Speeches from our Public Meeting on 4th October 2023

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

Before those, biographies of our three speakers:

  • 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 87th 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

Press Release: Community Solidarity to hold Public Meeting in Stroud

Contact: contact@communitysolidaritystrouddistrict.org

Community Solidarity Stroud District will hold a Public Meeting this Wednesday 4th October from 7.30-9.30pm at The Trinity Rooms on the subject of “Conspiracy Theories, the Far Right and The Light” paper.

The meeting follows the “Racism isn’t funny” open letter and protest by Community Solidarity Stroud District (CSSD) held in opposition to a recent “comedy show” by Katie Hopkins, in which they highlighted the controversial figure’s history of association with far-right organisations. CSSD has previously challenged the content of “The Light” a free paper handed out in Stroud High St and elsewhere around the country. The group formed in January 2022 when it highlighted an article defending someone convicted of “inciting racial hatred” for violent threats towards Jewish people on Holocaust Memorial Day that year. It has since written about and handed out leaflets challenging what they see as homophobia and transphobia, climate denial, anti-women attitudes, and the promotion of the far-right in the paper.

Denise Needleman from Community Solidarity Stroud District said: “At our public meeting we will be exploring the rise of the far right globally, in Europe, and in England. Here in Stroud we’ve been exposing and challenging the promotion of far-right organisations and ideas – including antisemitism, homophobia and transphobia, and anti-women attitudes in “The Light” for over 18 months now. The consistent denial of climate change and attacks on climate justice activists in the paper are also of concern to us. We look forward to discussing how we can tackle these issues in our community.”

The main speaker at the event, alongside members of CSSD, will be David Renton, a barrister and antifascist writer. David has written several books on the far right, including “Fascism: History and Theory” published 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.

The meeting is to be held on the anniversary on the Battle of Cable Street – when British Jews, Irish workers, trade unionists and left wing groups formed an anti-fascist counter-demonstration to a march by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in 1936 through the East End of London – which had a large Jewish population at the time.

More details are available on the Community Solidarity Stroud District website.

Public Meeting on 4th October: Conspiracy theories, the Far Right, and The Light

Public Meeting, Wednesday 4th October, 7.30-9.30pm

at The Trinity Rooms, Field Road, Stroud, GL5 2HZ

Doors will open at 7.15pm, so that we can start promptly from 7.30pm

Free entry – donations welcome (please bring cash)

On the anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, Community Solidarity Stroud District invites you to a public meeting about the growth of conspiracy theories and the Far Right in Stroud District – and how we can organise to combat this.

The main speaker at the event will be David Renton, a barrister and antifascist writer – alongside members of CSSD:

  • 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.

There will be presentations followed by time for questions and discussion.

If you use Facebook, you can let us know you’re coming and invite friends via the following link: Public Meeting: Conspiracy theories, the Far Right, and The Light.

Poster for the event

cssdmeetingDownload

Press Release: Community comes together to celebrate diversity and oppose Katie Hopkins’ “Comedy Show” in Stroud

Contact: contact@communitysolidaritystrouddistrict.org

An open letter initiated by Community Solidarity Stroud District calling on organisers to withdraw their invitation to Katie Hopkins to present a “comedy show” in Stroud town has been signed by over 225 people at time of writing (4:35pm 6th September).

The group is also hosting an event featuring representatives from different groups that are taking action to make Stroud inclusive and challenging racism and discrimination. The landlord of the original venue – The Old Convent has told the group he was not aware the original booking was for Katie Hopkins and that now he is aware the event will not take place there. However, it appears the event will go ahead, with Katie Hopkins’ website saying the venue is “To Be Announced” on Thursday 7th September, the day the event is due to take place. Community Solidarity Stroud District say “Despite rumours to the contrary the Katie Hopkins event is most definitely not cancelled. We will meet to hold our protest rally, with speakers and PA as planned at the foot of the hill car park – opposite Merrywalks bus station. If we find out more about where the show is going to be held, we may revise this. If we don’t find out where the event will be, we will old our own event discussing the issues raised”

Community Solidarity Stroud District are inviting people to meet in The Old Convent Car Park when they can between 6 and 10pm on Thursday 7th September. Their open letter about the event can be read and signed online.

Hopkins is known for rants made up of extreme anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim statements that have cost her jobs with mainstream right-wing media outlets. 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”. Other examples involved her comparing to migrants to cockroaches and calling for a “final solution” for Muslims. After being dropped by MailOnline and The Sun, Hopkins spent 10 months at the Canadian far-right media outlet Rebel Media, and also attended the conferences of the Islamophobic For Britain party alongside Ingrid Carlqvist – who has engaged in Holocaust denial – and the ‘Traditional Britain Group’ (TBG). The TBG is a meeting point across wider far right movements, run by former Tory fringe figure Gregory Lauder-Frost, who has called for the “assisted voluntary repatriation” of those “not of European stock” from the UK to their “natural” homeland. In January 2019, she publicised a conference in Finland which featured an international roster of antisemites, white nationalists and fascists.

