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Nigel Farage's Reform UK are now a significantly bigger far-right threat to the UK than previous generations of explicitly racist parties like the British National Party, the leader of Britain's foremost anti-racism campaign group Hope not Hate, has told Byline Times.

Nick Lowles, whose new book How to Defeat the Far Right is published on Thursday, told a live Byline Supplement event that Reform was helping to mainstream political ideas that were previously deemed unacceptable, even on parts of the far right.

"Back in 1999 the British National Party, led by a man who was a Holocaust denier, thought that Britain shouldn't have gone to war with Germany and believed that black people were genetically inferior to whites… dropped their repatriation policy because they felt they couldn't even sell it to their own supporters anymore," Lowles points out.

"And now we're facing a situation where a party that is leading in the polls can literally in the space of two weeks, have two policies that could be deporting a million people from this country, and there's very little pushback in the media or in political circles".

Lowles said that in some respects Farage's party were even more extreme than what had come before them.

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"The policies that they put out in the last few weeks on immigration, would be the most extreme policies that we've had from any political party, and I would say, was probably more extreme than the public positions of the BNP in its heyday" he said.

"The demonisation of minorities, the use of conspiracy theories, the support for autocratic regimes around the world.

"And while they're not anti-democratic in the sense of a group that wants to overthrow the system, they are certainly wanting to subvert the system and dismantle some of the pillars of what we would see as liberal democracy."

Reform's acceptance by the political mainstream is also making their ideas much harder to combat for anti-racism groups than previous far-right movements, Lowles said.

"Even though the BNP were winning support in certain working class communities and sometimes winning 30-40% of the vote [in those areas], they were still quite a marginal force, and they were outside of the political mainstream," he told Byline Times.

"But what we're facing now are far right and radical right ideas, which are firmly in the political mainstream, which it makes it makes it much harder to to take on."

Whereas in the past there was a "social cost" to supporting groups like the BNP and their calls for ideas like mass deportations, Reform could now push a similar agenda with ease across both new and more traditional media platforms, Lowles said.

"There was a social cost of being involved with the BNP… and they were shunned by the media… Whereas we're in a situation now where this kind of right wing discourse dominates social media and there's a ecosystem whether it's from magazines, newspapers, Substacks, YouTubes, podcasts, X, there's a plethora of platforms that are just pushing out this sort of content."

holding farage to account #reformUNCOVERED

While most the rest of the media seems to happy to give the handful of Reform MPs undue prominence, Byline Times is committed to tracking the activities of Nigel Farage's party when actually in power

EXCLUSIVE

Nigel Farage's Reform a Bigger Far-Right Threat Than the BNP, Says UK's Leading Anti-Racism Campaigner

25 September 20...