Britain's Fascist Slide

The Perpetrators and the Facilitators

On June 8th, Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese asylum seeker, attempted to kill a 44-year-old disabled Belfast man named Stephen Ogilvie with a knife. A video of this vicious assault was widely circulated on social media, and prompted riots and anti-migrant pogroms, perpetrated mostly by young men from loyalist strongholds in northeast Belfast and other places in Northern Ireland.

Loyalists have a long history of burning people out of their homes - in 1969 these events eventually brought the Provisional IRA into Belfast. Loyalist paramilitaries also have longstanding historic links with the British far-right. In recent years, Loyalism has increasingly overlapped with the white supremacist anti-migrant hate politics of the new far-right, and this month, both traditions converged, when hundreds of mostly young men attacked immigrant homes - some of which were on pre-existing lists that had been circulated for months on social media.

It’s doubtful whether many of the ‘patriots’ who set fire to cars and homes knew or cared that Stephen Ogilvie - the man whose attempted murder they were supposedly protesting - had once been tortured by members of the Ulster Volunteer Force. According to the Belfast Telegraph, Ogilvie was once a friend of a UVF killer Mark ‘Gutsy’ Campbell, who murdered two Catholic men in 1994.

That year Campbell moved to Edinburgh, after falling out with his organisation, and Ogilvie and some of their Belfast pals joined him. Campbell then set up a heroin dealing gage allegedly overseen by a former member of the ‘Shankhill Butchers’ named William Moore. Though Ogilvie was not a member of the gang, he moved in Campbell’s circles.

A diagnosed schizophrenic, Ogilvie was also regularly bullied by the gang. One member was given a 14-year-sentence for spiking Ogilvie with a date rape drug and putting lighted cigarettes between his toes. In the same attack, Ogilvie was stripped, beaten with a baton, covered in aftershave and set on fire.

Yet according to some reports, senior UVF figures played a leading role in encouraging the violent response to Ogilvie’s attempted murder. Other reports suggest that loyalist paramilitary groups may have attempted to present themselves as peacekeepers in order to make themselves useful to the authorities.

Demographic and ethnic paranoia is baked into Loyalism, and it may well be that a younger generation that did not know the Troubles, but inherited the siege mentality that goes with it, has found new outlets of persecution. Last year, this convergence was symbolized by the inclusion of a ‘Stop the Boats’ effigy during last year’s ‘marching season’ in Moygashel, County Tyrone.

This year, real homes were turned into bonfires. This violent trajectory is not unique to Northern Ireland, however. There were also violent disturbances in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Ayr in response to the Belfast knife attack. In recent years, there have also been incidents of anti-migrant violence in the republic of Ireland. Earlier this month, there were smaller scale disturbances in Southampton followed the sentencing of Vickrum Digwa, for the brutal murder of Henry Nowak.

Most of these incidents have been triggered by real or alleged crimes carried out by asylum seekers or people of colour against white people. No one ‘protested’ when Kyle Clifford in 2024 murdered three women from the same family with a crossbow. Last week, a teacher and his partner were found guilty of the horrific abuse and murder of a little boy who they had adopted purely in order to sexually abuse him.

It is one of those utterly depraved crimes that defies comprehension, and demonstrates that there are no depths to which some human beings may sink. But the fact that the perpetrators were white men and teachers tells us nothing about white men or teachers. We might feel pity, shame and disgust that a defenceless four-year-old boy who had already been abandoned, fell into the hands of such men, and we might also wonder how this was allowed to happen. .

None of us would think of putting on masks and balaclavas and terrorising teachers or random white people in their homes. But we have now reached the point when almost any crime carried out by a man with a different skin colour is instantly treated as an indication of a racial and cultural type. Such crimes might demonstrate the folly in letting brown people into the country, the failure of multiculturalism, or discriminatory action of the ‘woke’ police who have abandoned the white majority to the foreigners who want to rape, kill and ultimately ‘replace’ us.

Variants on these themes have been around for a long time, and they have become a kneejerk response to ‘migrant crime’ that can bring ‘patriots’ into the streets at the drop of a tweet. On Friday, a shirtless white man attacked Muslims at random in Edinburgh. Arrested by police, he shouted that he was ‘protecting the country’ from rapists.

These sons of the soil did not get such ideas from the dank, knuckle-dragging realms of the internet. They belong to a wider spectrum that extends to online ‘influencers’, mainstream rightwing populists, outright neo-Nazis and newspaper columnists, who all of whom share a common interest in maximising racial tensions and presenting the British white majority population as beleaguered victims.