James Beecher, a member of Community Solidarity Stroud District, said: “Katie Hopkins was banned from South Africa “for spreading racial hatred”. She meets with far-right organisations, dehumanises people, and calls for violence. Racism isn’t funny. We don’t think someone with her record should have been invited to Stroud – and are pleased to see the community coming together to make this clear. Supporters of Katie Hopkins and apparently even Hopkins herself are trying to present her event as an open one, with people who disagree welcome to attend. But there was no suggestion of debate, indeed no publicity at all, until we showed the level of community opposition. We’re using our free speech to challenge the hateful things Katie Hopkins says. Her freedom to say them isn’t what’s at stake. What we’re raising as a question is whether she should be saying these things, given their impact on people. We’re also asking why the organisers would want to invite her, and why the venue would want to host her, given her record. We want to be absolutely clear that Katie Hopkins record speaks for itself and that she is no more welcome in Stroud than she was in South Africa.”

Jagdish Patel, organiser of Stroud Love Music Hate Racism events, said: “How utterly disrespectful that The Light supporters have invited someone known for spreading racism to tell so-called jokes in Stroud”

Emma Calcutt, from Stroud Against Racism said: “Stroud Against Racism is a grassroots organisation with the mission of working towards a system of equality and equity. Our aim is to challenge institutional and systemic racism through action and policy change. We are working to help build an inclusive and welcoming community for all people and cultures. Katie Hopkins is not welcome in our community and we encourage members to peacefully picket this event and make our message clear that this kind of event has no place in our town.”

Caroline Hillhouse from Stroud District together With Refugees said: “Stroud District Together with Refugees is set up to show welcome and solidarity with refugees. To denounce the government’s inhumane policy and practice on asylum. To uphold international law, which states that vulnerable people seeking safety have the right  to claim asylum in any safe country. We are appalled that Katie Hopkins has been invited to Stroud.  She is well known for making statements that are vitriolic and extremely offensive to migrants and other minorities. Her language stokes up fear, division and hatred in our Stroud community.”

Roma Robinson from the Radical Youth Space for Educations said: “We at the RYSE stand with the Community Solidarity Stroud District Group in calling for this demonstration against her “comedy show” coming to Stroud. She weaponises the divisions that already exist to bring us further apart, when right now, in the face of increasing disrepair globally and in our communities, it is our duty to our community to refuse to be divided by white supremacists. So let’s pull on our heritage of the rooftop occupations and the water riots, our radical heritage that tells us to stand up in the face of injustice and declare that fascism is not welcome in our town, not now, not ever.”

Stroud District Cllr Robin Layfield, from Community Independents, said: “”Katie Hopkins has profited from division and controversy throughout her entire career. Hopkins’ offensive, discriminatory and harmful views have led to her removal from many print and social media platforms. Her visas have been revoked by Australia, the United States and South Africa on the basis of the threat she presents to incite hate or harm social cohesion. She trades in hatred and there should be no warm welcome in Stroud for a person with views as toxic or as unpleasant as hers.”

Lynn Haanen and Adrian Oldman, Co-cordinators of Stroud District Green Party said: “The Stroud District Green Party strongly believes in freedom of speech and the right to peaceful assembly. However, the right to freedom of speech does not extend to the sort of hate-filled, racist, inflammatory, socially divisive rhetoric that Katie Hopkins is notorious for; disinformation and hate speech should never be given a platform and must be called out loudly and clearly. We strongly object to this woman being invited to speak in Stroud by the group promoting ‘The Light’ newspaper. Her presence here can only serve to inflame and legitimise racism and we stand in solidarity with CSSD to protest against the presence of Katie Hopkins in Stroud.”

Steve Lydon, Chair of Stroud Constituency Labour Party said: “We as the Labour Party are proud to stand with other members of the community to show our abhorrence of the views of Katie Hopkins. She is not welcome here”

Notes for Editors:

  1. Community Solidarity Stroud District exists to build community led solidarity in the Stroud district to oppose the hatred of minorities and oppressed people arising from false and harmful information. It was formed in January 2022 to challenge distribution of “The Light” newspaper in the area, following a defence in the paper of a man convicted of “inciting racial hatred”. The group has challenged The Light’s support for antisemitism, Holocaust denial and racist hate speech – as well as for denial of climate change, promotion of homophobia and transphobia, and patriarchal values. It has also opposed previous talks organised by “Stroud Info Hub” or “The Beacon” featuring antisemitic speakers. You can read more about why at: communitysolidaritystrouddistrict.org
  2. The Independent – 27th November 2017: “Katie Hopkins gave speech attacking Muslims to far-right group days before leaving Mail Online ‘by mutual consent’”
  3. The Independent – 17th April 2015 “‘Hateful’ Katie Hopkins column on migrants causes Twitter backlash”
  4. Evening Standard – 7th February 2018 “Katie Hopkins says she has been detained at South Africa passport control for ‘spreading racial hatred’”
  5. Hope Not Hate – 26th June 2017 “Katie Hopkins removed from LBC after ‘final solution’ tweet”
  6. Hope Not Hate – 20th September 2018 “For Britain Conference: Hate, a Holocaust Denier and Katie Hopkins”
  7. Hope Not Hate – 4th January 2018 “Katie Hopkins joins far-right Rebel Media”

Racism isn’t funny – join us in opposing Katie Hopkins’ “comedy show” in Stroud

Katie Hopkins was banned from South Africa “for spreading racial hatred”. She meets with far-right organisations, dehumanises people, and calls for violence. She is due to speak / perform a “comedy show” at The Old Convent on Beeches Green in Stroud on Thursday 7th September.

