Nick Griffin called him a “vicious old Communist and Zionist thug”, which Gerry Gable would have taken as a compliment. In Searchlight, Andy Bell wrote that he leaves behind “successful tradition of anti-fascism led by intelligence and analysis”. The most powerful tribute was written by Steve Silver, once Gable’s successor alongside Nick Lowles. Silver said that Gable was “the most tenacious post-war anti-fascist Britain ever produced”. His piece describes Gable’s willingness to break the law (the 1962 burglary of David Irving’s flat), and also to work within it while courting legislators (leading to the War Crimes Act 1991), his running of moles (most famously Ray Hill), his appeal to groups of young Jews who were hazy perhaps about the left and about Israel but willing to fight antisemites.

Gable could place a story with TV journalists who had a mass audience. Imagine that, regular news pieces exposing the latest crimes of the far right, and think how far the right would need to go these days before any significant outlet would think of reporting them negatively. But, as an outsider who never saw those plans at first hand, I always felt this came at a price, a playing along with what cynical people considered the rules of the game.

I started writing for Searchlight in the mid-90s. As Silver said, Gable wasn’t too fussy about the politics of people he signed up, he needed to know that we would give our time and not waste his, he didn’t mind that I was in the SWP. I wrote pieces for them taking down anti-refugee talking points. I only met Gable a couple of times, and remember just one line of his, which he’d probably told youngsters a hundred times before. “Anti-fascism only ever gets going when it’s too late”, meaning that a few well-aimed blows can derail a movement of hundreds of people. If you wait till anti-fascist ranks are in the thousands, then you’ll get there when the enemy too has grown and they are much harder to weaken.

Gable wasn’t prissy about methods, what mattered to him was getting a job done. That emphasis on results served to conceal a recurring politics. I’ve seen anti-fascists deprecating Gable’s work, calling the young left-wingers who wrote for his magazine (many of whom now have poorly-paid jobs in the unions) “Zionist activists”, as if with that single word you can solve a political problem. Gable was typical of his generation of pre-56 Jewish CPers – the kind of people to whom it was a point of pride that the Soviet Union was the first state to recognize Israel. They saw the latter as simply a Jewish state, no different from Britain or the US. Palestinians didn’t count for much in this reckoning. Others in that generation left the Party as the news filtered around of the antisemitic Doctor’s Plot launched by Stalin. Gable didn’t leave, I suspect because in his view of the world Jews were losing everywhere, including Eastern Europe. If the choice was between a dictatorial future in which the despot killed 6 million, or one in which he murdered only a few dozen people, the latter was worth fighting for, lying for if need be.

I didn’t like the attempts to reinvent Searchlight after 9/11 as an anti-extremist magazine. I didn’t agree with the politics, nor did Gable have any contacts within Islamist circles – the idea produced few friends, stored up enemies. At the time of the UAF-Searchlight split, I argued for détente. I set up a meeting between the two sides, chaired by Paul Mackney of NATFHE, who had known and been a huge admirer of Gable’s mentor, Maurice Ludmer a CP anti-racist and trade unionist in Birmingham. Everyone promised to work together, but the split continued.

There’s absolutely no reason why anyone who has been watching Israel’s war on Gaza should look at that and think there’s any healthy left possible except through resisting the genocide. Israel’s rulers are a part of the global far right – they’re a face of the authoritarian drift, along with the banning of Palestinian Action, the treating of the prisoners as terrorists. Gable didn’t get, didn’t want to understand, any of that.

But you can’t write a good history of anti-fascism in Britain since 1945 without including Searchlight. People shouldn’t pretend he didn’t exist, should treat that whole tradition as somehow apart from us. Anti-fascists in the 1990s read the magazine, were shaped by it, all of us were – AFA, ANL, YRE, ARA – whatever tradition we belonged to.

[TW: discussion of intimate violence].

Friends have asked me how my book on Forgiveness relates to Sarah Schulman’s book, ‘Conflict is not Abuse’. They don’t overlap much. We both characterise moralism as destructive; we’re both against genocide. We both criticise the dominant ways of thinking about harm, we do so from different perspectives.

In relation to personal suffering, the old liberal consensus held that: (1) harm is real, (2) it is caused by individuals rather than social structures, (3) conflicts should be resolved in ways likely to help the victim, (4) that victim needs to pardon their abuser, (5) the reason to do so this is to protect the victim’s own long-term mental wellbeing, (6) these principles apply to individual conflicts, not societies (save for South Africa or black people in the US, when suddenly they apply again).

Both Schulman and I reject point 2, but for neither of us is it the central problem. My book mainly challenges points 4, 5 and 6. Schulman focuses on point 1.

Her narrative centres on domestic violence within lesbian communities. It queers our assumption of the normal. When people encounter interpersonal violence in heterosexual relationships, and apply step 3 above, a way to understand what happened is to look for an abuser. It’s often a wise starting assumption to assume that it’s the man’s fault. Schulman shares the activist shorthand that you should “believe the woman”. Her next point is that, whatever insight that approach delivers when dealing with straight relationships, it is useless in resolving anything when the relationship of conflict involves two women.

At times, Schulman promises to criticise society when it underestimates the harm done by abuse, and to be no less hostile when people overstate the harm done by mere inter-personal conflict. But, almost all the examples she gives of shoddy thinking are instances of the second and not the first of these problems. Similarly, her subtitle (“Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair”) speaks only of the dangers of overstating harm, not of the risks of minimising it.

Life is conflict, Schulman writes (I agree). Two people flirting are two people in conflict (I agree there too). Allowing the state to adjudicate conflicts is destructive (for that one, I’ll give her all the yeses in the world).

Where conflict approaches harm, Schulman’s answers are that a person caught up in a destructive relationship needs, in seemingly every case, to remain in a relationship with the other. She is hostile to the idea that a person can ever thrive by ending a relationship (“Refusing to speak to someone without terms for repair is a strange childish act of destruction from which nothing can be won”). To be fair to Schulman. following the passage I have just quoted, she goes on to suggest that repair might not mean exactly restoration. What is good for people could be them talking, not necessarily them continuing to live together. But, in the book as a whole, she is much more consistent in insisting that relationships should endure than she is in accepting that sometimes they need to be diminished or ended.

Complete abandonment, she says, is cruelty, “Shunning, an active form of harassment, is never useful in resolving problems”.

Schulman also shows a disturbing tendency to prove the injustice of departures by citing instances of her own life. This disempowers the reader, who wasn’t there when that particular friend abandoned Schulman and is expected to take the author on trust when she writes that the breakdown was unfair and unwarranted. I can’t have been the only reader wondering what complex story stood behind these bland assurances (“if we had spoken on the phone…”). What would the lyrices of West End Girl be, if the album had been written not by Lily Allen but by David Harbour?

