Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Cirenti.

What is happening behind closed doors in Britain's far-right movement? On today's episode, we're joined by journalist Harry Schucman, who spent over a year undercover investigating the British far-right. Drawing on his new book, Year of the Rat, Schucman sheds light on the secret meetings, pub gatherings, political canvassing and neo-Nazi conferences at the heart of the extreme right wing in Britain.

Through his investigations, Shookman has effectively exposed the mechanics of how far-right ideologies, from eugenics to Holocaust denial, are being normalized across the country, often with surprising allies in big tech, government, and the mainstream media. Joining him to discuss the book is author and researcher Carl Miller. So let's join Carl now with more.

Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of Intelligence Squared with me, Carl Miller. I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Harry Shookman.

So Harry is a researcher I hope not hate. He's a former Times and Manchester Mill journalist, and he's also the author of a new book called The Year of the Rat, undercover in the British far right. He's also an award-winning far right activist, but we'll get to that in a moment. But Harry, you're very welcome. Thanks for having me. So a year undercover in the far right, what made you possibly embark on this?

on such a kind of scary and costly kind of undertaking? I continue to ask myself that question. But to rewind a few years ago, I was a journalist interested in, during the COVID pandemic, their teaming up of these two groups that had seemingly never worked together before. Anti-vaxxers who might typically come from a left-wing background and far-right activists who obviously come from the polar opposite.

And it seemed like during the pandemic, they were working together on anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine protests. And I wanted to kind of learn a bit more about that and report on them. But I found it really hard. I found it really hard to be able to spend time with them, report on them, do normal approaches saying, I'd like to interview you, I'd like to hang out. I found that my interview requests just fell on deaf ears. But

Previously, in an earlier job, I'd experimented a tiny bit with undercover reporting, just one or two different forays into pretending to be someone else in order to secure a story. During this period, I changed tack and I started approaching groups as a fellow traveler. I found that this opened doors and people would talk to me in a way that they never otherwise would have.

Doing this, I came into contact with Hope Not Hate, the biggest anti-extremism organization in the UK. And we started working together, working out a longer term undercover project that ultimately turned into the book that you mentioned, Year of the Rat.

And it seems, Harry, that in various ways, which we'll get into in a second, the kind of long-term relationship building you were able to do at least did two really important things. On the one hand, it allowed you to kind of build these three-dimensional portraits of these people as, yes, racist and far-right, but also people, you know, that would have other things going on in their lives or not. But then also to get under the mask, the different kind of far-right people

kind of ideologues had built to kind of presumably hoodwink journalists that were just popping in and wanting a quick interview. Yeah, I think the fact that we did this project over the course of a year meant that we learned so much more from, you know, repeatedly seeing people. And I think that you're really right to point out the fact that journalists who do attempt to go for the more traditional route, I think have a really difficult time in finding out

being able to properly interview far-right activists, people on the fringes who are very distrustful of mainstream media. A lot of the people who I ended up meeting thought that ordinary news organizations were part of some sinister and baroque and very complicated fantasy in which they were doing the bidding of the state and more sinister people besides.

So they, you know, both, I mean, the far-right activists I spent time with are very well practiced at withholding their actions and their intent from the media. I think that they have quite a sharp understanding of what is and isn't an acceptable idea.

And, you know, I think I think we see this quite, quite often. If you journalists to some journalists at The Times tried to cover the Homeland Party this week, a fascist party and were made to sign a memorandum of understanding that they wouldn't be allowed to make any approaches to.

party members. These are the kind of constraints that far-right organizations will put on mainstream reporters. I'd argue that it's only by spending time with them, perhaps as a fellow traveler, as someone undercover, are you able to see something a little bit closer to the truth, the thing that they are trying to conceal from the public. But it's its own type of

of work. Not all journalism could be undercover. It comes with its own difficulties, its ethical messiness. But clearly there is a lot of time and energy spent in far-right groups on how to, as you say, hoodwink the public on their version of events. So introduce us to Chris, your alter ego.

