, when just 16. He was caught doing a Nazi salute and owned a ‘Terrorist’s Handbook’. He was described as a ‘prolific contributor’ to an extreme right wing chat group, posting regular racist and antisemitic content and propaganda, using a swastika as his profile image and telling the court he had “an interest and sympathy with some of” National Socialism.

We believe that by talking about these issues, and coming together as a community to discuss them – using our freedom of speech – we can tackle them.

We’d be really grateful if you would share our online articles on social media or through email with your friends and other networks.

We have leaflets that you can help us distribute, and regularly hold street stalls where you can join us.

We encourage you to talk about these issues in face to face conversations – including objecting when you hear people repeat conspiratorial or far right ideas.

We have a website, Facebook page, email list and a whatsapp announcements group you can engage with for updates, and will be organising further in person events including for Holocaust Memorial Day in January, and film screenings in the coming months.

If you’d like to get more involved, please talk to us.

Thanks again for listening.

The speech by David Renton

For 30 years, I’ve spoken at events in the UK and abroad about the threat posed by the far right. When I started, what motivated my listeners was fear of fascist parties. In France and Britain and Italy, there were parties set up former fascists, nostalgic for the 1930s.

So, in France, you could tell Jean-Marie Le Pen was a fascist, because he insisted on talking about the second world war. FN [Front National – Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party] candidates said that Marshal Petain, Hitler’s ally in France, had been misunderstood. Le Pen claimed the Holocaust had been exaggerated. Six times, he was convicted of Holocaust denial. He was fined, he was threatened with jail, but always he came back to that argument. It was more important to him to keep fascist, voters on side than it was appealing to middle-of-the-road centre-right voters.

Here in Britain we had the National Front, and the British National Party, which was founded by a former leader of the Front. When anti-fascists wanted to expose the BNP, the easiest way of doing it was by showing old pictures of their leader John Tyndall in a Nazi uniform.

In Italy, the main fascist party was called MSI, or M-SI meaning “Mussolini, Yes.” The party’s first three leaders had all served under Mussolini. For years, the leaders would give speeches saying, “Let everyone know, if they search for fascism, fascism is here.”

By around 1990, all those parties had worked out that it was in their interests to deny that they were still fascists. The first was the MSI in Italy. They elected a new leader, Ginafranco Fini, who said he was a “post-fascist”.

Every time I addressed an anti-fascist meeting, the audience would agree about certain things:

1. We all thought fascism was bad
2. Although the success of the parties was worrying, we weren’t absolutely terrified. We reckoned there was a limit as to how far the fascists could grow. It wasn’t exact. But iot seemed like no more than about 20 percent of people would vote for a fascist party.
3. What that meant was – so long as the left did our job properly, so long as we were organised and challenged them, the growth of the fascists would be limited.

This is how the left understood the world: and by the “left” I mean socialists, liberals, Communists, trade unionists, environmentalists, peace protesters, feminists.

Let me skip the intervening 30 years of history, and come to the present.

Politics now is very different. For one thing, the far right has undoubtedly grown. And yet, if anything the number of people willing to call themselves fascists has shrunk.

It is almost as if the most effective leaders of the far right had grown up in the same world as the rest of us, and drawn similar conclusions.

Their most important realisation was this – that people really did hate fascism. Therefore if the far right was to grow beyond its limits, what needed to happen was this. New leaders needed to emerge who weren’t interested in fascism, did their best to ignore it, and found new ways of doing politics seemingly a long way from fascism

The far-right had to decide between diluting fascism or trying something new. There were times when you could see these strategies in competition with one another. So, in the 2000s, you had the BNP standing in elections, you had UKIP standing in elections. For a long time, each party did about as well as the other. But by the end of the 2000s it became obvious that UKIP (a never fascist party) was going to do better than the BNP which had been fascist and now didn’t know what it was. Voters, donors, abandoned the BNP. They found a home in UKIP instead.

That’s why if you take the successful leaders of today’s far-right, Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro, they aren’t fascists nor have they ever been. They feel like – and are – something new.

Another problem is that small numbers of former leftists have joined them. With every “culture wars” waged by right-wing press, groups of people detach themselves from the left and go over to the right. So, when UKIP became the Brexit party, among its candidates was Claire Fox – a former Revolutionary Communist. She was happy to give cover to Nigel Farage.

Under Covid, in America and all over Europe, you saw people siding with the right from New Age communities. For someone of my generation, you say the words “New Age” and I think of people travelling in their thousands to Glastonbury, being denounced by government ministers, being attacked by the police. It felt like there was an automatic link between those communities and the left. But in 30 years those links have broken.

