Jeremy Green reports on a nasty development in the Cotswolds.

Every Friday and Saturday there’s a stall in the High Street in our little Cotswold town of Stroud. There are banners proclaiming “Peace, Love and Truth”. The people around the stall look like the kind of friendly hippy types that make up one of the ‘tribes’ of Stroud: brightly coloured clothes, birkenstock shoes, woolly hats and ponchos. They are handing out a newspaper, and passers-by stop to take copies and chat to them.

But there’s nothing friendly about the newspaper. It’s The Light, a free-sheet of some 20-30 pages. It’s hard to overstate how horrible it is. It contains sympathetic articles by and about figures from the traditional far right, like Anne Marie Waters of “For Britain” and “Pegida UK” – who in turn uses the paper as a platform to praise Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League.

Another regular contributor is Niall McCrae, a former lecturer involved in far right organisation Hearts of Oak, with Tommy Robinson. McCrae has co-authored pieces in The Light with Robin Tilbrook, the founder of the far right “English Democrats” party, originally known as the English National Party. There are articles in defence of Holocaust denial and supporting the convicted antisemite Graham Hart.

There’s homophobia and transphobia, and misinformation about sex education in schools. There are attacks on feminism, women’s equality, contraception and abortion rights, and the claim that there is a “war on masculinity”. There’s cheerleading for the racist mobs that have attacked migrant and refugee hostels.

And there is a relentless promotion of climate change denial and obfuscation, alongside attacks on environmentalists, ULEZ, “15 minute cities” and especially on any restrictions on car use.

It’s all lubricated with a heavy dose of “alternative health”, anti-vax misinformation, fear of technology and international organisations – especially the World Health Organisation and the United Nations, whose Agenda for Sustainable Development is a particular focus of hatred. There are ads for crystal healing, 5G radiation shields, and gold bullion, and links to far right publications and online sources.

The Light appeared at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, along with a host of other anti-vaccination groups. It fed on the fear and confusion generated by the real scientific uncertainty about the nature of the virus, and by the government’s contradictory and mixed messages about how real the threat was to the general population and the most vulnerable segments. Since then it has dug deeper into those groups who don’t trust conventional medicine and believe that they’ve been lied to – about the efficacy and safety of pharmaceuticals, or radio emissions, and so on.

Given its target market, there is a strong presence in towns with a thriving alternative scene – well-being practitioners, yoga teachers, home educators and so on. In towns across the UK, and now in Ireland, there are weekly stalls distributing the paper as well as other books and pamphlets. There is a strong presence in several towns in the South West, and the paper has been spotted in London and in towns in the North. A mob of ‘conspiraloons’ stormed a meeting of Glastonbury Town Council and then crowed that it had forced the administration – the equivalent of a parish council, with few powers – to abandon its non-existent plans for a fifteen-minute city.

The themes in the paper are picked up by an emerging street movement. There are rallies with speakers whose websites feature antisemitic material drawn from The Protocols of The Elders of Zion.

In recent weeks things have become a lot nastier. “Project Libertas”, an offshoot of the local group that hands out The Light, organised two events in Stroud – one to commemorate Hitler’s birthday, and another to promote the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion as the “Blueprint for the 20th and 21st Centuries”. The meetings were hastily cancelled after hundreds of locals declared their intention to oppose them.

The organisers issued a mealy-mouthed ‘apology’ claiming their intent had somehow been poorly communicated, and the group that hands out The Light presented a convoluted statement attempting to distance themselves from the event while emphasising the importance of being able to “challenge prevailing viewpoints” about the Nazis. But it’s a sign of the ever-closer relationship with the old-style Nazi far right.

So far, mainstream anti-racist and anti-fascist organisations don’t seem to have paid much attention to this new-variant far right. Hope Not Hate published a piece (written by our Stroud-based campaigning group) and referred to The Light and some other aspects of this phenomenon, and the 12 Rules for What podcast has also explored this in audio form and in their excellent book Post Internet Far Right.

And there does seem to be growing awareness of the threat. Groups are forming around the country in places where The Light is distributed and connections between them are starting to form. Anti-Light activists in Glastonbury organised a seminar discussing what the phenomenon is all about, why it’s harmful and how to counter it.

We hope that more anti-fascists will start to take notice. Because while it’s easy to dismiss this new movement as just a bunch of cranks who will turn out to be mostly harmless, I think that’s wrong.

They may not look like the Nazis in 1933. On the other hand, the milieu from which the Nazis emerged looked a lot like this – fringe groups in funny outfits who believed in all sorts of occultist nonsense, picking up limited numbers of votes but building their core for a more propitious time. We should be taking notice, and preparing to confront their ideas and their presence.

Jeremy Green is a Stroud-based activist.

Image: Stroud. Author: Alex Liivet from Chester, United Kingdom,  made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication