Mud Island? More Like "Hate" Island

The British citizenry loathe the Prime Minister. Keir Starmer is the most unpopular leader since records began, and most of his Cabinet aren’t far behind. But it would be irresponsible to believe the loathing is exclusive to Starmer’s Labour party; the Conservatives are loathed too, as is Nigel Farage and his Reform party.

The recent by-election in Gorton and Denton, a constituency located in Manchester, refers. At the beginning of February, Reform was leading in the polls and well-resourced with an apparently reasonable candidate, so the arithmetic predicted victory via the shellacking of its Conservative opposition with a smaller margin over Labour. But such was the loathing for Nigel Farage that voters strayed Green in a contest reported to have experienced significant abnormalities, including the documented phenomenon of “family voting” said to be rife within the UK’s Muslim communities.

But the Greens are loathed too, in particular their haywire-toothed leader Zack Polanski (not his real name). Elsewhere Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats is easily the most reviled leader in that party’s history – one reason being that his party is the choice of today’s white progressive boomer, which, alongside the Pakistani grooming gang leader, is easily one of the most loathed profiles in the UK.

Roots

Where did this all come from?

Today’s UK political class is evidently the most uncurious for a generation, possibly two. Whenever societal fractures appear, it never fails to respond with an answer that includes a social media mis- or disinformation lament. Blaming technology requires little effort – as algorithms continue to strengthen, so the excuses can endure. But what if the roots of today’s levels of contempt exist elsewhere?

In 2004, a man called Nick Lowles founded a “charity” called Hope Not Hate (HNH). Lowles was previously an editor of a UK publication called Searchlight, an anti-fascist magazine founded by Gerry Gable, a respected Jewish activist who’d been a member of the Young Communist League. HNH and Searchlight worked together exposing far-right fascism, originating mainly from white working-class communities.

Whereas you got what you saw with Gable, Lowles was – is – a slippery customer. The two fell out, and Lowles took HNH out of the working relationship with Searchlight into a new, more politically weighted direction, aligning it with pro-European Union (EU), woke Labour officialdom.

Untethered from traditional (effective) activism, Lowles took HNH mainstream – and celebrity. Heirs to billion-dollar trusts started donating, musicians started playing for free at its events and actors started reposting its social media statements. Lowles widened the scope of “hatred”; unlike Searchlight who emphasised neo-Nazis, HNH aspired to the distinct, right-on establishment groupthink captured by the emerging, metropolitan left as its call to activism. Gable wasn’t interested in appearing edgy, but Lowles wanted HNH – and more pointedly its self-proclaimed enemies – discussed around dinner tables in North London and in the columns of left-wing reporters.

Demand but little supply

Scaling the initiative required vast resources of hate. Sadly for Lowles, and similar to South Africa’s permanent supply-and-demand emergency of racism (limited supply – outrageous demand), there weren't enormous amounts available, so Lowles and his team set about provoking it.

Certain events accelerated the provocation – the murder* of Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016 being one. Cox was very much to HNH’s tastes: a strong woman who campaigned for refugees fleeing Syria and lived on a houseboat, she also had to live with a sex pest of a husband (these sorts of complexities endear women with sympathy, as Hillary Clinton revealed). One day a neo-Nazi gained access to her constituency surgery and killed her (in the UK a constituency surgery is a scheduled, in-person or telephone meeting where an MP or local representative meets with constituents to discuss personal problems, local concerns, or policy issues).

HNH’s response to one of its favourite politicians being slain was telling, emphasising Cox’s pro-EU campaigning (the murder occurred a week prior to the 2016 Brexit referendum). This is what Brits who want to leave the EU do, HNH seemed to be saying – they murder. The smear was breathtaking but critical: HNH was redrawing the boundaries as to what was permissible in its quest to claim as much hatred as possible.

Nothing gets donors forking out quite like telling them there is too much hate around  – and we can do something about it. This is the model advanced by one of the world’s most effective scams, the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC).**

"Hate Map"

In the 1990s, the SPLC started publishing intelligence reports on white supremacist groups across the United States, attaching a “hate map”. The idea (and its fundraising extensions) appealed to Lowles, who began publishing an annual report entitled The State of Hate in 2014, based on the principle of exposing people the group considered filled with “hate”.

A cursory glance of an average HNH report reveals a pattern: like the SPLC, the group targets mainly white profiles across politics and media, with a gratuitous Muslim psycho hate preacher thrown in for the appearance of balance. Since inception, there have been eight attacks related to white supremacists in the UK; in the same period, there have been 14 attacks associated with radical Islam, despite Muslims making up less than 7% of the UK population.

Thus, HNH became the UK’s original doxxer and the ultimate hater. Thanks to its reports, people lost their incomes, homes, families, and reputations – many on spurious grounds. The reports influenced a generation of journalists, who wrote letters to the bosses of individuals implicated in HNH’s reports, accusing them of “platforming hate” or complicity in racism.

As the mercurial restaurant critic AA Gill noted in his work The Angry Island, the UK has always been tempestuous, but the shift into the present level of loathing doesn’t appear to be a logical progression.

As hate begets hate, the state of the UK’s political, religious, and cultural loathing reveals the symptoms of a synthetic emergency manufactured by marketing humanity’s worst value, with the objective being to extract benefit to which HNH was not entitled. In the process of doxxing, chasing, catastrophising, and supposedly exposing hate, HNH damaged the national faculty of critical analysis, once a formidable feature of English intellectualism.

In 2024, after the murder of three schoolgirls in Southport sparked riots, Lowles knowingly spread false information via social media – the very thing he and his left-wing sympathisers have bemoaned for over a decade. Recently an HNH associate was convicted of child sex offences – in the past reports have surfaced of the group’s operatives attempting to sexually assault former extremists-turned-moles, forge documents, and harass innocent relatives of its targets.

Were UK libel laws as sharp as those in the US, HNH might not exist today. But calls to strip the organisation of its charitable status somehow never succeed, despite the rafts of evidence suggesting – in some cases confirming – that HNH is a hostile force against social cohesion, something, as South Africa is revealing, that occurs by itself, with time, and mostly the individual’s private commitment to not being a douche.

*The last MP murdered in their constituency surgery was Sir David Amess in 2021. His death was blamed on social media, not extremism. His killer was Somalian.

**In 2018, the SPLC paid over $3 million to a UK Muslim activist, Maajid Nawaz, for smearing him as an anti-Muslim extremist in its Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.