Shunning, Schulman writes, is arbitrary. Shunning prevents the departee from learning necessary valuable lessons as to how their own behaviour caused the other person to do wrong. The better life is, in her book, a continuing relationship with the person the other wishes to leave. In this account, all departures are bad, both the trivial and the extremely-not – even the victim of sustained physical violence, “shunning” the domestic home under threat of death.

Schulman’s final chapter is called “The duty of repair”. Every relationship has around it a community of friends. Their job is to support both parties and help them repair whatever damage the two people have caused themselves.

It is this latter argument which I think has resonated, almost disengaged from the rest of the book, in activist communities. I’m told that there are even small leftist groups who based their policies for harm reduction on a reading of Schulman’s book. If so, I bet you anything that it’s this final section which landed with them.

People feel that it is the natural corollary of abolitionist politics. If we are going to ignore the cops in our heads, if we are going to accept the possibility that people will cause harm even in political spaces dedicated to social change, and if we are not going to drive people out of the movement prematurely – then shouldn’t we be helping all our people, even the ones who’ve done harm?

One response might be the following: we should listen carefully to people who report violence. We should reflect on what they tell us. We may also need to listen to people accused of wrong, although that is likely to be a more shallow listening than they would like. We may listen to them to make sure that this is not one of those rare cases where an allegation is wholly fictitious or made (as Schulman insists they often are) by a violent person to hide their own destructive behaviour. We should decide, quickly and accurately, what happened. With that knowledge, a community of friends or activists might say to a person accused of violence that we are happy to treat them as a full member of our community, so long as they admit what happened, apologise, and take steps to repair the harm tehyt’ve caused.

Lots of different activist communities adopt the approach I’ve just set out. It is here that Schulman’s duty of repair bites. She is saying that the community must get involved, must supervise the accused person, and guide them to self-change. I am not necessarily opposed to this part of her argument, but it is worth spelling out its costs, and here are just two:

Assuming that the violence occurred in a heterosexual setting – the duty would mean, in many cases, a much more intense project of looking after and healing the accused man than there ever was of listening to the woman. It takes time and emotional labour to get a perpetrator past the wounds of their youth. That’s often a much harder process than telling a victim that the person who hurt them has been working hard on their issue. Doesn’t this duty of repair reward people with rampant and destructive egos – they’re the ones who get the most attention afterwards?

And what do you do if the accused isn’t willing to see himself as a perpreator; what it he has underlying problems of a damaged family background or alcohol or dug addiction, which is unwilling to admit or change? Is the community of friends allowed (contra Schulman) to say that some people are too trouble to fix?

I am not posing these problems as unanswerable. Really, all I’m trying to do is explain why the large majority of reviews of Schulman’s book are positive and also why it is remembered unfondly in activist circles. They are just some of the reasons why, in my book, I base my critique of liberalism on different grounds to Schulman’s.

The SWP has gone public with its plans to remove four people from its central committee: Alex Callinicos, Charlie Kimber, Weyman Bennett and Mark Thomas. Each were in the SWP leadership in 2013, the year in which that organisation tried to cover up two complaints of rape and sexual harassment. Callinicos formulated the SWP leadership’s justification for their decision to keep Martin Smith (“Comrade Delta”) in post. He wrote the article, ‘Is Leninism Finished?’ which told SWP cadres how to resist the complaints – by saying that the real issue was not what the women had suffered (“a difficult disciplinary case”) but the willingness of SWP dissidents to vote against their own leadership (“Two factions were formed in the lead-up to the conference to fight for changes in the model of democratic centralism …that the SWP has developed”). Kimber was National Secretary of the SWP that year. Weyman Bennett hinted that the women complainants were in the pay of the secret state (“I’m not saying it is MI5, but it is suspicious that someone would come forward so late”).

In the same document, the organization acknowledges that the reason for removing the four was “the legacy of the 2013 crisis, when the SWP failed two women who raised complaints of sexual misconduct”. The party talks of that legacy as “something that will pose a challenge in the year ahead”. There are at least two ways in which the crisis is likely to have an impact over the next year: members of the SWP are likely to stand for elected posts in Your Party in February 2026. If the SWP nominates such of its members as Amy Leather – who spoke on behalf of the SWP at the recent Your Party conference – other socialists will remember what those veterans did during the SWP’s crisis year. In Leather’s case, she was another SWP CC member and supporter of the cover-up. She was also more importantly, on the Disputes Panel tasked with investigating the complaint, and asked one of the questions which became notorious in 2013 (In relation to allegations of plying women with drink as a prelude to pestering them for sex, she asked: “Don’t you think Martin is just generous? Whenever I go out for a coffee with Martin, he always buys me coffee.”)

Further, in July 2026, Ebb Books are going to be publishing the book on the left, which is based on the testimony of more than 50 people who suffered in 2013, have described how they were effected, and how deeply the problems went within the party. I hope that the book’s readership will include many people who joined the SWP after 2013. They are entitled to know what the people around them did when their party was in crisis mode.

Here, though, I’m going to focus on the book on the right, which will also come into print in summer 2026. While that wasn’t written with the SWP in mind, it is trying to formulate a general answer to such questions as “Should the left try to forgive? When has a wrong-doer changed enough so that it is good politics to forgive them?” And those are exactly the questions which people will be asking next year. The book’s argument, put as succinctly as I can, is that whether you’re talking about a person, a party, or a whole society the rules should be the same. The moment at which it is sensible to start talking about forgiving people is after a revolution. In the case of a large society, I’m hoping that’s easy to visualise. In the case of two people and a complaint of interpersonal violence, that transformation might mean:

-the perpetrator admitting they were wrong,

-them spelling out exactly how they were mistaken,

-them promising not do anything similar again, and

-them doing all they can to lower themselves and lift up the victim (“reparation”) so that they have reversed the original dynamics of power and powerlessness inside which they committed the original wrong.

(One further complication; the only person who can forgive an interpersonal wrong is its victim. For anyone else watching, the issue isn’t so much whether we should forgive but more like – when does the time come when it’s working asking the victim what she thinks? For most of the past decade, we haven’t been remotely close to it).

I didn’t draw up those tests for the sake of the SWP, who get no direct mention in my Forgiveness book, but for all the world’s wrong-doers. They would apply just as well to a repentant fascist, an apologetic cop, to a boss after the workers have taken power.

From that perspective, the SWP has published an apology. The party is sacking the worst of its former leaders. On the minus side, the apology was over a decade late, and one of the two women affected declined to accept it. And, while removing Kimber and Callinicos, the SWP proposes to keep in place as its branch secretaries and as members of its National Committee the generation of people who were the leadership’s first line of defence in 2013 – the hundreds of local Amy Leathers.

Still, overall, that is actually quite a lot of progress. In terms of the list I’ve set out, the crucial omission is the second of those four points. The reason a perpetrator needs to admit what they did wrong is that without this information an apology rings hollow, and they seem unconvincing when they say it won’t happen again. Without insight, its hard to believe the contrition or any subsequent act of reparation.