Take the doe-eyed commentator from the Telegraph who called for a ‘Stephen Lawrence style inquiry’ into the police response to Henry Nowak’s murder. Some people - and there are too many of them nowadays - will say anything for clicks, money and a few minutes of flame. And if that means suggesting on tv that the white majority is subject to racial bias by the ‘woke’ police, while people of colour are given the red carpet, so be it

No use telling them that Stephen Lawrence was murdered by a gang of racists, one of whom had police connections through his father, which may have contributed to the botched police investigation. In Nowak’s case, the police initially believed the lies they were told, and failed to spot that the man they thought was a perpetrator had been stabbed and was actually bleeding to death.

This was a terrible and tragic mistake, but it does not mean, as James Cleverly suggested, that these officers ‘seemed more concerned with the accusation of racism than the pleas of a dying man.’ Nor is there any indication, as Nigel Mosley-Farage wickedly claimed, that Nowak’s death was the product of ‘DEI and positive discrimination’. Mosley-Farage - and he was not the only one -even had the temerity to compare Nowak’s death to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, in order to make the point that ‘white lives matter just as much as black lives.’

This is how they gaslight you, whilst also turning the truth inside out. Floyd was choked to death over nine minutes by a police officer, who was eventually given 22 years for murdering him. His death became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, because it was seen as one of many cases of historic and ongoing police brutality towards black people because they were black. Some ‘patriots’ protesting Henry Nowak’s murder actually took the knee in order to present themselves - and white people in general - as victims of racism.

It is nonsensical, hateful gibberish, and those who propagate the lie of ‘two-tier policing’ have no more concern for Henry Nowak than they do for Stephen Ogilvie. They have no interest in the facts of the matter in either case, and certainly no interest in the statements from both and Ogilvie’s families calling for calm and pleading with the public not to exploit these incidents.

Pure Cold Rage

The ‘patriots’ who rioted in response to these tragedies have no interest in calm. They are actively seeking to promote division, anger and hatred - what Farage calls ‘pure, cold rage’ - the better to channel these emotions to their political advantage. A Wired investigation found that hate groups and neo-Nazi movement Active Clubs played a key role in mobilizing and coordinating the riots.

Within hours of the attack on Ogilvie, a Telegram channel shared a screenshot of the video, with the caption ‘White youth in revolt’, accompanied by a caption: ‘Negro invader just attempted to behead a white man in the United Kingdom.’ The post also contained the following exhortation:

To the men of the UK. You must harden yourselves and work together. Make them terrified they are trapped on an island with you. Reignite your flame. Reclaim your homeland and secure a future for white youth. These third-worldist acts of violence cannot continue to take place on our streets.

This is what Nazis sound like. Others are more discreet. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka ‘Tommy Robinson’ posted a screenshot of the video, which has been viewed more than 16 million times. Mosley-Farage also called for mass protests. Even as the riots were unfolding, Laila Cunningham, Reform’s candidate for London mayor, tweeted:

They let them in. Then call you racist for complaining. They will now debate our right to express anger and pontificate about the legitimacy of the public’s reaction. And the House [of Commons] will be ‘united’ in condemnation, not of the failure. Of us.

‘If a migrant comes to our country and attempts to saw a man’s head off in the street,’ thundered Rupert Lowe, the ever-more openly fascistic leader of Restore, ‘a Restore Britain Government will not deport. With the British people’s approval, that savage will be put to death.

Deportation. Savages. Executions - words that swell the hearts of patriots everywhere. And then there is Elon Musk - the apartheid trillionaire and backer of both Rupert Lowe and Yaxley-Lennon - who posted feverishly about the Ogilvie attack, just as he had done following the Novak trial. Musk, like his protégé Yaxley-Lennon was careful not call for violence in either case, whilst also providing the information network that enabled the ‘protests’ to take place.

On June 9, Yaxley Lennon called on X for ‘mass protests’ at various cities across the UK with the message:

The whole of the United Kingdom is hitting the streets tonight at 7pm following yet another invader attack on our people.

It’s time.

Musk then retweeted this to his millions of followers with the comment:

Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!

This brought replies such as the following:

I bet Ireland would love their guns back!! These Muslims are fucking animals and euthanasia is the only solution.

And

Turn them into food enslave the middle east put them on crosses nuke mecca cook them on tv the end! And take ALL their shit!

And this:

Time to burn all these facilitating hotels down with their invaders in it. About time to make cuckistan unsafe for invaders

Isn’t free speech great?