We are organising an open letter calling on the organisers and venue to withdraw the invitation/hosting. Sign at: tinyurl.com/NoHateyHopkins (or below).

We are also hosting an event featuring representatives from different groups that are making Stroud inclusive and challenging racism and discrimination, while opposing division and hate by protesting the appearance of Katie Hopkins (if it goes ahead). The doors are due to open at 6.30pm and Hopkins is due on stage at 8pm. We invite people to meet us opposite the bus station on Merrywalks at 6pm and leaflet people as they arrive inviting them to change their mind about attending, and from 8pm in making as much noise as possible outside the venue. We will have a microphone and speaker for people from community groups that work to make our town inclusive and welcoming present to speak. If the Katie Hopkins event doesn’t go ahead, we’ll still meet up to discuss these issues.

Why are we opposing this event:

Katie Hopkins is known for rants made up of extreme anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim statements that cost her jobs with mainstream right-wing media outlets. Infamous examples involved comparing to migrants to cockroaches and calling for a “final solution” for Muslims. 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”.

It seems she’s been invited to speak in Stroud following a sychophantic interview with her in “The Light” – the dodgy paper handed out on Stroud High St and elsewhere around the district. In it, she was presented as a member of the “truth movement” and celebrated for attacking “leftist wokedom”. No mention was made of her history of 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”.

Though infamous as a television personality and controversy-seeking social media troll, Katie Hopkins recently descended into the far-right gutter. After being dropped by mainstream right wing media publications like The Sun and Mail Online, Hopkins spent 10 months at the Canadian far-right media outlet Rebel Media, and also attended the conferences of the islamophobic For Britain party alongside Ingrid Carlqvist – who has engaged in Holocaust denial – and the ‘Traditional Britain Group’ (TBG). The TBG is a meeting point across wider far right movements, run by former Tory fringe figure Gregory Lauder-Frost, who has called for the “assisted voluntary repatriation” of those “not of European stock” from the UK to their “natural” homeland. In January 2019, she publicised a conference in Finland which featured an international roster of antisemites, white nationalists and fascists.

What about free speech? 

We’re using our free speech to challenge the hateful things Katie Hopkins says. Her freedom to say them isn’t what’s at stake. What we’re raising as a question is whether she should be saying these things, given their impact on people. We’re also asking why the organisers would want to invite her, and why the venue would want to host her, given her record.

Who are we?

Community Solidarity Stroud District (CSSD) was started in January 2022. We are a group of local residents seeking to build community-led solidarity in the Stroud district to oppose the hatred of minorities and oppressed people arising from false and harmful information.

We have focused our efforts on the distribution of “The Light” paper in Stroud. We are alarmed by The Light’s support for antisemitism, Holocaust denial and racist hate speech – as well as for denial of climate change, promotion of homophobia and transphobia, and patriarchal values. We’ve also opposed previous talks organised by “Stroud Info Hub” featuring antisemitic speakers. You can read more about why at: communitysolidaritystrouddistrict.org

We’ve also opposed previous talks organised by the “Stroud Freedom Group”. In October 2022, we wrote an open letter asking organisers to withdraw their invitation to James Delingpole – a man with a long history not only of denying the science around climate change, but of repeatedly inciting violence against climate scientists and activists. Like Katie Hopkins, Delingpole has recently embraced increasingly extreme conspiracy theories and their politically extreme proponents, including white nationalists.

Before that we’d challenged meetings featuring Jason Liosatos, Mark Devlin, and Sandi Adams, who have each promoted antisemitism – with the latter two also promoting Holocaust denial.

The organisers of these events appear to be becoming bolder in who they will invite to speak locally. We are saying “enough is enough!”
Over 300 people have signed our statement requesting that people stop distributing The Light in Stroud district. This isn’t a petition to an authority asking them to ban distribution of the paper, but a statement of our community coming together to express its opposition clearly. You can sign at: tinyurl.com/TheLightStatement

Don’t let the far-right divide us!

Racism isn’t funny.

Sign the open letter.

Share and invite friends to our Facebook event.

Reclaiming space on the High St – report from our stall

Members of Community Solidarity Stroud District with a banner reading “No to “The Light” which was in front of a stall of leaflets

Thank you to everyone who helped organise the stall on Saturday and who turned up early enough to “jump the pitch” of the Info Hub who have claimed the spot outside Vodafone for themselves.

We had a successful day handing out leaflets and talking to people about the nasty content in the Light. Our leaflets and conversations covered The Light’s promotion of the far right, their consistent denial of climate change, their assertion of patriarchal values, homophobia and transphobia. All of our leaflets are available to download on this website.

Thanks to CSSD member Cammy Leon for the following write up:

There were a few interesting and disturbing interactions. One particular Light supporter (who proudly claimed that they read the Light and liked what was in it) spent a lot of time hanging around the stall, goading us and speaking loudly at us. They asked us questions but refused to listen to answers. When asked about the content in the Light they said “Well we’re being invaded aren’t we, by them (immigrants) on boats” some of their responses didn’t directly correlate with the question being asked but were repeated loudly at us like “a man can never be a woman” over and over. They also recommended we watch a Tommy Robinson video on YouTube. Their presence was bordering on harassment as they stood in front of the stall for long periods of time repeatedly shouting at us. One of our stall members tried to diffuse the situation by offering a biscuit from the stall to which they responded that they don’t know what’s in it and gave a list of possible poisons that could be in the biscuit. They asked one of us if we’d been vaccinated to which she replied “no” because she had an auto immune disease so chose not to. This led to the person attempting to shake her hand and congratulate her.