Okay, so obviously I couldn't go under my real name during this undercover project. So I became Chris. Chris was designed to be a kind of normal and quite boring guy who could sit at the back of rooms and just be able to listen and take everything in. So my colleague, Patrick Hermansen,

at Hope Not Hate, we came up with this person who would be very tedious. With the most boring job that you could possibly think up. Exactly. I was a strategy consultant in support function optimization, which even now is a combination of words so boring that it makes my own eyes glaze over. But we had all these projects that I would have worked on that

designed to elicit maximum tedium in anyone I spoke to. The idea being that I would just be able to not ruffle any feathers and not prompt any additional questions about me. So to that end, I had a very boring wardrobe. I mean, to be honest, there's a lot of choice already. I didn't have to search too hard to find...

you know, fleeces and sad anoraks and white shirts and depressing slacks. And so this is, yeah, this is part of the person who I pretended to be for the best part of, well, more than a year. Sorry to any strategy consultants, by the way, listening to this. I'm sure your jobs are far more interesting than our misunderstanding of them. But Harry, would he sound like you, Chris? I mean, how would you, would you have to actually act in terms of your mannerisms and demeanour?

Yeah, I think that the safest way to maintain an alter ego like that for a long period of time is to not make it that different to your ordinary personality. So I wasn't pretending to be anyone radically different. Some of my views, of course, would be different, but it's not like I was...

acting. It was more like lying. So, you know, when I came up with my own personal history, you know, my parents' names, my siblings' names, these were, you know, as close to the truth as possible. So they were by their middle names instead of their first names, for instance. I didn't want to do anything radically different about, because then I might get caught out or I might not be able to maintain that fiction for so long.

Okay, well, let's go to the first stop on Chris's journey, the Basket Weavers, a group I'd never heard of, actually, before. So who on earth are the Basket Weavers? So the Basket Weavers are a typical young community building organisation. The name is chosen as a deliberately innocuous sounding term to avoid scrutiny.

And they've successfully done that for some years since they've been set up. They've been going for about five years now. And they came to our attention because they were advertised on the website of an obscure and now disgraced academic

who is quite popular in far-right circles. And so they have chapters across the country and indeed across Europe and the US and Australia and beyond. And what they do is they organize meetups. And although that doesn't sound particularly sinister, it sounds like any kind of other community organization perhaps, they are doing this with a view to create a separate society in which they can leverage

live and work entirely separate to the mainstream. By numbers, it might be one of the largest groups in the UK in the far right. And what I think is interesting about it is that it provides a lot of young people with a low barrier to entry in far right activism. You know, they are not doing anything on the street. They're not politically organising

They are, to put it bluntly, just hanging out. They are within those groups fantasizing about murdering progressive civil servants and forcibly deporting non-white people from the country. And yet, because they are not engaging in politics or meta-politics, they provide people with a really easy way in. And from there, they might join other more sinister groups like Patriotic Alternative.

Another thing that I found really interesting about them is that they have a really sophisticated understanding of how to avoid scrutiny from the media, from the eye of Sauron, as they put it, police or anti-fascist activists.

And although they have an online presence in the form of a Discord server, a social media messaging app, they discourage any form of communication on that server beyond organizing in-person meetups. And it's in those places where the magic happens.

And this is a definite move away from comparable far-right groups where they're lurking online somewhere is group chat in which the most, the vilest, most racist, extreme things are being said and shared. So I think it represents a kind of increasing awareness of how to stay away from scrutiny that I find quite interesting.

And the kind of basket weavers raised a kind of quite a recurring motif in the book, which was the kind of loneliness that was often kind of really prevalent amongst these people and the kind of desire for community.

Yeah, absolutely. I think this is something that struck me while doing the undercover project. I felt quite sad about it. You know, at the beginning, certainly the, you know, the extremeness of the group, you know, made me feel this project was really justified. But a lot of the people I met were certainly very maladjusted. The relationships and friendships they had expected from life had not yet materialized.

What attracted them to this group was this lack of community that they sorely felt. It's doubly sad that within this group it was intensely hierarchical. It markets itself as a refuge for people whose lives haven't quite worked out the way they'd hoped for. But within that group, poorer members get mocked for not being able to afford more expensive events.

