The Guardian Today in Focus: The fall of Cardinal George Pell

One of Pope Francis’s trusted advisers is now the most senior member of the Catholic church to be convicted of child abuse. The Guardian’s Melissa Davey was in court every day and describes the trial that brought about Pell’s downfall. Plus: Alex Hern on Facebook’s decision to permanently ban the far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

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The Guardian: How Ukip normalised far-right politics

Since the Brexit vote in 2016 Ukip is no longer primarily concerned with attacking the European Union. Now led by Gerard Batten the party has started to normalise far-right ideas and has given roles to figures including Tommy Robinson.

Today in Focus: How Ukip embraced the far right

With Brexit talks stalled and some of its supporters pushing a betrayal narrative, the Guardian’s Peter Walker charts how Ukip has begun rising in the polls again. But how did the party come to fully embrace the far right in Britain? And do its supporters know how extreme it has become? Plus: Helen Pidd on what young voters in Bolsover make of the Brexit deal paralysis.

When the UK Independence party was first formed in 1993, its aim was to mobilise a relatively small group of voters whose main focus was getting Britain out of the European Union. In 2016, the party achieved what its leaders had always dreamed of: a referendum victory for leaving the EU. Since then, however, Ukip has gone through a succession of hapless leaders after the post-referendum departure of Nigel Farage. Now led by Gerard Batten, the party has begun explicitly appealing to far-right figures, such as Tommy Robinson, for advice and support.

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The Guardian: Tommy Robinson and the far right’s new playbook

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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UnHerd: How rival extremisms are firing up Britain

Choudary’s role was much more significant, however, than simply that of a self-appointed provocateur: such was his radicalising influence that Choudary has been linked to 15 terrorist plots since 2000. His followers included Khuram Butt, who was part of the attack on London Bridge that killed eight people last year, and Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby.[...]

Yet while Choudary has been in prison, Robinson has experienced a fresh rush of celebrity among the alt-right in the US, for whom he has recently become something of a cause celebre. After Robinson was tried and convicted of contempt of court in May (he already had a conviction for the same offence from 2017) Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former advisor, later called him a “solid guy” and “the backbone of this country”. Bannon recently described Robinson “a movement in and of himself now. He represents the working class and channels a lot of the frustration of everyday, blue-collar Britons.” For Robinson’s defenders, his brushes with the law are explained away by an excess of passion in opposition to Islam – although Robinson often shifts his criticism, without apparent distinction, between Islamism, Islam and Muslims in general. [...]

If the intricacies of the UK justice system don’t much concern Robinson, the same goes for his US supporters, who include not just Bannon but Donald Trump Jr. Beyond Robinson and his anti-Islam stunts and rhetoric, too, there is an ominous rise in far Right terrorist activity: Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, said last July that “the threat from extreme Right-wing terrorism is growing” with four extreme Right-wing plots disrupted since May 2017. The tiny but deeply nasty neo-Nazi organisation National Action has now been proscribed in the UK.  [...]

The tone of public debate is now one of permanent rancour: as it grows fiercer and more vituperative, many reasonable people are shrinking from open participation. It becomes harder, not easier, for British Muslims publicly to criticise aspects of Islamic fundamentalism, or for British Jews to criticise Israeli government policy – although they may do so privately – when those communities increasingly feel under broader attack from the Right or the Left. In such circumstances, voicing reservations about wrongs within the community is often seen as siding with the outsiders who are insulting the community: that is precisely what occurred over so many decades in Northern Ireland, with courageous exceptions.

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