We were prepared for some negative responses from supporters of the paper, and most people were sympathetic to our cause and we had a lot of support from passers by. What I did notice though was that one of the info hub members came and stood next to us giving out the paper, which gave passers by the impression that we were part of the Light and they started to avoid the stall. We held up some “No to The Light” leaflets so people knew that we weren’t with them. The “Info Hub” had around 2 or 3 members then come and stand around and opposite the stall intermittently.

In one incident a man passed by and took a leaflet, and whilst doing so an “Info Hub” member came over, grabbed the man and said “Hi”, then immediately shouted “they think we’re raving homophobes don’t they?” to this man and kissed him on the face. The man looked horrified and angry and pulled away thanking us for our leaflet.

Thanks again to everyone who came out to support us.

Download copies of our leaflets to print via this link.

Yet more misinformation on climate in “The Light”

By Andy Williams

Below is an image from Rhodes on 24th July 2023, from Sky News. According to the World Weather Attribution Group, “maximum heat like in July 2023 would have been virtually impossible to occur in the US/Mexico region and Southern Europe if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels”.

So when Issue 35 of “The Light” says on its front page that the climate crisis is “non-existent”, one has to wonder which planet they are living on?

“The Light” says, “CO2 output keeps rising, but temperatures have stayed consistent for years”. That is simply not the case. As the graph below shows, the global average temperature has shot up since the late twentieth century, after being fairly stable for the previous 2,000 years.

“Temperature record of the last 2,000 years (Chart showing the so-called Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were not planet-wide phenomena)” by RCraig09 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

On page 2 “The Light” says, “tens of thousands of scientists and researchers … have proven there is no climate emergency” but there is no reference to a single proof. A while ago I asked a climate-change denier friend to point me to a paper that showed that the world is not heating up. After much research he couldn’t do so, and he now accepts that we do indeed have a climate emergency.

On page 4 of Issue 35 of “The Light” we have more about the climate, and yet, again, not a single technical paper is cited. The author claims, “In the past 50 years, the predictions of climate computer models about global warming and its dire effects have been wrong – demonstrating their predictive unreliability” (though without mentioning any examples). That’s just not true. Carbon Brief examined the accuracy of climate models dating back to the 1970’s. None of them was far wrong. The projection below, for example, was made 33 years ago. The chart shows how the central black line of predicted increase in global temperatures from 1990 to 2020 has broadly matched a range of measures of actual global temperatures (different coloured lines). The chart shows that even when global temperatures were lower than the average prediction, they were almost always within the lowest range predicted – and that the broad trend is as predicted.

Projected warming from the IPCC First Assessment Report (mean projection–thick black line, with upper and lower bounds shown by thin dotted black lines). Chart by Carbon Brief

Climate modelling is still inexact, as the climate is such a chaotic system and has many feedback loops, but since the 1970s models have all pointed in one direction.

Almost all climate scientists (estimated to be between 95% and 99%) agree with the view that potentially catastrophic global warming, caused by man-made CO2, is happening right now. But “The Light” insists there is no consensus, and instead falsely claims  “there is a global network of eminent, experienced scientists and professionals in climate and related fields, and many others who challenge the settled science”. Helpfully, there is a reference to the 500 “experts” in question. Looking through the list of signatories, it’s immediately apparent that hardly any of them are climate scientists. Certainly none of the 22 UK “experts” were expert in climate science (compare that with the 234 actual climate scientists who wrote the last IPCC report).

Analysis of the 500 “experts” referenced by “The Light” showed that only ten identified themselves as climate scientists. If, as “The Light” claims, there is “no consensus” on climate change, it is strange that they can only point to ten who disagree with the mainstream view. In fact there is an overwhelming consensus that there is a climate emergency.

There is also a reference to The Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL). “The climate view of CLINTEL can be easily summarised as: there is no climate emergency” says “The Light”. CLINTEL is led by Guus Berkhout, a physicist who used to work for the oil giant Shell as an engineer. Then, while working at Delft University, he founded the Delphi Consortium which carries out seismic research for oil and gas companies. So it’s pretty clear why he wants to show that there is no climate emergency.

The ”World Climate Declaration” written by CLINTEL, demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the climate science it attempts to criticise. There is not even a basic understanding of the science of the greenhouse effect, which was described more than a century ago.

The tragedy of climate-change denial literature, such as “The Light”, is that it sows doubt about the science. Without any evidence to back up its claims (because there really isn’t any) it divides society between those who believe the science and those who think that scientists are censored and controlled by certain dark forces, and so cannot be trusted. When publications like “The Light” attempt to sow doubt about climate change, they undermine the social movements that are protesting and demanding action from governments and corporations. They divide our communities as we try to reduce our contributions to global warming, and try to build resilience to the crises to come. If the electorate are not sure that climate change is happening they are unlikely to demand that the government takes action to address it. In today’s world, when some random person on the internet can reach more ears than an expert in their field, it’s not always easy to tell fact from fiction. “The Light” pushes the anti-science view very hard. They want enough electors to doubt the science, to make sure the issue is not addressed. No prizes for guessing who benefits from this, and who funds most of the disinformation.