People who are romantically inexperienced will get teased. People whose views are less extreme than more senior members will get berated publicly in front of everybody. It discourages dissent or encourages people to become yet more extreme.

I think among the loneliness, there was a report that you had written, I think a decade ago now for Demos, it talks about conspiracy theories. And this was a point that was in my mind about vanguardism. The thing that appeals to a lot of the people in this group is this feeling that they are at the forefront of something spectacular. Life, society is going swirling the drain, but they are

uh, yeah, the vanguard that was going to save, save Western civilization. I think that provides people with, um, a great deal of, uh, and it galvanizes them and it gives them this kind of energy. And, you know, the, the basket weavers, they draw inspiration from, uh, from bear wolf, you know, their umbrella organization is called the bear wolf foundation. And, you know, they talk a lot about, you know, taking on this heroic mantle of,

you know, vanquishing demons and enemies that obviously come in the form of mainstream society. So I think that, you know, that provides them with some encouragement and some excitement, even when they might not be having the best time, even within the group.

Well, Harry, thank you. That citation for literally my oldest pamphlet ever warms an old think tanker's heart, so thank you. But you mentioned the kind of enemy, I suppose, and isolation that these people are feeling. And I suppose also in terms of dating and romantic life, being far right makes it very difficult to date.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, lots of the people I met were men. They certainly... Holding totally revolting views about women. Right.

Right, exactly. Which isn't going to be maybe the best place for women to want to go because they would complain, these blokes, about the lack of women at these events. Hardly surprising given that women seem to come in their mind in two forms, either as baby-making trad wives or as gullible...

gullible people who could be kind of deceived using pick-up artist techniques into bed. That said, some couples were formed through the basket weavers. I think that they all took great encouragement from this. But yeah, a lot of the relationships within these groups that the basket weavers hope for, they feel like have been...

denied to them either by the makeup of society or just haven't worked out in the way that they yearn for. That obviously, you know, makes them, we should, I guess, have, I was left with feeling a lot of sympathy for these people who were talking about

Less so the ones who are more aggressively hoping to kind of connive women. But to people who just expressing the feeling that they had these great hopes for life and that they were not working out and that they spent all their evenings and weekends alone just online listening to hours long fascist live streams.

And, you know, I think that while some of the certainly the more senior figures, the leaders I met in these groups, I think, you know, we should you shouldn't be under any illusions about their sinister motives. But the rank and file members, I don't know, I think to me.

To give some more context, I met a guy who told me, and this quote still haunts me, I feel pretty low down on the totem pole of society. And I think that clearly lots of people are lonely. They don't have the relationships they hope for. And I think that we should try and have a little bit of more understanding about the circumstances that led them to join these groups. Otherwise, we don't have any hope to stopping them.

So Chris is in the basket weavers, which, as you said, seems to involve a huge amount of sitting in pubs.

Just a ton of drinking and pub talk. But he's more ambitious than that, Chris, isn't he? So he wants to actually start joining some of these tighter, more hardcore groups that are actually going out there and trying to change society. So take us to the next kind of stage in the journey, Harry, kind of Identity England, and I suppose the stepping stone from that into probably a group the more people would have heard of, Britain First.

Yeah, so the British Fire Right can look like a giant Venn diagram. You know, not everyone is a member of every other group, but there are people who are members of more than one. And through the basket weavers, I was able to meet a member who invited me into Identity England, which is an offshoot of the identitarian group Generation Identity.

that it made headlines in the late 2010s as this European white nationalist organization that was very focused on image, on trying to convince people that its image was less extreme than the one, you know, its members really, from the views its members held.

And through that was able to meet another member who was part of Britain First, perhaps one of the better known, as you say, groups in the far right that not only contest elections, but also does a very aggressive form of street activism and holding flash mobs outside of asylum seeker accommodation.

Mosque invasions where they kind of show up inside mosques to film people at prayer and just get in the faces of worshippers.

So through this very slow form of infiltration, it worked because there was someone at each turn vouching for me. And it was a form of patronage, I suppose, someone who could help me bypass the typical application process. And there would be just much less attention paid to me because I was someone's mate coming along for the day.

