Mosley’s Shadow
Recent clampdowns on protest under Starmer and Sunak extend a long-running war on the Left waged by the British state. Meanwhile, far-right forms of extremism are scandalously deemed low-risk ‘cultural nationalism’.
BUF leader Oswald Mosley at a propaganda march in London, 7 May 1939. Key members of the British establishment took several years to acknowledge Mosley’s far-right politics as extremist. (Photo credit: Imagno / Getty Images)
In late 2008, Dr Peter Harbour, a retired physicist, found out that he’d been listed by the police as a ‘domestic extremist’. Harbour had recently been involved in a campaign to save an Oxford lake. Energy company RWE npower wanted to use the lake for fly ash disposal.
The Save Radley Lakes group marched and petitioned, and in some cases obstructed work to cut trees down. None of its members were violent. Still, npower took advantage of New Labour’s changes to the Protection from Harassment Act — a law intended to protect women from stalkers — and filed for an injunction that banned Harbour and others from the area. It was backed up with the false claim that Harbour had driven his car at security staff.
Harbour discovered his listing after this ban was defeated. The website of the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU), a police body that liaised with private companies to protect them from protest, cited the injunction as a measure that could be taken against ‘domestic extremists’, and named Harbour and others as its object. Harbour wrote to the head of NETCU to have his name removed. He had no criminal record, no arrests, no other significant history of political activism. He was refused.
The term ‘domestic extremism’ entered police vocabulary in the early 2000s. It was never defined clearly. In 2013’s Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police, journalists Paul Lewis and Rob Evans write that domestic extremists were ‘those who wanted to “prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy”, often doing so “outside of the normal democratic process”’. In practice, the label could be applied ‘to anyone police wanted to keep an eye on’.
The first targets were animal rights campaigners, some of whom did engage in behaviour more of us would recognise as threatening or violent, including arson attacks. When that movement declined, though, the units created to fight it didn’t shrink. Instead, they expanded their remit, applying the label to a growing number of generally progressive groups. Writing at the time, George Monbiot argued that this expansion sounded like the police saying: ‘Keep funding us, or civilisation collapses.’
What the police might not have planned was that the growing use of the term made it more controversial, and so more newsworthy. The ‘domestic extremism timeline’ constructed by the police monitoring organisation Netpol cites several articles published over the following years — first those in The Guardian confirming the existence of a database of surveilled ‘domestic extremists’, many without criminal records; then those revealing the listing of various peaceful activists. Among them was Green Party peer Jenny Jones. Jones was monitored even while she sat on the committee that scrutinised the Met at the London Assembly. By 2013, the database held 9,000 names.
Growing coverage of the ‘domestic extremist’ label coincided with the unmasking of the first known spy cops. When news broke that the Stephen Lawrence family campaign had been one of the infiltrated groups, Home Secretary Theresa May announced the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI). The next time Netpol entered a Freedom of Information Act request about the ‘domestic extremism’ database, in April 2014, the number of names it contained had fallen to less than 3,000. There had been a new definition of domestic extremism published and, clearly, a large-scale recalibration of records. Officers in the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit, into which NETCU had by then been collapsed, were later found to have shredded ‘a large number of documents’ that May.
After more attempts to redefine ‘domestic extremism’ throughout the 2010s, the Home Office confirmed it had dropped its use entirely in 2019. But non-violent environmentalist groups continued to turn up in materials about ‘extreme’ ideologies. In January 2020, The Guardian reported that Extinction Rebellion (XR) had appeared in a list published by Counter-Terrorism Policing South East. Officials told the paper it was a mistake and confined to that locality. The following week, it turned out that XR and Greenpeace, along with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, were in fact included on another counterterrorism document, this one used for Prevent training across England.
The anti-protest laws passed since 2021 have been justified as responses to the XR and Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the years immediately prior. What’s clear from this history is that they actually drew from a deeper well of state paranoia about — and hostility to — progressive movements, one that had long used accusations of extremity to legitimise the scale of its response. Academics at Bristol University have since found that environmental protesters in Britain face one of the highest rates of arrest worldwide. And just as worrying as this overreach is what it implies: that other, more serious, public safety risks are being underestimated.
‘Genuine if Wrong-Headed Patriotism’
The Guardian’s undercover policing database lists five officers known to have been deployed into a total of three far-right groups. All five of the deployments took place post-1990, despite the undercover Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) originating in 1968. Of those five, one officer engaged in a level of infiltration labelled ‘comparatively superficial’, and two were SDS officers who could not be ‘fully deployed’ before the unit was shut down in 2008. Infiltrations of left-wing groups, by contrast, were long and deep enough to produce close friendships, committed relationships, and, in some cases, children.
In the decade since its establishment, the UCPI has only completed two of five tranches of hearings. It’s a pace many feel is wilfully slow. But it has, at least, provided some insight into the covert surveillance approach to the far right in earlier decades — which is to say it’s exposed its absence. The one undercover officer who made it into the National Front (NF), in fact, did so in his capacity as a spy in the Socialist Workers’ Party, which then directed him to infiltrate the former.
In evidence to the inquiry in 2023, Detective Inspector Angus McIntosh, who was deputy head of the SDS from 1976 to 1979, said that a ‘high-level policy decision’ had been made not to infiltrate the NF. ‘It was a very violent section,’ he said, ‘and it was often involved in crime, so to put an undercover officer into that would have very, very difficult.’ Barry Moss, who was head of the SDS in 1980, also said the police were concerned about what officers would have had to do to prove their loyalty. Geoffrey Craft, another former SDS lead, said informants in the NF made infiltration unnecessary.
The ‘threat of criminality’ excuse is odd, given the willingness of other known spy cops to engage in and even instigate (allegedly) criminal activity. Some are also sceptical about these explanations because state permissiveness towards the far right predates 1968. Writing on this subject for Verso in 2019, Connor Woodman, a former researcher at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, points to a comparable permissiveness towards British fascism among the security forces in the early 1930s, in part because of a confluence of values.
In one text Woodman cites — 2009’s The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 — author Christopher Andrew writes that agent runner Maxwell Knight’s early reports on the British Union of Fascists (BUF) ‘were somewhat distorted by his belief in the BUF’s genuine, if wrong-headed, patriotism’. Knight refused for some time, Andrews continues, to accept that the BUF was being funded by Mussolini. Even when that was confirmed, the home secretary, John Gilmour, retained faith that the group’s leader Oswald Mosley was ‘a staunch patriot who posed no threat to national security’. Gilmour’s successor, John Simon, refused to intercept Mosley’s communications, even after Mosley married his second wife ‘in a private ceremony attended by Hitler in Goebbels’ drawing room’.
The state line on fascism became more critical as war approached and broke out, culminating in the internment of Mosley and around 750 of his supporters in 1940 (along with tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe). Until then, Woodman writes, much of the concern with far-right activity came from the fact that it fed a larger anti-fascist contingent under the banner of the Communist Party. A similarly skewed focus is evident in the police report, referenced by Paul Heron in Declassified, that followed the murder of 24-year-old Altab Ali in 1978: ‘While this death cannot be attributed to a racially motivated attack, it was exploited by the radical left to further exacerbate an already declining situation within the Bengali community.’
This kind of context is useful in understanding the police’s failure to prepare for last summer’s far-right riots. The two public order risk assessments that preceded those days both classed the threat of violent ‘cultural nationalist’ disorder as ‘low’, despite disturbances around hotels housing asylum seekers earlier in 2024, and on Armistice Day the previous year. A follow-up report by the police inspectorate also argued that a national mobilisation plan was implemented too late, over a week after the initial unrest in Southport.
Again, it’s hard not to contrast this presumption of peacefulness with the over-attentiveness to the pro-Palestine movement. The language of the spring 2024 risk assessment is enlightening: ‘It is highly likely strategic protest will continue to protect British culture and traditional values, with a focus on protecting monument[s] and memorials from Pro-Palestinian marches.’ Even factoring in the hundreds of arrests eventually made, the police and the rioters seem to have been in a kind of agreement that the real extremists were elsewhere.
Establishment Extremism
While the debate over ‘domestic extremism’ continued in the 2010s, David Cameron and Theresa May were struggling to define ‘extremism’ well enough to back up Cameron’s proposed anti-extremism legislation. Their failure meant that when Michael Gove introduced a new definition in spring 2024, he was replacing the version contained in the 2011 Prevent guidance, which centred on ‘opposition to fundamental British values’.
Gove’s new definition considered itself ‘more precise’. It refers instead to the ‘promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance’ that aims to ‘interfere’ with others’ ‘rights and freedoms’ or ‘undermine parliamentary democracy’. Organisations would be assessed by the government against those criteria, Gove explained. The government would refuse to communicate with any that qualified. No appeal process was mentioned.
Gove was criticised, including by human rights organisations and the Muslim and pro-Palestine groups who saw themselves — and were in some cases named — as the new definition’s targets; in the run-up to the announcement, Gove had been censuring ceasefire marchers for ‘lending [extremists] credence’. Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of state threat legislation, said the plans were labelling people extremist by ‘ministerial decree’. Netpol called it a return to familiar territory, since, ‘over the years, the label of “extremist” has repeatedly been deployed to justify restrictions on protests’.
To some on the Left, the periodic re-emergence of this debate is probably evidence of its uselessness. Extremity is subjective. To give governments the power to set the limits of political acceptability is to forget that they are political entities. A defined extremism can only be a political tool; those who oppose the people in power would be naive not to anticipate its use.
But there’s another way of looking at it, which is useful if you believe, as I do, that some behaviours do warrant the descriptor. This way emphasises the extremities of the mainstream. ‘Extreme’ does not necessarily mean ‘rare’. Actions with drastic implications for people’s survival are commonplace in our politics. You don’t have to travel across to Gaza, or forward in time to climate collapse, to see it, although the evidence is there too, under the rubble and the floodwater. Any bus ride through a British city today will show you people whose survival has been made precarious by ideological decisions. There are people going hungry, people sleeping on the street in the cold. Around 31 percent of children in Britain now live in poverty. A system that considers them collateral — not only believes so but makes them collateral — will never be able to make sober judgements about what is and is not extreme.
There are alternatives. In late 2023, I took a friend to a demonstration organised by the Jewish anti-occupation group Na’amod. This friend is not a regular protester or petition-signer, and as we walked to Parliament Square from the Tube, I made a joke about me radicalising him. ‘I think the point of this is actually de-radicalising,’ he said. I’ve thought a lot about that conversation since.