The SWP still refuses to say anywhere what mistakes the organisation made in 2013. Where did the faults start? What caused them? The SWP’s 2024 apology was written without consultation with the two women. Former oppositionists had to show it, ourselves, to one of them – the SWP having made no attempt to speak to either woman. The apology says, “We were wrong in how we responded to the two cases”, how were you wrong? “The process we had in place at that time was entirely inadequate”, how was it inadequate? The SWP is willing to admit to the vaguest and most weightless of things – error – but can’t say what people did, or who was affected by their actions, or why they were so destructive.

Of the hundreds of oppositionists who were humiliated, threatened with violence, spat on, lied about, or had to watch in horror as the SWP tried to drive them out of the labour movement – to which of them is the party willing to admit it did wrong?

The same SWP document urges its members to show “zero tolerance to defensiveness”. No-one’s arguing that they should defend anything. People are saying – it’s time to end the years of bureaucratic evasions. Now tell the truth – give us your best version of the story. Tell us honestly what you did wrong.

This Saturday and Sunday, delegates will be gathering at Liverpool ACC’s conference centre to discuss the founding of a new party. Four months ago, Zarah Sultana announced the formation of Your Party declaring, “We’re not an island of strangers.” By the end of August, 800,000 people had joined a contact list. Things have gone badly since then, with each of the two potential leaders, Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn, threatening their opponent with legal action. Each sits in Parliament as members of a six-strong contingent of MPs, the Independent Alliance. In the summer, all of those MPs were expected to join the new party. As of today, two have resigned, Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed – more would be no surprise. When critics say this weekend’s conference is make a break for Your Party – they’re right.

That said, I’m an optimist. As a member of Islington Community Independents, one of two nascent Your Party group in our constituency, I know quite a few people who have been sortitioned and will be there. Listening to them as conference comes closer my best guess is that Your Party will survive.

The task facing delegates this weekend is to find a way of working together across certain divides. On social media, the issues which have cleaved Zarah Sultana and other Your Party MPs apart have been the same ones which have split the left so often since the Brexit referendum: renters versus homeowners, support for open borders, whether your support for trans rights extends so far as to adopting policies that might resist the present backlash. Those are longstanding and generational dividing lines. But what outsiders don’t see about the left is the thousands of organisations that just get on. We find ways to co-operate across those fault lines. Trade unions, housing campaigns, anti-war and anti-racist groups have a very long tradition of grasping the principled position which keeps everyone you need in the room.

There are moments when unity is harder. One of them is where an organisation has a leadership contest. Choosing between rival candidates means thinking which of their platforms suit you better (although one of the tragedies of the Sultana/Corbyn conflict is how unwilling each has been to spell out their differences).

There are also time when unity is easier. Left politics works when people are involved in practical task, organising a protest, building the sinews of a party. If you want to persuade someone to take more left-wing positions on these key questions, it is far easier to do so if you are talking to them in action – if you are binding over some kind of joing activity – rather than looking to build an audience online.

Eighty years ago, George Orwell’s Animal Farm put the point well. What everyone remembers about the book is the part played by the leaders of the revolt, Snowball and Napoleon. Of the two leaders, Snowball is there from the start, but he is undermined by his rival Napoleon, who exiles him then turns him into a symbol of all that the animals are still fighting against. At the end of the novel, Napoleon and his allies have won. They sit down again with their humans; they’ve become the enemy they once fought. There is however, in the same book, a path not taken. Its representative is Boxer, the cart-horse, who never falters in face of the challenge of building the farm. Set any task, he works through it. That instinct doesn’t always do Boxer much good, but the one moment of real tragedy in the novel comes when Boxer dies. Readers care for him because we’ve all met people like that in real life. We know that any cause is likely to attract around itself people who give to the movement and people who take. And, in any healthy movement, it’s the former who predominate.

The reason why the last four months have been so toxic in Your Party is, through all that time, there has been an undeclared contest between the two camps around Corbyn and Sultana. The allies of the two potential leaders can argue as long as they back about which one of them is Snowball and which Napoleon, I doubt most members of the party care. They want us to build a party, to find an audience for it, to persuade other people that socialiusm could work.

(Incidentally, while the press have been desperate to explain the clashes in terms of the bad faith of far-left groups, very few – FRFI is the one exception – have been playing a destructive role. Those who’ve never seen the SWP in an election alliance would be astonished at quite how willing they are to play the role of uncritical backers of whoever wins the Your Party leadership. And the same is true of Counterfire, the Communist Party, etc. You need to go quite a long way down the list before you meet anyone who notices what positions YP adopts or cares about the party’s politics).

Since the summer, very few Your Party groups have pressed on with practical tasks of organising: getting their groups registered with the Electoral Commission, interviewing candidates for next year’s local elections, putting them to a public vote. They have had precious little direction from the people around either candidates. Each camp has, in reality, played down the task of establishing local groups, postponing it to the future. They’ve concentrated instead on the factional struggle and leaking their version of the conflict to the press.

In a number of towns and cities, local activists have ignored the leadership contest and pressed on with local organising. Where people have done that – as we have in Islington, where we have slate of candidates, just waiting to go to a popular vote – we’ve enjoyed the experience. Activists who used to be in the Labour Party, the Greens, or come from far left backgrounds, along with many others who’ve never been involved in politics before, have forged a practical understanding. We are the people who’ll be at Liverpool; we need to raise our voices. If we can use the event to relegate both sets of egos, Your Party will flourish.

West Runton punks, 1979 – Syd Shelton

I’ve held back from commenting on the Robinson march; I needed some time to process this new period we’re in. For a long time, the right has been able to out-mobilise anti-racist in Brexit voting areas (Rotherham, Nuneaton), but we continued to out-organise them in the university towns. This year, Britain First swatted away liberal and left protests in Manchester. In central London Robinson outnumbered the left by 10-1. If we can’t win in the big cities, what chance have we got?

For 30 years, I’ve believed that if the left just matched up our organisations to our level of support in the community, there would always be more of us than them. We can still achieve that against the sideshows, the losers of Homeland, the Nick Tenconi grift, but against the right organising as a social movement, against Robinson, that moment is passed. There is no organising trick that will bring back out control of the streets. Better leaflets which address the fascist campaigns for what they are not rather than what they were 50 years ago would help; renaming Stand Up to Racism, dumping the control-freakery, wrapping in Hope not Hate to a new coalition – all these would be welcome. But they changes would be minimal compared to the scale of the threat. Against a six-figure movement they won’t make a dent.

Anti-fascists need to find vast new reserves of energy, located outside the sphere of what we consider “politics”. The model, now more than ever, is Rock Against Racism. But calling for a strategy and making it real are such a huge distance apart. RAR did the trick because it was a cultural moment, because it connected to an art form (music) which turned young people into a collective. The kids of the 70s listened to the same songs, watched the same shows, were willing to fight for the utopian openness of new kinds of dound. When the stakes were so high – the papers full of anti-migrants, the Front on the verge of winning elections, schools and football grounds ringing with racist chants, people themselves had to (and did!) find a way to fight back.

It doesn’t help that anti-fascist have spent 50 years forgetting how RAR worked, lying to ourselves that the smaller, easier to repeat, better tacked on to the Leninist party form, more familair leafletting exercise which came afterwards, the Anti-Nazi League, was the secret to anti-fascism’s success.

But really, this is a much smaller problem than the much greater narrowing of the left which has taken place over the same time since – the vanishing of feminism out of our publications with its bold generous vision of transforming everyday life, the loss of interest in music, art, culture. Instead of Reclaiming the Streets, left discourse has shrunk to a following of celebrities and our desperation that they will form parties which might lead us. Culture has lost interest in us as we have ceased speaking to it.

Deeper still, too is the still inadequately phenomenon of the smart phone and its take over of day to day life, the technologies too which come with it, the disappearance of reading, of argument, of a concern with the truth. How are you supposed to talk down your racist uncle if the only person he’ll listen to it’s the AI on his Android, with its smooth reassurances that your aunt deserved everything he did to her? How can you defeat sexism and racism when the platforms are promoting them, making us seem the embarassing past? How are any of us supposed to fight the attention economy and the nest with which it cocoons our enemy – sending their cadres soft porn, pictures of crowds singing Allah is a Pedo. Swipe one way to support Reform, swipe the other and you can donate to Tommy’s this week cocaine fund.

And that’s before I get to America, the collapse of the left there, the sending of the National Guard into the cities, the elevation of Charlie Kirk to martyr status. Our society and economy are just as run by Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Nvidia as theirs. London could no more go its own way from Washington than could Tulsa. On any medium term – without political innovation so fast that you’d whip your neck seeking it – we’re every bit as doomed here as Socialist Vienna was in 1934 or 1938.

There is no alternative to change, but it must go deeper than the groups acknowledge. You need to do things differently, me too, and all of us. We need to see the causes of our crisis as well as our symptoms. Match our movements to the scale of the problem we’re facing. Shift to culture, take in the whole of the problem we’re against and resist with what we can. And be honest with ourselves. We’ve had 50 years in which things have been relatively easy and from here on it’ll be hard.

The picture was taken on Friday, it’s the last photograph of me in the chemo ward at UCLH. I’m delighted to share the news that, after six months, I’m on my final cycle. The last round of drugs still need to wash through me but I’ve been running a marathon and this is mile 25. I may be tired, fed up, desperate for it to stop – but I’m reaching the end.

The worst of it was about 4 weeks ago. For some time, I’ve been suffering from neuropathy, a kind of damage to your nerves. Doctors and nurses ask “Are you suffering from pins and needles?” and that really doesn’t convey the half of it. On good nights, I lie in bed, my nerves jangling like a set of keys. In the morning, I wake and I go to the gym and my hands are clawed shut. Most days, I get neuropathy in my nose and lips. When the Roman Emperor Justinian lost his throne, his captor chopped off his nose to humiliate him. It feels as if mine too has been sliced off, then salt poured on the broken skin

Sometimes – I could be walking through the city, in a crowd – I get neuropathy in the skin around my eyes. I stand there for long minutes, waiting to get my sight back.

The worst was four weeks when it spread to my mouth. For days, it was as if some torturer-antagonist was burning my jawbone with an oxyacetaline torch. The hospital recommended I drink salt water. “Just a placebo,” the consultant told me breezily at our next appointment.

But, I insist, I’ve been lucky. Many people don’t finish the 6 months; I will. Apart from the neuropathy, I’ve not been in pain or nauseous. I probably will still get numbness and fatigue for more months to come; the consultant insists that since the pain in my eyes and jaws has not been continuous, I probably won’t suffer it in future.

I still have surgery to go through, to reverse my ileostomy. Then tests to see if the cancer has come back. So far, all of that’s been positive.

People associate cancer with dying; we carry our memory of the time – not so long ago – when every diagnosis was a death sentence. Honestly, it’s a relief to have consider the prospect and to have faced it with equanimity. Maybe I could because he risk was still abstract.

What’s annoyed me more was the uncertainty – there’s are three possibilities from here – a version of the future in which I get 18 months of fatigue, am then healed, and live to the same age I was always heading to. There’s a second version in which the cancer some back next year and I end up being 3-4 years from diagnosis to death. There’s also a further version in which I get longer from here than the worst but not as long as the best. What bothered me most was that feeling that I didn’t know, and might know for ages, which hand I’d been dealt. I still don’t know, not odds. That’s an uncertainty I’ll just have to live with.

Maybe the disease has given me something of a Samson complex. Again, I can’t unwill that. And yes – these things are connected – I’m writing more than I was 18 months ago, but that’s because I was then working 40+ hours a week in a job which gave me the false impression that I had more energy, more ability to spot connections that anyone around me – except, of course, for the barristers on the other side. Take all that labour away and writing’s the obvious way of using up that some of my new spare time to good effect. In work terms, I’m doing 90% less than I was when I was altogether well; the writing I do now is more public. I’m often in bed for 22 or 23 hours a day; if I give the impression of energy, don’t believe the hype.

I have friends and family with cancer in a far later stage than I do. I have had people I’ve loved who’ve died of those conditions. You, dear reader, must have people in the same position as them. Guard your love for those at a later stage, me I’m looking forward to recovery.

All of us on the left are still coming to terms with the numbers of people that Tommy Robinson brought to central London this weekend.

At the most surface observation, this didn’t seem to be very different from Robinson’s mobilisations; his fans assembled at Blackfriars then marched north singing “Keir Starmer’s a wanker”. On reaching Whitehall, they listened to B-list celebrities: Carl Benjmain the Gamergater whose career highpoint was winning 3,000 votes as his party came sixth in the south-west at the 2019 Euro elections, and the actor Lawrence Fox whose biggest claim to fame is still that he was once the sidekick in ITV’s detective series Lewis.

But numbers change a great deal; at Cable Street, the British Union of Fascists turned out between 2,000 and 6,000 supporters. (Liberty quoted the lower figures, the Times the higher). In the 1970s, the National Front’s biggest demonstrations were its annual Remembrance Day parades, the turnout at them never crossed 10,000. Tommy Robinson was already responsible for the largest march in British far right history: the 35,000 people who turned out to hear him in July 2024, afterwards filling all sides of Trafalgar Square. This time, his turnout was several times larger.

This weekend’s protest saw between 110,000 and 150,000 marching behind Robinson. His event ended with his drunk supporters urinating in the streets, fighting with the police, breaking into the grounds at St Thomas’s hospital, presumably with the intention of driving out the Asian doctors who work there. They kettled anti-racist demonstrators and repeatedly threatened to attack them.

A month ago, I warned that Britain’s largest anti-fascist organisation was careless about safety, outnumbered, and leading its members into conflicts they were likely to lose. The left, I warned, “relies increasingly on the police to guarantee its members’ safety.” We avoided that disaster this weekend – barely – if the movement keeps on making the same mistakes, we will not keep on avoiding it.

How was Robinson able to build such a large event? His march took place just two days after the killing of US far-right activist Charlie Kirk, whose death Robinson blamed on antifascists, causing him to demand punitive violence against the left (“We don’t hate them enough”). The Kirk story wasn’t just news in the States, it led broadcasts here too. In the week before Robinson’s protests, you could see commuters on the London staring at the images on their phones. In my son’s school, another pupil pulled him aside, saying, “Watch this,” he said, and showed him a clip of Kirk’s casket. Kirk’s family, Trump and JD Vance have been demanding great acts of purging violence against the left, so that the right’s martyr could be avenged. People heard that message here too. “Charlie stood for Britain,” Robinson claimed. A group of his supporters took that message seriously, bringing photographs of Kirk on the march, large, framed in black, waving them at their fellow marchers like religious demonstrators in a different age, petitioning the Tsar. Tommy promised that “A million Brits” would honour Kirk’s memory by attending Robinson’s march.

Other dynamics helped too: through this summer, the far right have been displaying flags, and Reform and the Tories have encouraged them – Labour too. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper expressed her support for that campaign, telling the far right to hang flags of St George “anywhere” they liked.

Through August, Keir Starmer was posting his support on Twitter for the racists demonstrating outside refugee hotels. He spoke of immigration as a conspiracy against Britain, matter of “criminal people-smuggling gangs”. “If you come here illegally on a small boat, you will face return.” He didn’t explain why people come to Britain, what they are fleeing, or how much people here take the right to travel for granted. Instead, he tried to present Labour as the party of repression, “Illegal migration is a business, run by organised criminal gangs leading hundreds of people to their death in the Channel. My government is putting an end to this vile trade.” After Robinson’s march this weekend, and under a vast weight of condemnation, Starmer has briefly tacked back. But the damage has already been done.

Praised by the press, facing only a minimum challenge on the streets, the right has spent this summer pressing on, the success of the local mobilisations drawing people into what’s now a national protest movement. And, by taking people on its marches, familiarising them with the drinking, its chants, the right seeks to make them cadres in its movement, give the resolve to their racism, make them battle-hardened.

Some friends seem to expect more Robinson protests shortly, seem to be waiting got him to call more and more protests, try to force some conflict with the state. They assume that his movement will continue at this level, grow, become more pervasive. Richard Seymour’s take stikes me as a likelier prediction: “Tommy Robinson cleans up on the streets, and Nigel Farage cashes in at the ballot box.”

For a considerable time, Robinson’s movement has been making flat progress. Fifteen years ago, he was the leader of Britain’s largest racist street campaign. Eight years ago, Robinson sought to reinvent himself as a citizen journalist, using Youtube and Twitter to promote films warning of Islam’s war against the West; for which Canadian website Rebel News paid him around £5,000 a month.

Other people have led this year’s street protests. The campaign against hotels housing refugees rose independently of him. The largest protest – at Epping – reached its peak on 18 July, with up to 2,000 people participating. Robinson told his followers to join, “I’m coming to Epping next Sunday ladies and bringing thousands more with me.” He later deleted that email. Rather than recruit more supporters, Robinson’s on-off endorsement diminished the movement. The following weekend, there was another far-right protest but numbers were a sixth of what they’d been.

As for the journalism, his audience wants him to centre himself in significant news stories, but how is he supposed to do that while partying in Ayia Napa, Tenerife and Nassau? Over the past year, despite serving jail time for contempt and making countless financial appeals, he has increased his number of Twitter followers by just a fifth. Even the hapless Kemi Badenoch has grown her online audience faster.

Robinson doesn’t have a political vision, a plan to take on the state. When he started up as a right-wing activist, he deliberately made himself available to international patrons in the global anti-Islamic movement. Those patrons aren’t organising any more, nowhere else in the world is there a far right street movement that is operating at a bigger scale than him and from which he could sensbibly learn. He had made himself the king of a movement-style which no-one else is operating. All the pressure of life are likely to lead him back to the grift.

The general pattern in recent years has been for street movements on the right to emerge and flourish briefly, to leave their mark by openinh up the space for wider political forces, the latter, not the streets, have been the beneficiary. The English Defence League helped to create a mood whose victor was UKIP. The same then happened in Germany, where street protests by Pegida gave birth not to a viable street movement, but to an electoral alliance of neo-liberals and nationals, the AfD.

The new force on the British right is Reform, ahead in the polls and buoyed by the support of a satellite TV station, GB News. Unless, Robinson is able to call sustained street protests, with a frequency he’s not sustained in over a decade, probably it’s Reform, not him who’ll be the winner out of their rivalry. In the war of the content providers, certainly, GB News will defeat Robinson. It broadcasts 24/7, in contrast to Robinson who can offer his supporters in a good week maybe 5-10 minutes of fresh content. Similarly, Farage has a much more serious strategy; he is ahead in the opinion polls and likely to form our next government.

Look at how quickly Reform responded on Monday, announcing the recruitment of Danny Kruger. All this mood of desire for far-right politics, Farage was saying – it all has a natural home, in his party, in its plans for government. This is the what Robinson’s numbers open up, a further stage of high politics moving to the right.

While as for Robinson, what he will do next is unclear – wait another year before his next protest?

Through the last decade, the consecutive emergence of street movements and then electoral parties has tended to benefit the non-fascist right the most – Robinson, with his disdain for state policy is already a step away from fascism. Farage stands even further away from fascism: committed to the electoral path, bereft of any open links to a street movement, hostile even to seemingly friendly voices such as Musk urging greater militancy on him.

But, when we think about the future coming to us after the next election in four years’ time, it would be a mistake to think the worst possibility is only a period of far-right government. Among the conference guests welcomed with a standing ovation to Reform’s annual conference, was Lucy Connolly, who at the start of last summer’s race riots had tweeted that protesters should “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards.” That party may disavow violence, but it does so increasingly sporadically.

The dominant politics of our moment – expressed in Charlie Kirk’s life, the responses to his death, and in the politics which are dominating on both sides of the Atlantic – is that which Robert Paxton once called the “first stage” of fascism: a time marked by a mass revulsion with democracy, by the emergence of militia parties, by nihilism, macho culture, conformism and the policing of people’s lives through shame. It didn’t produce fascism, exactly, rather it was the release of the energy which subsequent fascist parties were able to shape and tighten and form to power their own projects.

If we think of Reform as the likeliest beneficiary of Robinson’s growth, then we need to bear in mind that Farage isn’t the same figure he was in 2016; he is rather Trump’s mirror. And the US has radicalised since his first term – Trump has ruled without Congress, sent troops to LA and Washington, is presiding this week over the next stage of the Gazan genocide. A successful Reform party would emulate Trump not as he was in 2016 but now.

For 12 years, I have been warning that our anti-fascist leaders are inadequate to the task they have set themselves, uninterested in how the right is changing, failing to innovate and being slowly but steadily out-organised by an enemy they lack the skill to defeat. But this isn’t a moment to repeat that critique, any readers of mine will know it already. I’ll try to end instead with some, disconnected, signs of hope:

-Even before last weekend’s events, anti-fascists in London were meeting and trying to organise a new kind of anti-fascist movement, not to replace SutR, but to draw together the very large numbers of people who want a broader turn;

-After weeks of criticism, for trying to economise a movement against sexual predators, SutR did belatedly execute one of its unacknowledged turns: they’ve organised letters around the issue, called women’s meetings, put women at the front of their protests. It’s not a coincidence that their protest felt younger and livelier in consequence;

-There has been no shortage at all of labour movement figures since Saturday calling for new tactics and new organisational forms.

Those measures aren’t on the scale we need – they aren’t the generational overturning, they aren’t the old guard letting go. But they’re something.

Personally, I’ll be doing the politics I’ve committed myself to ever since the Islington protest – working with local groups in an area which is being targeted by the far right. It will be much harder to win locally with Robinson on the rise. But there’s no way to isolate the right at the level of the state, unless we do it in civil society too.

We’re on day three of the response to the killing. Obviously, the most important analysis/commentry is coming from the States, but it’s worth looking at a couple of UK sources too, to see how they’ve engaged with the story.

For the first 24 hours after Kirk died, the dominant approach on the US right was to assume that Kirk’s murderer must be some kind of leftist, after all Trump has been warning for years that there exists an invisible but real movement of up to a million US anarchists or “antifa” who, as part of their pact with the Democrats, are planning at any moment to launch a civil war. Kirk was on the right, who could wish harm for him other than a leftist? Prominent Twitter Trump fans such as Laura Loomer (“The best way President Trump can reinforce Charlie’s legacy is by cracking down on the Left with the full force of the government Every single left wing group that funds violent protests needs to be shut down.”) and Elon Musk (“if they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die”) called for the banning of all liberalorganisations, and mass violence against Democrats and all to their left.

From late on Thursday evening, you started to hear the first right-wing voices cautioning against those who wanted to make it the right’s Reichstag fire moment – this whole approach, they pointed out, rested on the assumption that the killer was some leftist. And there was, as yet, little evidence to support that.

A first police report came out – based on unused bullet casings. Two had been written in what looked like far right terms, one was openly homophobic (“if you read this you are gay lmao”). The other no less obviously transphobic – but that didn’t stop the Wall Street Journal from speculating that the killer might be trans. Two looked like they were left-wing messages, one in particular had the killer writing over and over again “Bella Ciao“, the words of the old partisan song. It was suggested that the bullet had an arrow on its casing, which could have beed the anti-fascist arrows from the 1930s.

Many liberal, anti-Trump commentators penned opinion pieces calling for a return to civility in US politics. They used their few remaining platforms to insist that Kirk was one of history’s good guys, not really racist or homophobic, etc, but instead a supporter of civilised debate on campus. He wasn’t. His main form of political activism – where he spent most of his time, raised most money and where he had most success – was in maintaining a blacklist of left-wing academics. The world which Kirk wanted to create was one in which all leftists had been sacked. Then, yes, he could go into universities he could cosplay at being a world expert (in what – censorship?) and if a few younger people made desultory efforts to disagree with him, he would have the support of the state to shut them up. This future, in which he could speak endlessly and all his critics were made permanently silent, he labelled “free speech”.

By Friday, the suspect had been named – Tyler Robinson. On the right, prominent accounts suddenly grew much more tepid about their previous insistence that the killer would be proved to have been a leftist.

Many left-wing accounts in the States argued that the weight of the evidence suggested that he was a fascist – a fan of Nick Fuentes (a neo-Nazi who from 2019 has been trolling Charlie Kirk’s campaign, Turning Point, pushing it to take a much harder anti-migrant line) – a “Groyper” (the name for Fuentes’ online followers, they take their name from one version of the internet meme, Pepe the Frog).

Socialists should’t exaggerate the coherence of the evidence tying Tyler Robinson to that faction of the far right (more, much more, information is going to come out). But for the moment, the key facts appear to be as follows

-Robinson’s family were Republicans (his dad worked for 27 years as a sherrif – a cop), who took him to shooting ranges from what looks like the age of 6-7

-Twice, when dressing up in fancy dress, he chose right-looking costumes – once riding Donald Trump, another time in a tracksuit like Pepe the Frog (in a since-deleted post, his mother had complained that he looked like a meme – suggesting the way he’d dressed up was a deliberate Groyper look).

If it’s right that Tyler Robinson was a Fuentes fan then it would explain the messages on the bullet casings. Kirk was a Trump fan, unafraid of insulting everyone – students, lecturers – even right-wing rivals. People like Kirk were, to some extent, keeping the likes of Fuentes at a distance from Trump, lurching between copying him and calling him a fascist. So, a Fuentes fan would have a reason to shoot Kirk and to use anti-fascist rhetric – to paraphrase: You say we’re fascists, and you’re the anti-fascists. In which case, take that you areshole.

(The anti-fascist engravings also probably weren’t anything real – the Wall Street Journal had reported that the letters on the bullet casing might be a declaration of support for trans rights now. Ten hours later, they withdrew that allegation).

Anyway, having talked about where the story has got to, in the States, I wanted to end with how Brits are responding to it. Basically, depending on which side of US politics you follow, there’s a great deal of amplifying – including all the friends you see on FB saying (with more certainty than I would) than the killer is definitely a Groyper. Maybe, quite likely, but most of the killers so far in other political shootings have turned out to have all-over-the-place politics, had moved quite hard from one position to another in the year before the shooting – this is going to be something people are stlll arguing about in weeks and months to come.

On the far right, Tommy Robinson (no relation) spent Thursday signing up to the we-need-a-civil-war narrative, sharing various of his followers who were dictating love letters fo Charlie Kirk, and blaming the left. Robinson has his demonstration to build later today, so tried to bring Kirk in as a kind of posthumous sponsor of his event. “Charlie stood for Britain,” Robinson told his supporters, promising that “A million Brits” would join Robinsons’ demonstration today to honour him. As for socialists and anti-fascists – Kirk’s killers – “We don’t hate them enough”. On Friday, as I’ve mentioned most US MAGA accounts were walking back their previous insistence that Kirk’s killer was obviously antifa. Not so Robinson, who kept all those old tweets up, alongside new content pushing his march.

The other people I want to mention were the Guardian, whose reporters were still speculating that Charlie Kirk’s murderer must be a leftist, a full 24 hours after Conservative and MAGA accounts had stopped pushing that message.

The newspaper had found a single source, someone who had studied with Tyler Robinson at high school and said that the suspect had been more left-wing than the rest of his family. Over three posts, the Guardian paraphrased their source’s memories, then sad that their source wasn’t definite about this at all, then dropped him as a source (editor’s note, here).

I like to think that one of the Guardian US journalists (far to the left of their UK counterparts) rang up London and told them to stop. For much of the last few days people have been terrified – warching as Trump gives Kirk a state burial, living in fear of state-sanctioned revenge – really, did the Guardian UK want to be encouraging that mood? It probably doesn’t fit in the top 30 of annoying things the Guardian has done just in the last year, but still they shouldn’t have done it.

This Saturday, Tommy Robinson will march through central London. If you read the left press, you would think that anti-fascists are “coming to stop Tommy Robinson”. Sadly, they’ll be doing no such thing. Rather, a crowd of his supporters will gather in a pen at one end of Whitehall, where there’ll be large video screen. They will be part of a crowd of between 15 and 30 thousand people who will go to the pub early rather than endure all Robinson’s dull films. While, at the other end of Whitehall, 2 to 3 thousand lefties will gather, again behind a police pen, where they will spend an hour to 90 minutes waiting, listening to speeches from trade unionists and friends of the SWP. At no point will Tommy Robinson supporters see or hear the anti-fascists, they won’t be stopped, they won’t have any reason to know that anyone opposed them.

The same left papers will tell you that they are fighting “notorious Nazi Tommy Robinson”. The alliteration makes you expect a punchline. But the joke’s on us.

In the 1970s, anti-fascists called our movement the “Anti-Nazi League”, the point we were making was that the National Front weren’t just fascists, worse than that, they’d chosen Hitler over Mussolini. If you looked at the people they were fighting, the uniforms they wore, the speeches they made – it was a credible analysis.

But extending that argument to Tommy Robinson is embarrassing. Robinson has been active on the right since 2009, in all that time he’s never been out of the limelight. Every speech he makes is recorded. He’s never praised Hitler; none of his speeches are mere rewrites of Mein Kampf.

Suppose our bureaucrats-in-training toned down the rhetoric and said that Robinson was a fascist, even that would go too far. In the anti-fascist movement, we used to mean something specific by “fascist”. It referred to a tradition which sent large numbers of people to fight the liberal state. Fascism meant loyalty to the past, meant the intention to rerun the 1930s, even the genocides and race wars. We used to grasp the difference between conservatives (people who will leave the existing bosses and institutions alone) and fascists. In the 1980s, there were any number of Thatcherites, inside or (like Nigel Farage) outside the Tory Party. We understood that they were far right but not fascists.

Ask yourself what is Robinson position on the economy, is he a spender or a cutter? Does he believe in the corporate state? If he was in power, what would he do with the trade unions, with the NHS? If you don’t know the answers, don’t be surprised. None of his supporters know either. Although he has led first a street movement (the EDL) then a giant self-publicity campaign; at no point has Robinson shown the least interest in anything states do. Robinson sits in the middle of a great deal of far right organising; Reform voters admire him, as do the people who’ve been shouting at hotels. He isn’t just an Islamophobe, his racism is more expansive than that. But much as he’s willing to leads crowds against all manner of racial enemies, he doesn’t have a totalising ideology, which equips him to understand all aspects of life. Unlike any fascist who’s ever lived, he has no interest in capturing the state.

Here’s an exchange from the last week. Veteran anti-fascist to me: Don’t you think it’s wise to hold open the possibility that Robinson might become a fascist? I’m willing to accept he isn’t one yet. But what if he becomes one in a year’s time, won’t those analyses look like they’ve been vindicated? Me (with a sigh): He’s been doing the same things for 16 years now…

The present-day left’s inability to describe Robinson honestly comes from the same place as our failure to build protests which might inconvenience him. Both are expression of the weakness of the movement. Instead of addressing our problems, we find short cuts. If we don’t have enough people to be stewards on our marches, we’ll pay for private security. As our numbers shrink, our leaders’ get shriller – they don’t care about the truth of what they say, they’ll speak any old nonsense that will get them through this week’s crisis.

Here are a few further problems with the “notorious Nazi” line:

-It assumes that if you come up with the right boo-word, our enemy will be easy to defeat. But for words to register, your audience has to accept the allegation behind them. Robinson is unpopular, but that’s not the same as being a Nazi.

-The people who run the SWP seem to still believe that there’s a respected, popular, centre-ground willing at any moment to unite with the left to stop fascism. But how’s that going to work when our centre-right party is sending its leaders to join in racist demos; when Robert Jenrick is hanging flags from lampposts; when our Labour Prime Minister is tweeting in support of the racists? What is the healthy force of British democracy that we are celebrating as our shield against the extremists beyond?

-Unlike previous generations of anti-fascists, the people leading our movements don’t seem to care what Robinson stands for. They never use his speeches against him. EG this weekend, you’ll see Robinson make a Christian turn, invite in Evangelicals, drown his audience in crosses. But the core of Robinson’s support is still a generation of football fans who were against all “politics”. They’re not religious people. Couldn’t we see that happen, respond to his followers’ discomfort at his latest turn?

-Another part of his movement which we’re bad at exposing is the grift; the houses that Robinson’s supporters pay for, his cocaine lifestyle. He’s fighting a class war against his own fans. Why can’t we use that against him?

-The authors of the left press seem to think that if the world goes fascist by 2030, a decisive role will be played by people who wanted that outcome all along. What we need to do, it follows, is see them, and fight them – even at the cost of ignoring everyone else who’s more moderate racism won’t have that consequence. But, haven’t they noticed the people making their countries more authoritarian fast – the likes of Trump? The networed right? Our problem isn’t the small number of recognisable fascists, it’s people one step close to the mainstream who are doing away with parliaments and democracy, sending in troops to subdue Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago next. They’re doing enough damage, even without the fascists.

For some time, I’ve been collecting novels which focus on the far right. One of them is a book published in 1938, Minimum Man, published under the pseudonym Andrew Marvell. That book tells the story of a British fascist, Jellaby, who stages a successful coup. He is brought down by alien invaders, a race of short (12-inch tall), intelligent, humanoids. The aliens appear to have no super-abilities, save for one, telepathy. Equipped with it, the minimum men swiftly kill 26 leading members of Jellaby’s Party of New Freedom. Jellaby is driven out of power. Their victory over him, the novel implies, brings about a temporary calm before they take on the entire human race.

The author of Minimum Man was Howell Davies, a BBC scriptwriter and sci-fi fan who was a friend of his fellow novelist John Wyndham from the mid-1930s onwards. Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos – the source material for The Village of the Damned, which was made into a film three years later – imitates Davies’s antagonist. Once again, the enemy is a collective of small, quiet, but powerful strangers who operate as a silent hive-mind. The one significant tweak is that the society of telepathic humanoids are no longer short because they are a separate species, but because they are children and not yet fully grown.

The film begins with a phone call, middle-class stuffed shirt Major Alan Bernard, played by veteran British character actor Michael Gwynn, is hoping to speak to his brother-in-law, the Professor Gordon Zellaby, the actor George Saunders. (A brilliant philosopher and author, Zellaby is evidently named after the villain of Minimum Man, Jellaby). Midway through their call, Zellaby falls to the ground and the phone operator is unable to reconnect him. His collapse, viewers learn, is not an individual act, but the product of a collective sleeping sickness which affects everyone even the animals in the fields around the village where he lives, Midwich. A quiet, small, southern English town, its inhabitants wake up after several hours.

Not long afterwards, the villagers learn that every Midwich woman of suitable age has become pregnant. Everyone is affected: women whose husbands have been away from home for over a year, even virgins are due to give birth. What happens next is the sharpest divergence between the film and the novel. The former lasts a mere 77 minutes, requiring any number of cuts from the book. The scriptwriters cut female characters, their dialogue and their choices. Wyndham, by contrast, grasped that an unintended pregnancy could be a disaster for the person experiencing it. Eight characters in his novel attempt informal abortions, through hot bath, falls, or taking aspirin or other chemicals. In the book’s next chapter, the five dozen pregnant women meet – with all men excluded from their discussions – and plan what they are going to do. They don’t want outsiders talking about them, they are determined to keep the press away. They resolve to go on with the births. (The films passes over all this).

Once they’re born, the children are alike, with blond hair, golden eyes, narrow fingernails and back-combed hair. Between each other, they have a telepathic bond. They treat all unwanted contact, even the accidental, as a mortal insult. They are also able to impose their will on other people: their eyes are enlarged and glowing while they hypnotise their victims. As they age, they take on a precocious physical size, dress and speak like adults.

Midwich, viewers learn, is just one of several towns to have gone through a similar invasion. In one Australian town, the children all died on birth; members of an Eskimo killed their children; in Mongolia, both the children and their mothers were murdered. In a Soviet town, the children were at first welcomed – the state later killed them with a nuclear strike. The telepathic Midwich children learn for themselves of this latter holocaust. Increasongly fearful, they clash with the Midwich villagers, causing one to burn himself alive. Local tensions combine with the news of international events, setting up the film’s central dilemma; will this town of English villagers (and in particular, Bernard and Zellaby) respond like the rulers of the Soviet Union and kill the arrivals, or will they recognise that the children have a right to live, and reach some accommodation with them?

The comparison with the USSR would have been of particular importance to viewers, in a second sense that the Midwich children are (among other things) a metaphor for the menace of Communism. In 1951, sometime CIA stronger Edward Hunter had published, Red China: the Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds. It popularised the message that China was planning to unleash new forms of psychological warfare against the West. In 1956, Hunter’s international best-seller follow-up, Brainwashing: the Story of Men Who Defied It, described Communist propaganda techniques as being intended “to change a mind radically so that the owner becomes a living puppet”. That idea of a person turned into a marionette captures the interactions of the Midwich children in relation to David, their spokesman. His personality is so strong that it leaves the others passive behind him, empty and incapable of speech.

In the film, Zellaby takes responsibility for the children. He senses their power and determines to kill them. He proposes to do so by setting off a bomb in the classroom where the children gather for lessons. This is a suicide mission. To succeed, Zellaby must also find a way of escaping the children’s ability to see into and take control human minds. He imagines a brick wall and hiding his thoughts behind it. In the film’s dying seconds, the last moment of tension comes from the conflict between his ability to conceal his thoughts and the children’s evident skill at unravelling them. We see the wall again and again. For several minutes, we do not know which determination shall prove the more powerful, his or theirs.

At the level of appearance, there is a similarity between his conduct and the children’s. They manifest their power through a combination of keeping silent and yet communicating with one another. He shows his strength through plotting furiously and yet never saying what his plans are. Silence is a common consequence, yet Zellaby is not a hive-mind, he has not been brainwashed. He reaches his conclusions out of patriotism and male duty – they are just the right thind to do.

The message which The Village of the Damned tells its audience is that there still exists in Britain a class of heroic people, “men”. They are virtuous, in a first sense, through their participation in a good war. They share the memory of the conflict, the events of which they have never revealed to mere civilians (women, or those who were children in wartime). They have come back from the fightingand repressed their emotions of suffering and guilt. In keeping these experiences and feelings private – hidden, as it were behind Zellaby’s brick wall – they have been heroes a second time, in that they have prevented the people they love from having to form the understanding the way that all they find good about postwar Britain (its domesticity and community), depends on the fact that their country won the war. It is built, in other words, on a foundation of men shooting guns or dropping bombs, and the people they hit with those munitions (mainly, but not only, German soldiers) sobbing as they died. It is far better that they should not have to confront this reality.

The film’s message is that all that emotional repression has been healthy. It has left men in an appropriate condition of stiltedness and silence, which they would have to draw on again if faced with a new threat – alien or Soviet.

Of these two connected messages, the first is strongest. The connection to the recent war is more powerful than the link which The Village of the Damned is also drawing towards anti-Communist conflicts in future. Viewers see many reminders of the recent war – the soldiers who occupy Midwich at the film’s start, the uniform in which Bernand goes everywhere, the officers who by the film’s ends are threatening to detroy the village. The alien children, by contrast, neither look like any real-life Soviet figure, nor show any strong loyalty to that state.

I want to end not in 1957 but today. Half a century ago, it was possible for people who were instinctive conservatives (churchmen, officers, professors) to insist that their politics was a noble and virtuous dogma of serving the collective. When Europe and the world had threatened to fall under the sway of fascism and genocide, hadn’t they put their bodies on their line to protect democracy? Zellaby is their representative in the film, entitled, rich, poorly equipped to tell his wife he loves her, and yet taking at his own cost the choice that will save hundreds of lives.

Often, on the left, we see the legacy of Churchillian conservatism as mere humbug. He was fighting to save the Empire, wasn’t he? Well, yes, he was. But if Churchill’s children are going to jump sides, and behave as Hitler had won the war – that won’t make politics any easier for us.

If you look at the centre-right today, the message is the opposite to that of the 1950s. That, if there is a genocide, then those responsible for it should be lauded as heroes. That if there are people on the street threatening to hurt other people, because they are trans or Muslims, then conservatives are on the side of those who threaten or initiate violence. If this generation of conservatives were faced with similar events to the Midwich children, they would be offering the latter a united front – enslave the poor villagers, so long as the rich remained in charge.

Through this summer, Keir Starmer has sought to position Labour as a party fit for bigots. At least, he has been resisted – the party’s polling has collapsed. Kemi Badenoch has tried a similar move on the right, and no one has complained. Her only competitors on the right woulkd go further, faster, to emulate Trump. Part of the reason why politics has felt so broken has been the solidity of the convergence between centre- and far right. This should be as big news as Labour’s moral collapse.