At this point, I need to explain two definitions. The first is “fascism”. When I talk about fascism, I mean something specific. It is a way of doing politics with a definite history. What Mussolini and Hitler stood for was radical inequality: they wanted bosses to have more power over workers, the richer countries to have more power over their colonies, men to have more power over women. They pledged to fight a war to the death against socialism.

Fascism was also a mass movement. It was enthralled by the latest technology, airplanes, cinema, radio. By uniforms. By leaders. It tried to mobilise millions of people on the streets.

Between fascism’s goals and its style of organising there was always a tension. If something else could emerge, a mass movement with millions of supporters, fascism would be pushed back. That’s where anti-fascism comes in. That was the effect of such demonstrations as the Battles of Lewisham or Cable Streeet, whose 87^th anniversary is today, when 2,000 fascists tried to march through east London, but were blocked by a crowd of 150,000 people.

Lots of people have tried to define fascism over the years, and their definitions say more or less the same thing. Everyone knows what fascists stand for. You can make a list of their beliefs. But there is no similar list of core “far right” beliefs. Their content changes rapidly.

By the far right, all we mean is a kind of politics which is on the right, and more aggressive than most other right-wing politics at the time. It’s not a fixed set of ideas, but something changing. One of the reasons the far-right changes is because the centre-right changes as well. Think about the Conservatives when they came into office, how their one slogan was austerity. But that’s now what the Conservatives were under Boris Johnson, he was a spender not a cutter. So the centre-right changes, and the far-right changes in reaction to it.

That said. It is always the case that when you have a far right that is large and growing, the fascist element never disappears. Fascism solves certain problems facing the far right. The far-right goes through a cycle, in one moment disavowing fascism, in the next copying parts of it

One part of fascism which the non-fascist far right constantly recreates is fascism’s dependence conspiracy theories. No political movement in history has relied on conspiracy theories as deeply as fascism did. Hitler and Mussolini wanted to pose as radicals. They also wanted to run society very much along the lines it was already organised, with the same rulers. How they could combine these two ambitions was by pretend that there were, everywhere, secret conspiracies of the truly powerful which only the fascists could defeat.

They said Western society was run by cultural producers, artists, film-makers, musicians, working as opinion formers. They called this Kulturbolshewismus, “Cultural Marxism”.

They claimed that the banks and supermarkets were run by rich Jews, “Globalists”. And the trade unions run by poor Jews. These were lies. This was paranoid thinking. It was a spur to violence. Thousands of socialists had their meeting-halls burned or were shot, even before Hitler or Mussolini took power. Fantasies of Jewish power led to the Holocaust.

What about The Light?

The first thing to say about the newspaper is that it is right-wing. It never has a kind word for the poor or a harsh word for the rich. Think of the things which make people in Britain’s lives a misery. High gas and electricity bills – the Light isn’t interested. Why aren’t wages keeping up with bills. In 38 issues, the paper hasn’t once tried to explain where they come from.

Tens of thousands of tenants are going to be evicted in Britain this year. Read The Light, and you’d never know it. The paper isn’t interested in workers or the poor.

Much of what the paper does tell you is the same as any right-wing papers. The poor are a cost on society. The poor want houses, they want jobs. And the rich mustn’t help them.

The Light is against taxes on the rich. The Light think making the rich pay their fair share is “100 per cent immoral and 100 per cent corrupt.” Like every other right-wing paper, the Light hates refugees. In Issue 27, the Light warned of refugees coming into Britain. Let them in, the paper said, and it will be taxpayers “footing the bill”

Remember – a year ago – we had the most useless government in British history. Headed by Liz Truss, it announced more tax cuts for the rich in a shorter period of time than any government we’ve ever had. She cut so much, there wasn’t going to be any money left. There was a run on the pound, and Truss fled from office after 45 days.

The Light responded in March this year. They reprinted an article from the Daily Telegraph, praising Liz Truss, quoting her account of what had happened, and wishing for the return of a proper “Conservative government to implement Conservative Party policies”.

There is a reason why The Light can borrow content from the Daily Telegraph, without that article standing out in any from the material around it – and it’s this. The basic ideas of The Light are the most familiar clichés that we see every day in the right-wing press.

Of course The Light was only a right-wing paper, then many people in this room would dislike it. We’d ignore it. But The Light isn’t just right-wing, it is a far-right paper.

The first issue of The Light was published six months after the start of the Covid lockdown. The first reaction of the Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Covid was to insist that Britain would see no lockdown. You remember what he said. He  was going to be like the Mayor in Jaws, keeping the beaches open no matter what.

Within days, though, Johnson had changed course. The government introduced a lockdown. It did so because every night on our TV screens, pictures were being shown of people dying in hospitals. No-one knew how many people would join them. Ordinary people in our millions demanded that the government take action to save lives.

From the start, the lockdown was criticised by the right-wing press. There were Conservatives who wanted business keep on as usual. They hated the idea of spending billions on healthcare. The Light saw that argument, and repeated arguments spread by Johnson’s Conservative critics.

The problem wasn’t criticising the lockdown, it was the way they criticised it. There is all the difference in the world between criticising the lockdown from the left or criticising it from the right. A “left anarchist” paper could have said – we are giving the state power, which after the lockdown ends will be used against protesters. But the Light didn’t say that. It said all the real protesters (Pride marches, Black Lives Matter, XR) were part of some fantastic imagined conspiracy. They think we only took to the streets because George Soros put us there.

A “left libertarian” paper could have said the impact of the lockdown fell too hard on workers. But The Light never did say that. It wasn’t interested in workers.

Instead of taking either of those approaches, it tried to join up people’s anger to far-right talking points. When The Light criticised the Covid rules, the paper never attacked the actual people making the decision: Boris Johnson or the Conservatives. Instead, the paper blamed a series of imaginary enemies. It started talking about the 9/11 attacks, saying they had been a “false flag”. It claimed that fluoride was being added to the water to “reduce an individual’s power to resist domination by slowly narcotising a certain area of the brain”.

When people start using conspiracy theories, that always helps the right. They stop talking about the real, obvious, visible beneficiaries from our society, “the rich”, specific politicians. They start invoking some other secret, invisible, imaginary enemy.

The Light has published 43 articles attacking “the globalists”. It’s a language with an old history. When interwar fascists spoke of “globalists”, they meant the Jews. They had in their kind the weird fantasy that Jews didn’t have roots, that they wandered the world. Unlike the good, honest, British or German or Italian rich who were tied to one place. Blaming people on the basis of myths about ethnicity: that way of thinking led to the gas chambers.

And The Light, in its inching, dishonest, way – not wanting to state anything openly, only at the start of the journey – is staring down the same path.

As I speak, The Light has on its website, an advert for the latest David Icke book. David Icke believes there is a secret conspiracy that runs the world, “the Death Cult.” It’s a conspiracy of secret lizard people. And behind them, the Jews. He blames Jews for the Russian Revolution. He blames them for 9/11. He insists that the greatest forgery in world history – the Protocols of the Elders of Zion “are happening”.

Let me end by addressing the question of how to respond to publications like The Light.

I have always encouraged movements to distinguish between fascists and their allies closer to the political mainstream. Faced with groups like the National Front or the British National Party, the left has always spoken of “no platforming” fascists. The idea was of taking away any means by which the fascists might reach their audience. If a fascists hand out a paper, take if off them, throw it in the bin. If a fascist tries to hold a stall, close it down. If a fascist wants to hold a public meeting, occupy the venue, we should make sure it couldn’t proceed.

The reason for that approach is that fascism is a dynamic style of politics, capable of growing every fast, and with serious ambitions to take state power.

If that’s the model of no platform, then The Light aren’t fascists. They don’t organise physical attacks on anyone. They support the likes of Meloni in Italy or Orban in Hungary – but they never dare say straight out that Britain would be better if we got rid of democracy. The Light is, in the end, a far-right propaganda sheet. If you were going to draw up a line of political ideologies, from left to right, then you’d say. Not actual fascists, but the next along.

So my position would be that that people should allow The Light to speak. But when they speak, we will speak too. We will argue with them. We will say it over and over again until even the people handing out that paper grasp what we are telling them. If they have a meeting, we will stand in front of it. We shouldn’t make it impossible for them to organise, but we should argue with every person in their audience where The Light’s ideas lead.

The Light is wrong. It lies about what’s happening. People who read it, and believe what it is saying, misunderstand the world. There is no secret world government of anything. Tommy Robinson does not care about the victims of child sex abuse. Global warming is not a conspiracy to usher in 15-minute cities or whatever other nonsense talking-point the magazine decides to print. The far right are not your friends.

100 years ago, a socialist writer August Bebel responded to the rising antisemitism of his day, and he called it “the Socialism of fools”. He wasn’t dealing with the murderous antisemitism of the 1930s but something earlier than that, fuzzier, less well-formed. What he meant was that if you look at the world, imagining you’ll find some secret conspiracy to explain everything – you make it harder to identify the real culprits in our society.

If you think about all the problems in Britain, it’s remarkable how many boil down to the same basic issue. The rich do not pay enough in taxes. The politicians cosy up to them. Therefore there isn’t the money we need to pay for proper services – NHS, council homes.

The rich are not a conspiracy. The papers don’t hide their wealth, they boast about it in Rich Lists. You don’t need to imagine there’s a secret caste of reptile overloads ruling us. You just need a system which properly taxes the rich.

The Light doesn’t help us to see what needs doing. Allowing the paper to go without challenge makes it harder to bring about the world we need.

So the paper can share its lies, but every time they speak, we will speak too.

Footage from the event