Lowles has spent his entire adult life organising against fascism, facing countless threats as a result. He discusses the street confrontations of the 80s, foiling a murder plot, Nazi satanists – and the urgent need for optimism and actionIn 1979, a 10-year-old Nick Lowles saw a hard-right party political broadcast. Born in Hounslow in London, he had moved to Shrewsbury when he was seven: “A very white town. There was a British Movement march soon after we moved up there.” Theirs was a “small-P political household”. His dad was a social worker, his mum worked for various charities. “She was from Mauritius, and now on the telly, the National Front were saying they were going to send people who weren’t born in Britain home in six months. I was petrified that my mum was going to get sent home.” The ambient racism of 70s and 80s Britain permeated everything. “I just remember being scared,” Lowles says. “We used to go on holiday and I tan really easily. I was frightened of coming back to school too brown.”You can’t meet terrifying politics except with politics of your own, he realised in his teens. How to Defeat the Far Right is Lowles’s memoir-cum-manual, telling the story of how Hope Not Hate, the anti-fascist campaign group, came into existence in 2004. There is no other organisation like it, in its range of actions and independence of spirit. It does a lot of data (polling and analysis) but also a lot of community organising; it infiltrates fascist spaces, online and off, to subvert their plans, and it organises counterprotests. It is connected to institutional politics, though its influence waxes and wanes – Lowles is a good friend of Gordon Brown’s, but doesn’t feel especially heeded by the current government. Continue reading...