So through this way, I was able to spend about six months in Britain first, starting as just helping out on their local elections campaign and ending up as a more trusted figure, being invited to a trip to Warsaw to join an Independence Day march. And

ultimately getting awarded with an activist of the year medal at a summer camping festival that was held in the Peak District. My racist Oscar. It was one of the only prizes in my working life that I

I've been given. Do you still have it? I still, yes. It's not on my mantelpiece, but it's in a box at the back of the wardrobe. I had to get my hands quite dirty to get it. I knew that this project would... I'd have to do some distasteful things, but...

protesting refugee accommodation, handing out racist leaflets, spending time with former criminals and hardcore racists. It was unpleasant work, but it did kind of have these lighter moments of getting the award. I could never have expected something like that. And truly scary work.

too. The camping trip must have been absolutely terrifying. For people that aren't aware of Britain First, there were individuals on that camping trip that are extremely dangerous individuals, aren't there? People with multiple violent crime convictions, members of football firms...

And you're in the middle of it all, you know, trying to be Chris. But, you know, the fear of being uncovered must have been absolutely kind of nerve straining for you.

Yeah, absolutely. It got to the point where I could no longer really think rationally about being undercover. You know, there are times when texts would come through, calls would come through, and I'd think, you know, my heart would start racing because I would just imagine that this is the moment where I get exposed. The thing I feared the whole time was that I was about to get, my cuddle would be blown off,

I'd be showing up to a meeting and I'd have this kind of fantasy that this would be this would all be organized to sort of expose me in front of a group of the former criminals and as you rightly point out part of Britain first the head of security while I was in the party this guy called Andy Frayn his nickname was nightmare he's a former combat 18 terrorist member of the Chelsea headhunters football firm a habitua of His Majesty's prison system

who once slashed the throat of a police officer. He used to carve up his football rivals with a Stanley knife. And on one occasion, he got into my car and I gave him a lift to the pub. The fear of what would happen if I was exposed during an undercover meetup, particularly one at this camping weekend,

just outside Buxton in August of 2023, became a huge, huge worry, particularly in meetups where it's hard to escape. You know, being in a pub in central London, easy to just dash out the door and try and jump on a train or get in a cab. But in the middle of nowhere, you know, miles away from anywhere familiar.

there would be these huge worries that I would make an incorrigible slip up where I would accidentally reveal who I was or someone would recognize me and I dreaded to think of what would happen. Luckily, though there were some very many near misses, I didn't get exposed.

So six months-ish into this, it sounds like the strain is beginning to show. The strain of fear of discovery, the strain of having to be Chris. But it also sounds like you develop this hatred of Chris at the same time. I think at one point in the book, you call him a sycophant.

You know, you kind of grow to hate this character that you have to be, which, you know, chips in with the racist jokes, you know, and lasts along where, you know, where time after time you hear things that are just, you know, so kind of, so, you know, revoltingly against your values. How do you deal with that? Yeah,

Yeah, I did find that really difficult. And the description of me as a sycophant, what comes to mind... Well, not you, Chris, obviously. No, Chris. Yeah, well, that's very kind of you. The description of Chris as a sycophant, what comes to mind is this moment where, one of the first occasions I met Paul Golding, the leader of Britain First...

And he's this cage fighter. He was describing this street fight he had, like a scuffle he'd had with a stranger. And he took a swing at me. And, you know, he didn't make contact. But, you know, obviously I flinched at seeing this giant fist coming at me. And...

And I had to kind of laugh it off and kind of just bottle up this, you know, reaction to bullying, basically. And I think that I, you know, I found it very difficult in order to try and maintain this person of Chris as this affable, dependable guy who could show up week after week and, you know, get close to the leadership while also being, while also, yeah, just like,

pushing down these reactions I'd have. There were times when it was really, as I said, very messy trying to work out what to do. During the campaigning with Britain First, there would typically be a kind of argument between a resident who didn't want us in their neighbourhood protesting us and the other members. And there'd be this shouting match where someone would, someone, Paul Golding would be yelling at a resident, the resident would be yelling back.