This is why the Center for Combating Digital Hate (CCDH) calls Musk the ‘owner amplifier’, because there is so much more where this came from. In the wake of the Belfast disorder, the CCDH found 240 calls for violence on X in replies to posts from Musk, 1000 calls in replies Rupert Lowe and 2690 in response to Yaxley-Lennon.

As the CCDH points out: X is effectively a hate machine, in which:

Elon Musk, the platform’s owner, has again used the incident to amplify violent migrant narratives inspiring calls for violence, with little apparent consequence on the platform. The costs, however, were felt offline, as online outrage gave way to real-world intimidation, violence and disorder.

Needless to say, the world’s richest man does not like to be associated with the consequences of his hate amplification. Instead, this cowardly fraud has used his wealth to take legal action against the German public broadcaster ZDF, following a report in which the anchor claimed:

A racist mob went on a hunt for migrants. This was called for by a British right-wing extremist and tech millionaire Elon Musk.

As ZDF later admitted, the phrasing was ‘imprecise’, but that does not absolve Rocket Boy of his responsibility for helping to generate real-world violence. As the New Republic notes:

As the bedlam raged in Belfast after the stabbing—resulting in far-right rioters torching cars, buses, and even the homes of immigrants—Musk egged it on. Using X—the platform he acquired precisely for moments like these—he posted locations for groups of rioters to congregate. He elevated vile, overtly fascist and white-supremacist exhortations. When one far-right British politician called for the prosecution of officials who “placed dangerous third world savages in our communities,” Musk replied: “This is the way.”

It cannot be overstated how dangerous this is. The richest man the world has ever seen is using his vast wealth to amplify racist hatred, and destabilise UK society, and he is not acting alone. JD Vance recently described the Henry Nowak murder as a consequence of a ‘mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.’ Echoing Musk and Mosley-Farage, Vance claimed that the ‘only response’ to this ‘invasion’ was ‘righteous anger.’ Pete Hegseth used the D-Day ceremony to rant about ‘new invaders on old beaches.’

The UK is in a uniquely dangerous and even perilous situation. Years and years of anti-migrant rhetoric have now created a ‘common sense’ understanding of migration, which is confirmed every time there is a crime involving a person of colour, regardless of whether they are migrants or not.

Under the guise of free speech and addressing ‘political correctness’ or ‘wokeism’ British politicians have long since lost the shame that once led Ted Heath to sack Enoch Powell. The firewall of respectability has gone, the moral threshold is being lowered day by day, and the worst people in British society now feel emboldened and legitimized in saying the worst things - and increasingly, in acting on what they think and say.

To some extent Brexit was a product of this transformation. Brexit ushered in a new world of lies, and its architects did everything possible to create and maximise the siege mentality that made ‘controlling our borders’ the key benefit of leaving the European Union. Ten years later, immigration ‘concerns’ remain the driving force behind the popularity of Reform and Restore, and one of the main reasons why Starmer’s government is held in such contempt.

The irony is that Labour have done everything they can to appease these ‘concerns’, and brought net immigration down dramatically, whilst also introducing draconian legislation to limit access to asylum. But Britain’s fascist slide is not a mathematical problem. This why, as numbers have fallen, Reform and Restore have increasingly talked about deporting tens of thousands of people who are already here. In attempting to placate the right’s concerns, Labour have helped legitimise them.

It is telling that no cabinet minister went to Belfast to reassure the communities who had been attacked. Nor was there any Cobra meeting to highlight the far-right threat to minorities. Apart from a few verbal criticisms, the government has taken no action against the trillionaire who is using his platform as a fascist information board, and it remains to be seen whether Andy Burnham or whoever takes Starmer’s place can do it either.

There are positive indications across the country of localized resistance to the ‘raise the colours’ movement and other far-right ‘patriots’, but we need a national movement to prevent - and reverse - Britain’s fascist slide. This is not something ‘the left’ can do by itself. It needs to be broader and wider, and reach sectors of the population that the left does not usually reach. Who will organize and lead that movement? And where will it come from?

As as things currently stand, the UK remains trapped in its morbid post-Brexit trajectory, which has made the UK uniquely vulnerable to the sinister machinations of a far-right bloc with an active interest in destabilising the country, in order to bring a Trump-like political formation to power.

If that happens, no ethnic minority in the country will be safe, and we are likely to see an accelerated movement towards mass deportation and ‘remigration’ - with all the attendant horrors that these concepts involve. To prevent that dire outcome, we need to recognise the connections between the masked men in the streets and the men who are fuelling their hatred and violence and paving the way for a racist ‘war’ that will rip this country to pieces.