Yaxley-Lennon frequently complains he is being smeared as a racist and a Nazi; he insists that he doesn’t care about skin colour and that his objection is to Islamist political ideology rather than people. What this misses is that far-right politics almost always involves singling out particular groups on the grounds of their alleged culture and behaviour, as with the way far-right groups have in the past used the “black muggers” panic of the 1970s, or Jewish ritual slaughter. And the way Yaxley-Lennon characterises Muslims is to present them as an alien presence in British society working to harm the majority. In Enemy of the State, previously majority-white areas of Luton are described as having suffered “ethnic cleansing” via Muslim immigration. “We are sleepwalking our way towards a Muslim takeover of the country,” he writes elsewhere, and describes the niqab as “an up-yours that shows exactly how the hardline, majority Muslim community regards the rest of us”. He is also sceptical of Muslims in public life. “You cannot buy loyalty,” he writes. “You buy a measure of allegiance for a while.” [...]
Yaxley-Lennon, meanwhile, is frequently treated as “authentic” by parts of the British media that do not know how to deal with class. A public conversation that often treats being working-class as a kind of ethnic identity only shared by reactionary white people in forgotten suburbs – when, in fact, working-class Britain is the most diverse and numerous section of society – undermines efforts to credibly challenge him. And a journalism profession that contains few people of working-class backgrounds makes it all the more difficult. Take Yaxley-Lennon’s appearance in front of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in 2011: Paxman’s patrician contempt only bolstered Yaxley-Lennon’s projected image of the little guy versus the liberal elite. By contrast, one of the rare occasions he was convincingly challenged on television was in a debate in 2013 on BBC3 with the rapper, author and activist Akala, who was able to paint a very different picture of working-class Britain. It’s telling that Yaxley-Lennon only gives this 2013 encounter half a sentence in his autobiography, while dwelling at length on his other media appearances.
Why are these changes happening now? One reason is that political ideologies that were once dominant are struggling to make their worldview seem like the obvious one. Put crudely, this is the fallout from several decades when neoliberal globalisation was seen, to varying degrees, as the only game in town. The financial crash and its aftermath rendered that view untenable, but so far no alternative vision has won out. [...]
Yaxley-Lennon is a potential asset to the new, international far-right activism. He has a brand name and a powerful myth that is menacing enough to keep him in the news, and has mobilised support in a number of countries. Conservatives in the US can use his story to boost the “Europe has fallen” narrative promoted in order to justify Trump’s own anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies, while Bannon has already acknowledged his potential to catalyse campaigns across Europe. In the UK, he could become part of a broad rightwing coalition that seeks to mobilise popular anger as Brexit unfolds. The Ukip leader, Batten, has publicly supported Yaxley-Lennon. On 24 October, after Yaxley-Lennon’s most recent court hearing, Batten accompanied him to the House of Lords for a lunch with the Ukip peer Lord Pearson – and is now proposing he be allowed to join the party, in defiance of a long-standing ban on former BNP members. A recent long-term study by Hope Not Hate suggests the places most susceptible to far-right narratives are white-majority communities away from big cities, which have been hit particularly hard by austerity policies and longer-term industrial decline. Another danger is that smaller, violent neo-Nazi groups still exist – as does antisemitic conspiracy theory – and this increased activity in general gives them more space in which to operate.
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