Tommy Robinson and rise of far-right in UK

Eleven men turned up. All wore balaclavas to conceal their identities, although Robinson removed his outside later. Most sported black EDL hoodies with “Luton Division” written on the back and they’d made placards bearing slogans such as “Ban the Burka!” and “No more Sharia law!”.

Robinson did most of the talking. He explained that the spark for him to help start the EDL had been the sight of Muslims demonstrating when soldiers paraded through Luton on their regiment’s return from Afghanistan in May that year.

“We have nothing against Muslims, only those who preach hatred,” said Robinson. “They are traitors who should be hanged and we’ll keep taking to the streets until the government kicks them out.”

READ MORE: Audit launched by watchdog into Labour hires amid 'cronyism' row

The rise of the EDL had been rapid that summer and protests quickly spread from Luton. In a matter of weeks, the group had organised nearly 20 rallies in cities including London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Swansea – and Glasgow. Dozens of EDL divisions – mostly football hooligan firms – had been set up and the EDL was becoming efficient and, worryingly, a potential catch-all for far-right organisations in Britain.

Former British National Party member Robinson claimed the EDL was a peaceful, non-racist organisation but violence had erupted at some of its demonstrations. Dozens of EDL supporters had been arrested and an array of weapons had been seized, including knuckle dusters, a hammer, a chisel and a bottle of bleach.

Muslims were targeted in unprovoked attacks in 2009. In one incident, a mob of 30 people surrounded Asian students near City University in central London and attacked them with metal poles, bricks and sticks while shouting racist abuse. Three people were stabbed.

I witnessed violence first-hand. Following the Luton meeting, we were allowed to join the EDL at a protest in Manchester where 48 people were arrested during the disorder.

Next weekend, the far-right will likely be in Glasgow once again. Although the EDL is defunct now, a “Pro-UK” rally (advertised as a peaceful protest) is due to take place – an event promoted by Robinson in the wake of recent riots in England and Northern Ireland. It is likely to be the first significant anti-immigration gathering in Scotland since events down south descended into violent scenes – protests fuelled by false information over the person accused of the murder of three young girls in Southport. As crowds rampaged through towns and cities in recent weeks, they chanted Tommy Robinson’s name and “Who the fuck is Allah”.

These are tense times in the UK and the sight of howling mobs attacking mosques and trying to burn down hotels housing asylum seekers prompted me to reflect on decades of investigating the far right. How did we get here? It is often said that Scotland is inherently more welcoming to migrants than England. But is this really true, or does Scotland too have a far-right problem?

My interest in far-right extremism dates back decades. In 2004, I visited Russia to investigate a spate of neo-Nazi murders. A new wave of nationalism was sweeping through Russian society as living standards fell after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Democratic reforms were failing and it appeared that latent xenophobia was developing into a more radical, sinister form with young people coming under the sway of neo-Nazi ideology, largely as a response to terrorism and immigration from the former Soviet republics.

I went to Moscow with photographer Angela Catlin and interviewed victims of racist attacks, far-right politicians, human rights groups, unions and academics, among others. The violence was chilling. The Moscow-based newspaper Izvestia said neo-Nazis had assaulted 15,000 people in the seven years before 2004, and the Moscow Bureau of Human Rights estimated that up to 30 people a year had been killed. During an attack in 2002, a group of 25 people murdered Mamed Mamedov, a 53-year-old Azerbaijani fruit seller and father of eight, beating him and stabbing him to death with metal bars at his stall in the Primorsky district in the east of Russia. They even filmed the murder.

We also interviewed neo-Nazis. They included a skinhead bodybuilder called Maxim Martsinkevich who used the pseudonym “Tesak” – which translates as “big knife”. Tesak was a leading member of neo-Nazi groups Russian Goal and Format 18 and while flashing a flick knife in a café, he told us that he wanted his country to be rid of “n*****s, Jews and people from the Caucasus – any fucker who is not white and not Russian.”

Most of all, Tesak wanted to kill Chechens, the vast majority of whom are Muslims. He said his girlfriend Natasha had been killed in a bomb attack in 1999 in Moscow, perpetrated by Chechen rebels. The bomb killed 105 people and injured 900 – and it led Tesak to join Russian Goal.

“I watched the news on television. As soon as I heard Natasha was dead, I got hold of the biggest fucking knife I could and went looking for Chechens,” said Tesak, who claimed to have stabbed an Azerbaijani man “12 times in the ass” in a random attack. He later received three prison sentences for inciting racial hatred. In 2020, he was found dead in a prison cell.

Russia was fascinating but disconcerting. The nation’s neo-Nazi problem felt remote in comparison to the UK’s far-right back then – the likes of the British National Party and National Front were on the dark fringes of society, largely rejected by most people and de-platformed by the mainstream media. They were still active and dangerous but they were outcasts.

READ MORE: Commonwealth Games 'won’t be funded by public purse' if held in Scotland

Five years after the Russian experience, I visited Austria. The trip followed the 2008 general election when far-right parties won 29% of the vote. Drumming up hatred of foreigners and campaigning against the “Islamisation” of Austria, the Freedom Party, along with another right-wing party, Alliance for the Future, jointly secured a result viewed as a horrifying development by many people across Europe.

Both parties ran xenophobic campaigns, particularly the Freedom Party who pledged to set up a ministry to deport foreigners and whose leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, described women in Islamic dress as “female ninjas”. More sinisterly, the FPO wanted to revoke the Verbotsgesetz – an Austrian law enacted in 1947 that bans the promotion of neo-Nazi ideology.

Emboldened by this, right-wing extremists were becoming more arrogant. Violent clashes had taken place on Austria’s streets between anti-fascists and neo-Nazis. Muslim graves were desecrated and left-wing meetings and demonstrations were targeted. Angela and I documented fighting on campus at the University of Vienna between anti-fascists and nationalist students called Burschenschaften.

The Freedom Party has long been accused of having links to neo-Nazis but it has always tried to distance itself from extremism. However, the party was co-founded by two former SS officers, Anton Reinthaller and Herbert Schweiger. Schweiger, now dead, was still politically active in 2008 when I met him at his Austrian home a few weeks before he was due in court after being charged with promoting neo-Nazi ideology for the fifth time.

Still remarkably sharp-minded at 85 years old, Schweiger was a lieutenant in the Waffen SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, an elite unit originally formed before the Second World War to act as the führer’s personal bodyguards. He was captured by the Allies but escaped back to Austria and post-war, he spent his time involved in far-right politics.

He considered himself an intellectual and claimed to have travelled widely in Austria and Germany to teach “the fundamentals of Nazism” to underground cells of hardcore neo-Nazis who, over the past three years, he added, had started to infiltrate political parties such as the FPO.

He had stood trial in Austria for breaking the Verbotsgesetz law four times. He was found guilty twice and acquitted twice and it was apparent that little had changed in his mindset since his SS days. “The Jew on Wall Street is responsible for the world’s current economic crisis,” he told me. “It is the same now as in 1929 when 90% of money was in the hands of the Jew. Hitler had the right solutions then.”

Schweiger also talked about training a terrorist movement fighting for the reunification of Austria and South Tyrol in 1961. He was arrested again after my report was published but died before standing trial.

As Austria’s recession deepened in 2009, there was growing concern over where the country could be heading. The Freedom Party has since been in a coalition government and it currently polls at around 30%.

The far right feeds off economic downturns and Greece is a prime example of how ultra-nationalist groups can quickly build public support in hard times. Five years ago, I went to Athens to cover the trial of Golden Dawn, a neo-fascist political party facing charges of acting like the mafia.

(Image: David Parry/PA Wire)

Golden Dawn first arrived on the scene in 1980. Initially a fringe group of far-right nationalists, it grew its support by exploiting people’s concerns over immigration and Islam after the Greek economy nosedived as a result of the 2009 economic crisis.

By 2012, 18 members had been elected as MPs, despite appalling levels of street violence by its supporters. Golden Dawn, the third largest in parliament, was behind hundreds of attacks on Muslims, Jews, immigrants, trade unionists, anarchists and political opponents.

I interviewed farm workers on the outskirts of Athens who told of attacks carried out by far-right groups. Hooded men armed with sticks would arrive in trucks and chase migrant workers across fields, several recalled. Those not quick enough suffered vicious beatings and dreadful injuries.

By April 2015, 69 members of Golden Dawn – including its MPs – were on trial accused of orchestrating murder, arson, assault and weapons possession. They were all found guilty in October 2020 – a verdict met with jubilation internationally after judges ruled that Golden Dawn was a criminal organisation in disguise.

But while Golden Dawn’s leaders remain in jail, the Greek far right hasn’t retreated. At the 2023 general election, three ultranationalist parties – Greek Solution, Spartans and Niki – garnered together 13% of the vote. Spartans is backed by Ilias Kasidiaris who is serving a 13-year jail sentence for membership of Golden Dawn. He was the right-hand man of the party’s self-styled “Führer”, Nikos Michaloliakos, and led the extremist party’s infamous hit squads and trained its members in martial arts. Kasidiaris regularly broadcasts from jail and attracts tens of thousands of views on his YouTube channel.

A lesson from Greece – the far right reinvents itself. Scotland too has witnessed this. A case in point is Scottish Dawn – a neo-Nazi group that chose its moniker as a nod to Golden Dawn. Scottish Dawn emerged shortly after the proscription of fascist group National Action by the UK Government in 2016. National Action had praised the man who murdered Labour MP Jo Cox (below) in a street by shooting and stabbing her to death, and one of its members – Jack Renshaw – was later jailed for life for plotting to murder Rosie Cooper MP. Renshaw visited Scotland in 2016 for a Scottish Defence League protest on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.

By that time, I was trying to infiltrate National Action for The Ferret, prompted by its decision to set up a “whites-only” food bank in Glasgow. But after the group was banned in December 2016, the contact stopped. A few months later, attention turned to a new outfit that had emerged called Scottish Dawn, whose activists started turning up at anti-asylum seeker protests.

I suspected neo-Nazis were involved with Scottish Dawn but had to prove it. In July 2017, my Ferret colleague Jamie Mann covertly filmed two recruiters admitting former National Action members were involved and two months later, Scottish Dawn was proscribed. The then-home secretary Amber Rudd said: “National Action is a vile, racist, homophobic and antisemitic group, which glorifies violence and stirs up hatred while promoting their poisonous ideology – and I will not allow them to masquerade under different names.”

At The Ferret, we’ve documented that Scotland retains a far-right problem. Other groups we’ve investigated include the Scottish Defence League, National Defence League, Generation Identity, System Resistance Network, New British Union, Patriotic Alternative and Homeland, a blood and soil nationalist group which is now registered as a political party. Homeland, formed by activists who left Patriotic Alternative last year, says it rejects violence.

Patriotic Alternative, which organised anti-asylum seeker protests in Erskine last year, has links to six people in prison for race hate or terror-related offences including supporters who travelled to Scotland for demos. In 2011, we revealed its supporters included neo-Nazis and former members of the British National Party and Scottish Defence League. They had posted racist and antisemitic comments and disturbing images in a private group on messaging app Telegram.

Other Scots far-right activists have posed with weapons, shared a bomb-making manual, quoted a mass murderer and said members should kill “for the greater good”. Several people have been jailed for terrorism offences. Connor Ward, from Banff, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018 after being found guilty of preparing to commit acts of terrorism. In 2021, a Fife man who hated Muslims and idolised right-wing mass murderers was convicted of terrorism charges. Sam Imrie was arrested after he posted messages on social media saying he was planning to set fire to the Fife Islamic Centre.

Last year, James Farrell, from Glasgow, was sentenced to two years and eight months imprisonment. The former security guard’s communications with neo-Nazi extremists were uncovered after an online chat group was infiltrated by an undercover counter-terrorism officer. Farrell shared a video with detailed instructions on how to construct a 3D-printed, homemade, automatic weapon. And this summer, right-wing extremist Axl Scott was jailed for 18 months after pleading guilty to terrorism charges. Police found he had documents on how to construct explosive devices.

Signs are the far right will be in Glasgow for next week’s protest. It is unlikely Tommy Robinson will attend – he now resides in Spain and a UK judge issued a warrant for his arrest in July. But the EDL founder – who has a history of violence and multiple criminal convictions – had posted about the “pro-UK” rally in George Square and wrote “the British are rising”.

In response, Glasgow City Council leader Susan Aitken said he is “not welcome in Glasgow and neither is anyone who chooses to align with his poisonous rhetoric”.

Whatever comes next, we’ll continue to document.

Billy Briggs is co-editor of investigative website The Ferret