Nick Scanlon, Britain First’s London Mayoral candidate who stood against Sadiq Khan, has been captured in covert footage saying he and a former date shared hatred for certain racial groups
Britain First’s London mayoral candidate has been recorded saying he harbours “misogynism”, a racist slur against black people.
In undercover footage filmed in a bar by anti-fascist group Hope not Hate, Nick Scanlon, who ran in May against Sadiq Khan, claims he and a former fellow woman shared a racial hatred. The Britain First member said: “I’m not going to ask a woman out on a date who I’ve had sex with.
. The funny thing is, one time we were on a date and she turned around – we were in Shoreditch and there were loads of jerkbags there – and she suddenly said to me, ‘Fucking black people,’ and she said, ‘I can’t stand black people, but I can’t stand it.’ So you could say we share a hatred for fucking.
During London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s election victory speech in May, Scanlon stormed across the stage and shouted “Khan has killed London” after the Labour candidate won one million votes and came in 12th place. He is now Britain First’s regional organiser for the South East. Britain First leader Paul Golding was also filmed saying he wanted to make Britain a “bastard” in a beer garden.
“In the next 15 years, this country is going to become a lot more violent and a terrible place to live in,” he said in footage filmed ahead of this summer’s racist conspiracy-driven British riots. “The moment we’re all waiting for is approaching. I want this country to be a fucking country. I want this country to descend into a bloody nightmare because that’s the only thing that’s going to save people from their sanity.”
On another occasion, far-right activists distributing Britain First magazine, The Essex Patriot, were shot dead by a local woman who asked if she should stop spreading hate in her community. A Britain First activist was quoted as saying, “If she loves them so much, she should have a bloody piece of them.” “Maybe that’s why she wants them here.” She’d probably like to have 1,800 friends. Yes, if they tie her up and rape her, make her say something about being ‘racist.'” Havana Markings, a new film about “Undercover: Exposing the Far Right,” is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the violent riots that have scarred British communities this summer. This may be the source material for the UK riots.
Academic Harry Shukman became “Chris from Cambridgeshire” and was a regular at Britain First demonstrations and days of action in Kent and Essex, and travelled with the group to Warsaw, Poland, where he took part in an Independence Day march. Banners at the march read “Defend White Europe” and crowds chanted “Ultranationalists! Come on, come on, come on!”
“We need to let Britain First voters, donors and members know what this organisation really is,” “Some people think they’re mainstream but a little bit more right-leaning. If you analyse [Britain First’s] politics you’ll see they are very racist and aggressive organisers disguised as a legitimate party.”
Patrick Hermansson – Senior Researcher and Liaison Officer at HOPE not Hate, Shukman said: “These organisations announce one thing to the world but what they say privately can be very different. So we need to be in the room when it seems like no one is listening. “
Having nothing to do with Britain First infiltration, “Chris” has also secretly infiltrated the “intellectual” far-right through the international conference Skanza Forum in Tallinn, posing as an investor in Estonia. The connections he made at the conference led him to organizations like the Human Diversity Foundation, the far-right eugenics movement, the US-based Pioneer Fund, which had ties to Nazi Germany, and the anti-immigration party AFD (Alternative for Germany) both in Germany and in Silicon Valley.
The documentary, which will air on Channel 4 on 21 October, also follows the high-profile case of Tommy Robinson since he was allowed back on X/Twitter, and reveals how evidence from the Hope Not Hate case relates to the current contempt of court charges against him, due to be heard in court again next week. It also sees Robinson (whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) confront Hope Not Hate CEO Nick Rowles.
Shukman and Hermansson revealed the potential danger posed by far-right infiltration. “When we were gathering information for Britain First I was in the back garden of Paul Golding’s house, which was surrounded by a barbed wire fence and a locked gate,” Shukman says. “We were sitting very close together in lawn chairs. I was wearing a hidden camera and Golding just stared at this spot on my chest where the camera was located.
“I knew I was far from safe. This was a locked door within a locked door. There was nowhere to escape to. Ms Golding has already had to pay damages for assault and trespass and has been jailed for a hate crime. After a while I realised he was just absent, staring at me.”
In Warsaw, Scanlon tapped Shucman on the chest as a hidden camera recorded him. “He hit my chest, the camera, a big plastic block,” Shucman says. “I think he touched the camera.”
The infiltration of the ‘intellectual’ far-right was in some ways even more unsettling, he adds. “They don’t have a history with the BNP or the EDL or as skinheads. They wear suits and they have PhDs,” Shucman says. “They have money, power, influence and they have access to the most important people in the country. They have truly evil plans in the field of racial science and eugenics.
“It’s the intellectual fringe of the far-right. They want to influence society through ideas, not street protests. But both wings of the far-right want to block ‘foreign’ culture. There is a fundamental interest they all share.”
Hermansson served as Shukman’s commanding officer, drawing on his own experience as an undercover far-right investigator. In 2016 he spent a year undercover in the alt-right in the UK, Europe and the US as part of an investigation unrelated to Britain First. The role took him to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, where a car drove down a side street and into counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old anti-racism activist Heather Heyer.
“I was about 15 or 20 feet away,” he says. “A woman died. Dozens were injured.” Before that, I asked myself how influential the far-right actually is. Charlottesville settled that question. It showed the true impact of extremist online ideology.”
Hermanson said Charlottesville meant he was taking Shukman’s safety very seriously. “The attack itself wasn’t directed at me, but it was painful to watch and very isolating,” he said. “One of the hard things about our job is that you can’t talk about the hard things. You’re isolated. I was very conscious of that when working with Harry. “Part of my family left Poland just before World War I,” says Shucman. “We’re not culturally Jewish, but their history plays a big role in my family.”
“Those of my family who didn’t leave Poland were probably deported to the Majdanek concentration camp and sent to the gas chambers there. So many people I met in the last year are targeting Jews. This stuff never goes away, it doesn’t change much either. The symbols and flags may change a bit but the meaning behind it remains the same.”
In Undercover, to mark the centenary of the anti-fascist movement in the UK, Marking sought to explore hope rather than hate. Activist groups claim that the use of informants led to the thwarting of a plot to assassinate Labour MP Rosie Cooper in 2017, and exposed the true identity of the 1999 Soho Nail Bomber as David Copeland.
But this is the first time that a documentary film crew has been allowed to follow their work. The result is an astonishingly bold, forensic and fearless investigation into the seedy networks of the modern far-right, from street thugs to Silicon Valley, and it couldn’t be more urgent.
“This is the first time we’ve allowed a documentary film crew to follow our work,” says Nick Rowles, CEO of HOPE not Hate. “This is not just the story of our investigation, it’s the story of the HOPE not Hate people – our story.”
“We are excited to be able to bring our work to a wider audience and expose some of the far-right tactics and elements that are pervasive throughout society.
“We are excited to share our work with a wider audience, and expose some of the far right tactics and elements that have managed to foster in our society. Often these groups are shrouded in secrecy but increasingly their ideas are finding their way into the mainstream.
“Our hope is that the film inspires people to take action in their communities. Together we can stop the normalisation and rise of far-right politics, and build stronger communities where diversity is valued as a strength.”
Shukman and Hermansson say they hope the film “shows the breadth” of HOPE not Hate’s work. “But it also shows very small pieces of a bigger picture,” Hermansson says. “The UK riots this summer followed years of agitation. Anger plus conspiracy theories, online actions plus the state of our politics.
“The way politicians speak about immigration plays a role. Key figures in our mainstream parties are talking about invasions and alien cultures. It’s an escalation.” We contacted Britain First, Nick Scanlon and Paul Golding for comment.
• Undercover: Exposing the Far Right airs on Channel 4 on 21 October.
