My Year Inside Britain First

HARRY SHUKMAN

For a year I was inside Britain First and observed first hand how members of the anti-immigrant activist group denied the Holocaust and had misogynist shouting matches with members of the public.

Paul Golding, leader of Britain First, takes the stage. We’re in a secret location outside Buxton, Derbyshire, where 70-odd activists have gathered in a marquee at the summer camping holiday of Britain First. The awards ceremony for the hardest-working members is now underway. “The first is for someone who joined six months ago and proved himself by showing up week after week during the local election campaign,” Paul says to the audience. “I’d like to welcome to the stage… Christopher! Everyone give him a big hand!”

I stand up, lift my fist in the air, and hear the crowd cheer. I step onto the small stage so Ashlea Simon, then the party deputy, can put a medal over my head. She and Paul shake my hand and we pose for a picture. “Well done son,” says another member, patting my back as I sit down.

Nobody in the room knows that my name is not Christopher but Harry, and I am in fact an infiltrator from HOPE not hate.

For most of 2023, I was undercover in Britain First, an aggressive and confrontational organisation that is perhaps the best-organised far-right political party in the country. I joined them as they campaigned in local elections and protested asylum seeker facilities. Guided by my colleague Patrik Hermansson, a researcher at HOPE not hate, I got so far into Britain First that in addition to receiving a top activist award, I was invited on a trip to Warsaw to attend an extremist demonstration with senior members of the party. I even went to Paul Golding’s house for dinner.

Harry Shukman with Nick Scanlon and Charlie Fox, Warsaw, November 2023. (Photo: HOPE not hate)

What I saw inside Britain First is that the image it likes to present to the world — of a non-racist, friendly party that wants to curb immigration — is a lie. In reality, Britain First is a nasty, hate-mongering organisation that divides communities and sows discord.

On paper, Britain First says it is welcoming and vehemently disputes its reputation as a racist party. In actuality, it is a party that only campaigns for white people. Political parties are provided with the electoral roll of their target wards to help them campaign. So hostile is Paul Golding to people of colour that he struck the name off anyone from the electoral roll if they had a name that sounded non-white. If a Britain First activist knocked on the door and a non-white person unexpectedly answered, we were told to excuse ourselves, remove their name from our ward list, and leave.

Golding wants to portray Britain First as a mainstream organisation but in private, he advocates for policies of mass deportation, even for people born in the UK. He says that the principles of Britain First can be distilled into three words: “Deport the lot.”

The racism of the Britain First members was continually surprising to me. I listened to conversations about how Auschwitz was “all made up”. Tony, a member who also belonged to the neo-nazi British Movement, told me how the Holocaust was a fiction. “The gas chambers? For delousing,” he said. Alex Merola, a national organiser who runs the Nationalist Newsroom podcast for Britain First, agreed. “For typhus,” he said. “That’s all it was.” Both were referring to the conspiracy theory among Holocaust deniers that the main cause of Jewish deaths in WW2 was from disease. Tony and Alex both also bragged about owning signed copies of books by David Irving, the Holocaust denier.

Tony was telling me about the absence of Prussian Blue in gas chambers when Paul, who went past, said: “Not so loud on this topic while we’re in public please.” On another occasion, activists on the battle bus passed the time by telling antisemitic jokes to each other. “What’s the difference between a pork pie and a Jew?” asked one member. “A pork pie doesn’t scream when it’s in the oven.”

Harry Shukman with leaders Paul Golding and Ashlea Simon, August 2023.

“I want this country to become a shithole”

Paul Golding has a deeply cynical view of politics. “I want this country to become a shithole,” he said to me in the pub after a day of activism. “I want this country to descend into a fucking nightmare. Because that’s the only thing that’s going to get people off their backsides.” Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, used to say something remarkably similar: “If things aren’t bad, people aren’t taking notice,” he wrote in 1963. Golding, like Mosley before him, believes that support for his organisation depends on the immiseration of ordinary Brits who, once faced with empty wallets and divided communities, will support his party.

Golding likes to project an image of popularity in social media videos, exaggerating the degree of public support his party receives. What he is less eager to show are the shouting matches he is regularly embroiled in during his campaigning. Each time I go undercover with Britain First, there is normally at least one argument with a member of the public who objects, quite reasonably, to our presence.

One particularly unpleasant encounter took place in Folkestone, near the asylum seeker accommodation facility at Napier Barracks. “You are not welcome inciting hatred,” said a woman whose house had just been leafletted by Britain First. “You need to stop filming me. Leave our streets.” Paul had his camcorder trained on this woman, talking about his democratic right to film her. He called her “darling” and she replied: “Don’t condescend me.” Other residents opened their windows and front doors to peer out at the commotion. “She supports all the migrants,” Paul shouted. “No-one’s on your side, darling! You’ve got no support.” The woman said Paul is intimidating her. She left, and Paul filmed her as she went back to her home.

Hidden camera footage at Britain First event, May 2023.

The membership of Britain First can be just as nasty. After one protest in Finchingfield, an Essex village, in August 2023, members of Britain First began shouting that they hoped a local woman — who was unreceptive to our campaign leaflets — would be raped by refugees.

“Let’s hope they fuck her up the arse,” a member named Anthony yelled. “Fucking right. If she loves them so much, let her fucking have a bit of ‘em.”

Internal discontent

There is a lot of discontent among the members of Britain First about the donations constantly being requested by Paul. Every day, it seems, there is another email berating members for not giving enough money to the organisation.

In July 2023, Paul sent three emails in three days demanding we contribute to an “urgent” fundraising target of £2,000 to buy ten high-quality camcorders. “I want to buy enough of these so that each and every Britain First local branch has one to film their weekly activities,” he wrote. We never saw those camcorders, nor were they mentioned again. That same month, Paul took his girlfriend and her son on a luxury holiday to Pattaya, Thailand.

Frustrations about donations boiled over in August during a camping weekend in the Peak District. A fight kicked off between a drunken member and Paul and his co-leader Ashlea. “You can shove that hundred quid I gave you up your arse,” this inebriated activist said, sparking a physical scuffle. The sequence of events was a little unclear and I was not present for the actual incident, only its aftermath. It seemed like some senior members of Britain First sided against Paul. One of them was Andy Frain, the party’s head of security. Frain, a career criminal and football hooligan, was sent to prison for slashing the throat of an off-duty police officer. He left the party the next day.

Paul Golding, Nick Scanlon and Lewis Youles (AKA Luke Cage) at Britain First’s Camp Britannia, August 2023.

Activism turnover was another problem plaguing Britain First. Paul drove everyone hard, contributing to a high level of churn among the membership. A typical example would be asking members to come for a day of campaigning in Kent when, several hours in, we would announce that we would also be going to canvass houses in Essex, an hour and a half’s drive away. Nobody complained to his face — they only grumbled in private, and the most deflated failed to return the following week. Behind his back, the activists disputed Paul’s approach, calling him a “slave driver” presiding over a “shitshow” of poor activist turnout.

I heard Paul talk in candid terms about his struggle with activist engagement. Around the firepit at the camping weekend, he complained that numbers were down because “people have got on with their life, people haven’t turned up”. However, this never prompted introspection that members were quitting because they were frustrated with his leadership.

Paul says there are now 20,000 members of Britain First. But he admitted in private that this number was in fact composed of members and donors. The public figure of 20,000 is deeply misleading, a cynical ploy to present his party as an active and dynamic organisation in order to siphon yet more of his members’ cash.