Issue 34 of “The Light” also included blatant misrepresentation of the evidence around global warming – read our previous piece: “Fact-checking the June 2023 front page of “The Light”“.

Read more about the consistent denial of climate change in “The Light” in our July 2022 piece.

“The Light”: sending women back to the Dark Ages

by a member of Community Solidarity Stroud District

“The Light” sets itself up as an alternative paper, but what is it really pushing?

Over the last year, the Light has generally promoted:

“traditional families”, men being “allowed to be men”, women having “lots of children”, and “faith, flag and family”. 

It has also started promoting anti-abortion activists and the “rights of the unborn”, and sought to justify men’s “domination and rage”. 

So that’s what it promotes and defends. What does it attack?

In the last 6 months or so, The Light has published numerous articles opposing:

  • “Gender equality” (compared to “evil”)
  • “Equality of opportunity” (which it compares to “the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch trials”)
  • ““Family law” (elided with “child abuse”)
  • Abortion and contraception (which it repeatedly equates with “eugenics”, a common Religious Right trope)
  • “The massive use of contraceptives” (“clearly unacceptable”)
  • “Sex education” (which it refers to as “taking control of our children”)
  • “Role reversal” in which women don’t accept traditional gender roles (behaviour which The Light says is “communism and insanity”)
  • And (my personal favourite…) strong female leads in films and TV (not only are all these strong female characters “miserable” and with “no personalities” but their existence in film is a “woke agenda” which wants to “destroy society”. Poor old Galadriel and Princess Leia! Who knew?!)

And what does it ignore?

Notably, whilst it’s got space to fulminate about fictional characters, the Light *doesn’t* show much interest in the need for more childcare, better welfare benefits, employment rights for parents and carers, ending child poverty, or anything that would help those who still bear the brunt of responsibility for most caring – women – to do the job.

In more detail: The Light’s views on women (from recent issues)

July 23 issue

Claims that contraception charity “Planned Parenthood = Abortion/sterilisation; depopulation agenda”

June 23 issue

“Role reversal – Whilst it is true that some women are better than many men at some things, the aggressive push towards everyone ignoring their own biology smacks of communism and insanity. In professing to give the right to choose, this is doing the exact opposite”

May 23 issue

Highly sympathetic interview with a former Fathers 4 Justice activist in which he talks about “family law child abuse”, and promoting his book.

A page-long article presenting the views of a Conservative Spanish bishop who claims the UN is anti-family and encourages abortion. Says it also encourages “the massive use of contraceptives” which is “clearly unacceptable”, as well as “so-called gender equality”, tolerance of which is comparable with tolerance of “evil”. Women should get married young and have three or more kids, he says. The Light author concludes, “It is refreshing to see a man of God standing up for what is right”.

April 23 issue

“[O]n the surface, the idea of equality of opportunity irrespective of gender can be pitched as a noble cause, but then so were the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials.”

This is in an article which suggests “the fairer sex” are not having a great time of it, any more than men – but the article goes on to suggest that the only thing harming women these days, is the behaviour, not of men, but of transgender people (for example, entering beauty contests). Probably most women have bigger concerns than transgender people entering beauty contests, such as why women still do most housework, caring work, and other work, are paid less, have less wealth, and experience so much violence and sexism from men. But none of that is mentioned in the Light’s article.

March 23 issue

In an article titled “The War on Masculinity”, the paper states that “the System’s war against humanity” includes a war “being waged against men”. It suggests that “toxic masculinity”, “domination and rage”, “could also be understood as men resorting to their innate biological responses in trying to cope when they find themselves trapped in an insane society.” It goes on “Why make men more feminine? We might even wonder whether the obvious war against meat could even be a cover for the drive to subvert manhood, with… emasculating phytoestrogens [in soy]”. 

It goes on “God did not create women to do everything men can do. God created women to do everything men cannot do” and that “Maybe the goal is not to make us like women, but rather like infants, dependent and very little threat to them”. It says (at some length) that the only “toxic masculinity” is that which is exercised by the 1% of “psychopathic men” that are running the world. Which is sadly against all the evidence – and what women know – that men of all social classes perpetuate violence towards women.

Another article holds up as evidence of Bill Gates’s world domination, the fact that his father was “head of the abortion industry in the USA (Planned Parenthood)” and a “eugenicist”. There’s no evidence for the latter claim, and the equation of contraception and abortion advice with “the abortion industry” and “eugenics” is a classic Religious Right, anti-women, trope.

January 2023 issue

A page-long article headlined “Volunteer arrested for silent prayer near abortion facility” about the head of an anti-abortion group who had been arrested for protesting outside an abortion clinic in Birmingham. The article’s author is given as ‘ADF-UK’. ADF are a Religious Right American anti-abortion group. The article presents the anti-abortion activists as only having “tirelessly served…providing charitable assistance to” and “supporting” women, and anti-abortion protests outside abortion clinics, as “free speech” that must be protected from “censorial” restrictions.

Another article suggests that “faith, flag and family” are all that protect us from the Chinese-style totalitarianism that Western governments would otherwise want to impose.

December 2022 issue

A long article equating concern about climate change, and the promotion of birth control, with eugenics and “the greedy termination industry”, whose cause has been “cemented to the core of feminism”, the author bemoans. (Just because some early twentieth century birth control advocates endorsed eugenics, clearly does not mean that the two are the same a century later, but this is a popular trope amongst the Religious Right).

November 2022 issue

After a long rant about how the latest Star Wars film features “a strong female lead with no flaws…and weak, clumsy idiotic men” as part of a “political agenda”, the article goes on “The agenda of making men weak and women strong is not only visible on the big screen, but also occurs in Disney’s TV shows [where Obi-Wan Kenobi, a male] is bossed around by young Leia, who is 10 years old”. Disney, we are told, is cashing in on our nostalgia to fund its “homosexual, social justice propaganda shows”. The article’s author is also upset that Natalie Portman has a strong character in the latest Thor film, and that the Rings of Power (Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel) contains similar “woke themes”, with Galadriel, alarmingly, an “independent, all-empowered woman” (actually she’s an elf, but let’s not split hairs). All of these peskily strong female characters are then summed up as “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…” and other nefarious purposes.

Another article contains a glossary of supposed “old speak” (as opposed to Orwellian ‘newspeak’, the graphics make clear) which claims that the phrase “white male privilege” is merely a “racist AND sexist insult” (though white men own most of the world’s wealth, guys, so actually it’s a material fact). “Patriarchy” is another phrase that is nothing but a “sexist insult”, the Light tells us, 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.

Another article in the same edition is headlined “New abortion law in Hungary gives unborn babies a chance for life”. The article is about a new Hungarian law “requiring women who are seeking an abortion to listen to the baby’s heartbeat before termination”. The objections by Amnesty, amongst others, that this move makes it much harder and more traumatic to access abortion, The Light disdains as “predictable”. The Light goes on to praise the Hard Right Hungarian PM, Orban, as a champion of “traditional family values”, and concludes “It is hoped that many thousands of lives will be saved in Hungary because of this new law. With the overturning of Roe vs Wade, and the new decree in Hungary, the fight for the rights of the unborn baby appears alive and well”. (No mention is given to the rights of women to determine their own bodily autonomy without these traumatic restrictions).

Another article in the same issue entitled “Profit the driving force of healthcare” again suggests access to contraception and abortion are merely “euphemisms” for eugenics.

A short history of bigotry… and what do we do about it?

The Light appears to have the same attitude to women as reactionaries always have done. That is to say, women are most valued when they are barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Despite The Light’s supposed focus on bodily autonomy in relation to vaccines, it presents all the other things that give women autonomy and choices over their bodies and lives as overwhelmingly negative – be that access to contraception, abortion and education; the right to choose a different sexuality; the right to choose different partners; the existence of strong female role models in the media; a welfare state that supports women by taking on some of the caring responsibilities; even the existence of convenience food. This is also why you basically never hear The Light advocating for better childcare provision, anti-poverty measures, protection from discrimination (unless it’s to do with vaccines), or other key feminist demands. 

The Light’s reactionary world view disempowers women. Even when women are interviewed as political actors (as they sometimes are), they are mostly portrayed as pure, “fair” vessels, whose main agency, as far as they have any, is to protect the borders of the nation and people’s bodies (mostly their own and their families) from a variety of supposed incursions. To police what people take into their bodies. 

Many women (and men) do have rightful concerns about issues like health, food, and so on. But The Light exploits these concerns, stokes paranoia around them, attaches a historically illiterate view of ‘tradition’, and weds this toxic mix to an altogether uglier agenda. It’s a technique that has a long history on the far right, as many of you will know, from early twentieth century ‘volkisch’ messaging in Germany, to ‘eco-fascism’ and body fascism.

Those women who don’t focus on bodily purity ‘correctly’ (in The Light’s eyes), can expect to be vilified and dehumanised in words and in pictures, too – from the NHS nurses whom The Light wants to subject to Nuremburg trials and even execution, to the ugly, classist and misogynist centre-page cartoon of a heavily pregnant woman vaping, in last month’s issue.

It’s an agenda in which women are also portrayed as victims – of the penetrating “jab”, as well as of trans people, and in particular, of migrants. The idea that migrants (ie, men with darker skin) are “endangering women and girls” is repeated throughout recent issues of The Light, explicitly and implicitly. 

This shouldn’t surprise us. Racism and sexism have tended to march (literally) in lockstep, from the murderous Ku Klux Klan lynch mobs of segregation-era America, through to the UK tabloid press and EDL thugs like Tommy Robinson and beyond. Racist propaganda has frequently portrayed white women (and the white babies they are, in this world view, supposed to produce) as needing protection from dark skinned men. In truth, in today’s Britain, the overwhelming majority of sexual and other violent crimes against women and girls are perpetrated by assailants who are the same race/ethnicity as their victims. Nonetheless, the racists always love to portray white women as needing protection from darker skinned men, both through segregation, and by the (sometimes violent) actions of heroic ‘white knights’. 

In this vein, revoltingly, a few months ago The Light published an article invoking these ideas to strongly defend the men – many suspected of being associated with far right groups – who had carried out a violent attack on a migrant hostel, an attack in which police vans were set on fire and migrants were terrorised. Ongoing protests by far right groups at the hostel have seen migrants punched. Last month The Light ran another article suggesting that the government was ignoring the “safety” of female “citizens” by housing refugees in hostels, claiming their presence is “potentially endangering women and girls” (this article, incidentally, was written by someone who was filmed abusing a black anti-Brexit campaigner and poking a union jack flagpole at his face). 

As a woman, I’ve found that when I try to talk to any of the people handing out The Light on the High Street, however calmly, it’s fairly pointless. They don’t have answers beyond interrupting me to say that the BBC is as bad (guys, two wrongs don’t make a right!), or shouting “Lies”, or “Sheep”, or something like that.

But whether it’s on the role of women – or on racism, antisemitism, climate change, homophobia, transphobia, or a whole host of other things, The Light’s content is not just right wing (many of its articles are actually quite similar to those in the Daily Mail, except much more poorly written). It is also, more worryingly, deeply reactionary, and in places, frankly crypto-fascist. I don’t want it on our streets. And what I’ve learned lately is that calmly taking a copy and then scrunching or ripping it up in front of them is most satisfying. Make sure you recycle!

Fact-checking the June 2023 front page of “The Light”

Is The Light telling us the truth?

“It was a real shock to find that they had tried to trick me. And they had also lied” – Andy Williams picked up the June issue of “The Light” and looked into their front page story. The front page of Issue 34 of “The Light” claimed in its headline there is “No climate crisis” and “Carbon Dioxide has zero effect on temperatures” and presents two graphs in an attempt to back this up. In the piece that follows Andy outlines his investigation into the claims and graphs presented:

I’ve been hearing a lot about The Light recently, so I decided to give it a try. I’m a sceptical reader, fact-checking everything that seems a bit odd. The article at the very top of the June issue really caught my eye.

That there is apparently “No climate crisis” was really big news to me. The science of “global warming” – how carbon dioxide tends to stop heat from the earth escaping off into space – has been accepted as fact for more than a century. So “The Light” would have to have good evidence to show that it’s not true.

The header of Issue 34 of “The Light”. Superimposed text reading “Factchecked: false” because we don’t want to repeat their claim as is

The “uncensored truth” – or hiding data?

The front page of Issue 34 of “The Light” used a compelling looking graph to back up the headline claim. The graph showed that despite CO2 levels rising for a 17 year period, the surface temperature of the earth has stayed about the same. It cited data from a website called remss.com – associated with Remote Sensing Systems, which “provide[s] research-quality geophysical data to the global scientific community”. Unfortunately, when I tried to follow this up, the link provided didn’t really work. A little digging uncovered that they were using the data associated with the graph below. This shows the temperature of the lower troposphere  – not the surface temperature, as claimed.

The full graph from the remss paper shows data from January 1979 to June 2023. Across this time period a trend line shows an overall warming trend in the troposphere of 0.21°C every ten years. That is a high rate of warming.

REMSS chart. Source: https://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html

The version of this data in “The Light” (shown below) only shows 1997-2013, however. Those making the chart have deleted the cooler periods before 1997 and the much hotter times after 2013.

The first of two graphs to appear on the front page of “The Light” as it appeared

The two graphs don’t look at all similar until you realise that they have chosen just to plot the bit of the original graph in the red box.

It was a real shock to find that they had tried to trick me. And they had also lied. The full graph (and the article explaining it) shows that carbon dioxide does have an effect on temperatures.

The REMSS chart with an annotation to show the area “The Light” chose to show in the red box, and all the data they didn’t show their readers

This was not a mistake

This was not a genuine mistake by the authors of The Light. They must have hunted hard to find this graph. Then they went to the trouble of replotting just the segment of it which made it look as if temperatures are falling, then they added CO2 emissions and mislabelled the whole thing. They know that temperatures are rising due to greenhouse gas emissions, but they are trying to prove the opposite.

Text underneath the chart commands readers to “Ask those pushing… to explain this”. It is very easy to. The chart is an example of a classic disinformation tactic known as ‘cherrypicking’ – deliberately selecting/excluding data from a larger dataset in order to misrepresent the evidence. “The Light” use the strapline “The uncensored truth” to describe their paper… but on this occasion they have deliberately “censored” the full data.

More cherrypicking

The Light also featured a second graph. What about that one?

According to the graph, the temperature over Greenland has varied between -29° and -34° over the last 10,000 years and is now actually a little colder than average.

This graph was published in 2008 and versions of it have been widely used by climate sceptics. The Carbon Brief website provides a helpful article on the misuse of this data, with background on how such long-term data regarding temperatures is collated. They explain:

versions of the graph have, variously, mislabeled the x-axis, excluded the modern observational temperature record and conflated a single location in Greenland with the whole world.

More recently, researchers have drilled numerous additional ice cores throughout Greenland and produced an updated estimate past Greenland temperatures.

This modern temperature reconstruction, combined with observational records over the past century, shows that current temperatures in Greenland are warmer than any period in the past 2,000 years.

An accurate and up to date graph is in the Carbon Brief article referenced above, and is included below. The recent rapid heating is clearly visible at the right of the image covering observational records since the year 2000. Carbon Brief summarise this by saying “Recent temperatures are clearly higher than any seen in Greenland over the past two millennia”. They acknowledge that “they are likely still cooler than during the early part of the current geological epoch – the Holocene – which started around 11,000 years ago”, but emphasise that “warming is expected to continue in the future as human actions continue to emit greenhouse gases, primarily from the combustion of fossil fuels. Climate models project that if emissions continue, by 2050, Greenland temperatures will exceed anything seen since the last interglacial period, around 125,000 years ago.”

Source: “Greenland temperature reconstruction from Vinther et al. (2009) using proxy data from six ice cores. Data spans the past 12,000 years with a resolution of 20 years. Observational temperature data from Berkeley Earth is shown at the end in black, with a 20-year smooth applied to match the proxy resolution. Proxy records and observations are aligned over the 1880-1960 period.” (taken from Carbon Brief’s piece on Greenland ice cores.

The big problem with the graph used in Issue 34 of “The Light”, below, is that it does not go up to “NOW” as suggested on the axis. It only goes to 1950, so recent rapid warming – associated with greenhouse gas emissions – is not shown.

The second graph featured on the front page of Issue 34 of “The Light”, as it appeared

A second problem with the graph in “The Light” is that it presents a single ice core record from Greenland as representing all (global) “Temperature Variation Over the Last 10,000 Years”. As Carbon brief explain “Any individual location will have significantly more variability than the globe as a whole. A single ice core is also subject to uncertainties around elevation changes and other perturbations to the ice core over time.” The chart they present which we introduced above instead combines data from six Greenland ice cores.

Why did “The Light” pick Greenland? The graph below shows the world’s longest archive of observational temperature records – the central England temperature record, which covers the last 360 years. Temperatures are clearly going up. As well as 2022 being the hottest year so far in England, the graph also highlights how much more common it is for a year to exceed the 1961-1990 average. You can find this chart and an explaination of it on the Met Office website.

Source: metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet

At the global level, the graph below shows one of the largest reconstructions using multiple proxies for past temperatures. It is from the Past Global Changes (PAGES) project, “a collaboration between thousands of palaeoclimatologists from 125 different countries, who published a thorough analysis of global surface temperatures over the past 2,000 years – called the PAGES 2K project”. The red line shows the rapid rise in observed global surface temperatures after 1850. You can find this chart on a Carbon Brief webpage discussing “How ‘proxy’ data reveals the climate of the Earth’s distant past“.

“Source: “Global mean surface temperature reconstruction (yellow line) and uncertainties (yellow range) for the years 0-2000 period from the PAGES 2k Consortium along with observations from Cowtan and Way from 1850-2017. Data available in the NOAA Paleoclimate Archive.” (from the Carbon Brief piece on ‘proxy’ data for temperatures in the distant past.

Global warming is happening

The front page of “The Light” was interestingly time. The month it was published, June 2023, was the hottest on record according to scientists from the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Aadministration (NOAA). Heatwaves affected Europe, Asia, and North America, with record-breaking wildfires in Canada affecting 10 million hectares – equivalent to the area of the whole country of Portugal. Meanwhile, devastating flooding affected India, Japan, China, Turkey and the U.S.

The average global surface (land and ocean) temperature in June [2023] was 1.89 degrees F (1.05 degrees C) above average, ranking June 2023 as Earth’s warmest June on record.

June 2023 was 0.23 of a degree F (0.13 of a degree C) warmer than the previous record set in June 2020. June 2023 also marked the 47th-consecutive June and the 532nd-consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th-century average. 

From the NOAA

Why is “The Light” lying to us?

If the authors of The Light are correct – that carbon dioxide has no effect on temperatures, and there is no climate crisis –  why are they relying on graphs so easily shown to be misleading? There should be loads of solid evidence to back up their claim. Instead they have to cherry-pick bits of data, or show old, incomplete graphs.

The authors know they are publishing misinformation. Finding bits of graph to back up their assertions means reading through reams of papers and viewing graphs that show that global warming is happening.

Perhaps the editor has been deceived, rather than publishing misleading graphs deliberately. But if the paper really is the “truthpaper” it describes itself as, shouldn’t he have checked the charts showed the full “truth”? What other mistakes has he made with regard to evidence on other topics if he was willing to overlook the obvious ones here? Denial of climate change is a consistent theme in “The Light” paper (as we wrote about last year). Yet nearly all scientists – people who spend their working lives trying to discover the facts, and examining the evidence – say we are facing a climate crisis.

We might not like it, but that doesn’t mean we can escape reality by relying on dogy graphs.

We have to ask: why is “The Light” lying to us?

You might be interested in further information on how CO2 and other “greenhouse gas” emissions affect global temperatures – and increasing emissions lead to global warming. The following discuss this in more detail:

“Global temperature and CO2 levels are correlated and both have risen overall since the late 1880s, according to researchers… The greenhouse effect has repeatedly been verified in experiments since at least the 1800s” (from “Fact check: Global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels are correlated, contrary to claim”)

“How do we know more CO2 is causing warming?” (from skepticalscience.com)

A video cited at the above link which explains the basic physics and chemistry involved in understanding how CO2 effects global temperatures, and the long history of evidence around this: