Harry Shukman, a British activist-researcher in his mid-twenties, has a bad conscience. This is because for over the course of a year he befriended scores of Right-wing extremists and then betrayed them by shining a light on their sordid activities and all-round creepiness. The fruit of his duplicity is a new book titled The Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right. Shukman or “Chris”, as he presented himself to his new friends, duped them into thinking that he was one of them. In reality, he was an “infiltration” operative from Hope Not Hate, an anti-racist group that, despite its name, loathes the far-Right.
The Year of the Rat is a revealing book, but not in the way it aspires to be. The extreme fringes of the British far-Right, it turns out, are, well, pretty extreme and the oleaginous assortment of oddballs, cranks and grifters Shukman meets there are racist, sexist and homophobic. Which is to say that the big revelation of the book isn’t all that revelatory. What the book reveals instead, despite its driving thesis, is the dire state of Britain’s far-Right, which, far from becoming “mainstream”, is so exotically fringe and weird that most normies wouldn’t even have heard of its various ideologues and acolytes. It also reveals the dire state of a progressive mindset that can’t seem to discriminate between Alan Partridge-sounding populists such as Nigel Farage on the one hand and mouth-frothing racists on the other.
What little drama there is in The Year of the Rat depends on the conceit that Shukman’s cover could be blown at any moment. As part of his disguise as Chris, a zip-up fleece-wearing everyman who is “concerned about demographic replacement”, Shukman grew a moustache and cut his hair short. “I wanted to get close to the British far right, find out what kind of people join, and, if possible, do what I could to disrupt their operations,” he writes.
To read Shukman’s breathless prose about Chris’s “infiltrations”, “safety protocols”, secret meetings with his “handler” Patrik Hermansson (who himself went undercover in 2016) and the many near-misses where his hidden camera is almost discovered, you could be excused for thinking that he’d breached the inner sanctum of a terrifying Mexican drugs cartel or a sword-wielding, spy-hating jihadist group. But the far-Right activists with whom Shukman ingratiates himself are more ridiculous than terrifying. People like the Basketweavers, a “far-right community” that no one has ever heard of.
According to Shukman, the Basketweavers are “a kind of clandestine discussion group” that scorns online communication and only meets in person. Indeed, Hermansson “has good reason to believe that this is no ordinary community”. It soon transpires that instead of weaving baskets, the Basketweavers trade in racist conspiracy theories, doing this in the backrooms of British pubs where they regularly meet up in small and exclusively male groups. It also transpires that the number of people who belong to the Basketweavers is tiny: around 2,000 worldwide, with “hundreds” from the UK.
Shukman devotes a whole chapter — his first — to the Basketweavers and in it we learn that once he infiltrates the group, he discovers that they are very racist and harbour an especial antipathy toward Jews. Revealingly, Shukman observes that it’s “remarkable” that the Basketweavers “have so far escaped media attention”, seemingly oblivious to the idea that no one cares very much about the Basketweavers’ racist pub chitchat.
Next Shukman goes to Tallinn, Estonia, where he infiltrates a far-Right conference organised by someone called Fróði Midjord. He runs into a host of unsavoury characters who are very racist and make little or no effort in concealing that they’re very racist, such as an American white nationalist who talks about the “capture of America by non-whites” and a Holocaust denier who insists that African-Americans should be repatriated “back” to Africa. Indeed, almost the entirety of The Year of the Rat is organised around Shukman meeting a lot of racist people no one has ever heard of and surreptitiously recording them saying racist things. It is thus quite a boring book, enlivened only by the bits where Shukman comes close to having his cover blown.
One activist who I had heard of and who Shukman met and skirted around is Paul Golding, the leader of the far-Right party Britain First and the protégé of Nick Griffin, former leader of the BNP. Britain First, Shukman explains, is no ordinary party: it pickets refugee centres with flash mobs and conducts “mosque invasions”, where its activists berate Muslims about the evils of Islam. And Golding himself is no ordinary party leader, having been found guilty of hate crimes and a terrorism offence (the latter because he refused to hand over the pin codes for his electronic devices to counter-terrorism police on re-entering the UK from Russia in 2019). “I want to understand what Paul Golding is like,” Shukman confides, with all the sincerity of a pick-up-artist who feigns interest in a woman’s point of view. In Shukman’s telling, and to no one’s surprise, Golding is a nasty piece of work: a bully and grifter who trousers party donations which he duly splurges on a 10-day holiday to Thailand.
Golding’s crew of minions, which includes a coke-head with missing teeth, isn’t much better and Shukman soon discovers, with “horror”, that many believe that the Holocaust is made up. “Here was proof that Britain First is a nasty party whose activists traffic in some of the vilest conspiracy theories,” he writes, as if relaying some dark truth he’s just brought to light. But most people who have heard of Golding know full well about the nastiness of his politics, which is why his party has so few members — no more than 40 active ones, Shukman estimates — and why it has failed so abysmally at the ballot-box; in the London mayoral election of 2024, Britain First received fewer votes than a candidate called Count Binface.
This is emblematic of a deeper problem with The Year of the Rat, which is that it’s a profoundly dishonest book. It is so, in part, because it suggests that the far-Right activists who Shukman infiltrates have a hidden agenda, when in fact only an imbecile would be surprised by Shukman’s “revelations” about the far-Right, not only because it’s so unabashed about what it believes but also because so many journalists and experts have been loudly warning us for years about how its odious beliefs — about race science and the “great replacement” — have gone mainstream.
It’s also dishonest in the sense that it attributes far more political power and cultural sway to the far-Right than it actually possesses. Not a few, he says, are “sophisticated” campaigners and “enjoy the support of American tech tycoons and Conservative policymakers”, which may well be true. But most of the characters that populate his book are the sort of people that any normal person would determinedly avoid on the street or in a pub. Shukman clearly knows this and takes no small amount of pleasure in reporting on the abject political failures, internecine squabbles and ineptitude of the sorry activists he joins and spies on. For example, when canvassing with Britain First in Finchingfield, Essex, the entire village makes it very clear that they’re not welcome. This must have heartened Shukman, but it’s a detail that doesn’t exactly flatter his thesis about a powerful and ascendant far-Right in Britain. No less dishonest is Shukman’s use of the term “far-Right”, which he uses to refer to figures as ideologically far apart as Golding and the Reform Party’s leader Nigel Farage. But because the latter has a substantial following and sounds the alarm about tens of thousands of undocumented migrants milling around in the towns and villages of Britain, he is “far-Right” and hence proof-positive that it has gone mainstream.
“It attributes far more political power and cultural sway to the far-Right than it actually possesses.”
If Shukman has a bad conscience, it’s not chiefly because he’s deceived so many people in the process of researching his book — he actually justifies deception as a necessary if regrettable tactic to get close to the far-Right, which is suspicious of outsiders, and to expose all its unpleasantness. Rather, it is because he felt morally tainted — “complicit”, as he puts it — by participating in their activism while undercover with them. On several occasions, he uses the word “grubby” to describe how this made him feel.
Shukman should feel grubby, not just because he lied to people, but because he lied for no discernible benefit. Indeed, he has not advanced the study of the far-Right one inch. He has no theory of mind of the far-Right activist and nothing of interest or originality to say about why or how people become part of its orbit, other than referencing some trite clichés about loneliness and alienation. And the revelations he discloses are scarcely earth-shattering.
In fact, Shukman, along with several other researchers who shamelessly tout their proficiency as undercover infiltrators, has likely set back the study of the far-Right, making it much harder for genuine researchers to study its members up close and to win their trust. The next time such a researcher approaches the far-Right with a research project in mind they ought to be prepared for something decidedly more earnest than the mock punch Paul Golding launched at Shukman when they first met.