And the members of Britain First would be loving this because it's, you know, shouting at some liberal who doesn't mind refugees in their town. And, you know, residents may be becoming quite frustrated and angry and maybe even a bit scared at the thought of these kind of dozen guys yelling at them. And

I'd want to break it up. You know, the purpose of this project, in addition to being journalistic, was also, you know, activist. I want to try and disrupt the operation of the far right in this country. And here were far right activists in the process of, you know, of dividing communities. And there'd be nothing I could do about it. I couldn't go in and say, you know, stop it.

Let's go, let's just agree to disagree. That would have been suspicious. And so yeah, I think they're still feeling a lot of guilt about not being able to do that kind of thing. I think that in undercover work, I often have this thought that there is the perfect combination of words that you can say in order to maintain cover.

Life obviously doesn't work that way, but it's sometimes like tempting to think of it as this almost like this video game where if you push the right buttons, you'll be able to get interesting responses, not without, you know, not entrapping people and saying anything, but just in maintaining your cover and avoiding suspicion. But so often there'd be, you know, that view would be very mistaken, particularly in these, you know, argument instances.

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Let's turn to a very different face of the far right, Harry, that you then in the book kind of proceed to dig into and uncover. So Chris becomes an investor and kind of gets involved, you know, it seems in a much more kind of, well, kind of, what would you call it? Kind of pseudo intellectual form of far right, like especially kind of predicated on and revolving around this idea of race science.

Yes, yeah. So I attended a conference organized by white nationalists in Tallinn in Estonia that was certainly, they saw themselves as the intellectual or even the more academic end of the far right attracting people from across the English speaking world.

And there I met a kind of startup founder. You know, he looked like he could have just come off the stage of a TED Talk. He described setting up this magazine called Aporia, doing stories on HBD, human biodiversity, which is a...

a euphemistic term for race science. The idea that races have measurable differences in things like intelligence that are primarily the cause of genetic factors rather than environmental ones. It's called race science, but it really also encompasses ideas that sexes and socioeconomic classes have differences between them because of genetics.

In this way, you'd see discussions that poor people shouldn't be allowed to breed because they have lower IQ or that women should be excluded from higher education because they have lower IQ. And this is because of a, you know, for genetic reasons. So it's a very old form of hatred given this academic veneer, you know, that if you talk to geneticists, they will vigorously deny, you know,

That sounds like it's... That sounds like I'm saying that it's not quite right. If you talk to mainstream geneticists, they will tell you that this form of science has no basis in fact. At this conference in Tallinn, I was still pretending to be Chris, the boring strategy consultant. But I wanted to get closer to this magazine called Aporia and its mysterious founder who was talking about receiving a large chunk of cash from a Silicon Valley source. And...

What we found was that Chris was so boring that further attempts to make contact were not getting any traction. So we changed the idea of Chris. We took a risk to say that Chris was no longer just a very kind of boring corporate drone. He also had come into a stack of money, a big inheritance that he wanted to now put into far-right projects. And this opened up a lot of doors for us. It was amazingly successful, wasn't it? The idea of...

having money, suddenly all these guarded people and these carefully kept secrets suddenly started pouring out. Now, this world that Investor Chris steps into is

kind of looks like much more insidious doesn't it than the the kind of world of the kind of you know the the the the ballot box and the boot i suppose that you've been looking at until this point because i mean i think you know when britain first turns up in your village it's any attempt the paul golding and the others make to try and smooth over their ideology is is quite transparently fictitious isn't it you can see that they are far-right thugs we're

Whereas these people, you know, they really did manage to, like, get some of their articles into academic publications, didn't they? And as you said, and this is one of the big scoots of the book, you managed to uncover a genuine Silicon Valley, like, founder, multi-hundred millionaire, if not billionaire, that is actually backing some of this stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. And this is much more scary to me. You know, far-right thugs, right, people will recognize them as dangerous and they're not going to be winning any parliamentary seats anytime soon, touch wood. But the impact that the world of these race scientists is having is working on a much bigger scale

they are getting a lot of support. They're getting access to money and power in a way that once would have been considered unthinkable. The Aporia magazine team and their umbrella organization called the Human Diversity Foundation had picked up $1.3 million in funding from Andrew Conroe, who made his money in the 1990s tech scene in the States, creating a hookup dating website.

And that kind of figure is unheard of in these far right circles. And he'd been backing secretly this group. He'd also been putting money behind Jared Taylor, who's a white nationalist, an advocate of segregation in the States. And

What Aporia is striving for is for who they consider elites, billionaires, tech entrepreneurs, policy makers, to accept the idea that there are these inherent genetically based differences between races so that that can then influence policy. It can reintroduce segregation. It can encourage re-migration, this euphemistic term for forced deportations of non-white people from Europe, from America.

And, you know, are they succeeding? They're certainly making more headway than the types of Britain First. You know, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has been reposting on his ex-account one of the race scientists who writes for Reporia magazine. You know, I don't think we have the luxury of treating this as a really fringe topic anymore.

You know, race scientists one day in the recent past might have been writing on some obscure form on the internet. But as one of the guests who's come on your podcast, Julia Ebner, has so impactfully written, you know, these ideas are going mainstream in a way that would have once been hard to imagine. Do you see there to be a link, maybe one that needs more exploring between Silicon Valley and science?

contemporary forms of fascism. You mentioned Musk and Musk's views and turn towards fascism is obviously heavily discussed. And Conroy, but you also mentioned Mark Anderson, the very famous, very wealthy founder of A16Z, a venture capital firm based in the Valley, and his following of Ed Dutton, a white supremacist YouTuber?

Yeah, race science YouTuber, maybe. Race science. And it seems to me anyway, Harry, I wonder what you think, that there are elements of Silicon Valley fascination, whether that's to do with transhumanism, looks a bit like eugenics, effective accelerationism, looks quite fascist in obsession with getting rid of the old and replacing with the new, or even just this obsession with modernity, where maybe there are elements of tech ideology that are much closer to fascism than we've suspected for quite a long time.

Yeah, I think you could make that point. The father of Silicon Valley, William Shockley, in the 70s, he was advocating for the sterilization and deportation of black people because of what he considered to be lower IQ scores based on genetic factors. The link between eugenics and Silicon Valley has been around for decades.

Why that is I'm minded of something that you wrote about in your death of the gods book about some this this kind of Silicon Valley mindset of your either Ruthlessly disrupting the status quo someone you quote or you're dead in the water and sinking and I think that there's there's Perhaps like a renegade allure to some of these ideas that are

You know, there's a reason why this so-called intellectual part of the far right calls itself the dissident right. It gives itself this kind of, yeah, rebel...

rebel sheen that maybe sounds quite exciting and exotic and and perhaps that is explains why some of these kind of obsession with finding hidden ideas finding finding you know the right disruptive tool to unlock potential may maybe there's something in that either that's there's no something I get really go into it in the book but you know just just the thought

Certainly this obsession with optimizing that comes in with, you know, sometimes they call themselves techno puritans. This view that there are some people who are born who matter and some people who don't. I've seen this idea expressed by Razeeb Khan that there are 10,000 people in the world who matter.

obviously he considers himself one of those lucky few, this kind of, this Calvinist type idea that you're predetermined for greatness. I think that appeals to Silicon Valley naturally. And it also appeals to people who are interested in race science, you know, that, you know,

Your IQ is determined by your genes and there's no amount of education that can improve it, which is obviously not what science tells us. IQ scores are not fixed. They can improve over your lifetime with education. But this view that basically the place you have in society is determined by your genetics.

It naturally appeals to people in Silicon Valley who think that they have unlocked the key to the future. Maybe it brings us back to this idea that they're in the vanguard of some future greatness.

Yeah, perhaps the cult of the founders, quite Nietzschean, isn't it? The idea of the Superman and the hero, and as you say, the rejection, the fundamental rejection of human equality. But anyway, without getting too deep into the philosophical speculation, there's one more person I'd like us to speak briefly about, and that is Uncle Sabs.

I did not think of all the many places that you would go, that Chris would go on this journey, that a Downing Street former policy writer would be one of them.

Yeah, I mean, this guy, Uncle Sabs, which is a term that Andrew Sabisky uses to refer to himself. He is a super forecaster, someone who was brought in by Dominic Cummings to work in Boris Johnson's number 10. And he didn't last very long when he was hired in January 2020. Some of his old writings on race science, on IQ, on black people, on...

on poor people were uncovered and he quit his job. I met him at a dinner for pronatalists and luminaries, as it was billed, organized by the pronatalist Malcolm and Simone Collins, who were visiting the UK.

Andrew Sabisky, who was at this dinner, heard that I was this funder and asked me how much money I had. He wanted me to help fund his idea to write or contribute to a policy paper for Rishi Sunak's No. 10.

on energy, on nuclear energy. And he told me that he had a load of secret stuff in his bag. He told me that he had a friend, number 10, the special advisor Will Dry, who had basically commissioned him unofficially to help inform policy. This was a huge surprise, you know. When Sibiski left his job three years previously, there were even conservative ministers who were saying, you know, this should never be allowed to happen again,

We've got to re-look at hiring practices. What did he exactly say? Just so we're clear on what Stabisky's views actually were. Despite his avuncular nickname, these are some of the things that he had written online. Some of these comments appeared on Dominic Cummings' own blog. A far greater percentage of blacks than whites in the range of IQ 75 or below, at which point we are close to the typical boundary for mild mental retardation.

He'd also said that anyone who has researched the issue for more than five minutes could see that there are very real racial differences in intelligence. These differences, he said, were significantly, even mostly genetic in origin. And he had this idea that IQ scores should inform how the UK controls immigration. You know, he'd also appeared at this very controversial London conference on intelligence, which is a gathering of race scientists and far-right activists who I had, I met later in my undercover work.

And, you know, he had been writing about Britain becoming a majority Islamic nation by 2050.

anticipating that there might be violent resistance to this demographic trend. So these are the kind of views that at the time caused Tory ministers to say, this kind of person has no place in government, no place in forming policy. So yeah, it was a massive shock to see that he was still, even at arm's length, influencing how number 10 ran society. And I guess final question is,

Do you draw any threads between all these different kinds of groups that you were in and that you got to know? Because on the one hand, obviously, we've been reflecting on the vast difference in the context

between an Uncle Sabs and a Paul Golding. But it also seems that, ideologically speaking, they are actually fairly similar to each other in the kind of gripes they have and both the problems that they see society to be suffering and also the solutions that they want.

Yes, the solutions vary on aggression and violence, but the diagnosis that there are some cultures and nationalities and even faiths within this country that are completely incompatible with the British way of life and they have to be removed is,

is something that I heard expressed in the intellectual, so-called intellectual circles and the much more kind of street activist ones. Something that struck me is a shared belief that

The path to success lies in secrecy. It lies in withholding the truth about their true agenda. Sibisky described this as putting on the mask. He described how he was encouraging his peers in Westminster to put on this mask, get in the institutions, and one day we'll all have a critical mass to be able to pull the levers of power off.

And, you know, Britain First, the basket weavers, they are all doing their own version of putting on the mask. They are trying to convince, you know, donors, voters, potential members, even people within their groups that they're concealing from them their true intentions.

And that's why I think this form of undercover journalism is justified. People might understandably have their qualms about this type of work and about whether it's acceptable or not. But there are unfortunately a lot of people who work within the British far right who are trying to conceal their agenda.

Something that struck me about the funding mechanism of the Human Diversity Foundation was it was all done in private. Andrew Conroe has a foundation, a charitable foundation, that declares the groups he funds. This was not part of it. This happens behind closed doors. The public, I think, has a right to know when they are being influenced by

by ideas like race science and eugenics and remigration. We know very little about it, about exactly how this dark money works. I think it's up to us to make sure that we do everything we can to try and understand and ideally disrupt some of these mechanisms.

Well, Harry, thank you. What a gruelling and courageous and important investigation this was. That was Harry Shipman, everyone, author of the new book Year of the Rat, undercover in the British far right. I've been Karl Miller, and you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you so much, as ever, for joining us. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts.