In the introduction to Year Of The Rat, his illuminating and disturbing portrait of today’s British far right, Harry Shukman notes he has “a personal stake… I am not spiritually or culturally Jewish, but I come from a Jewish family… I am fascinated and maddened by the persistence of antisemitic prejudice.”
Many Jews who might thus describe themselves – who feel, as some would put it, “Jew-ish rather than Jewish” – have learnt that when you “come from a Jewish family”, you’re as much a Jew as any other to an antisemite. Shukman reminds us that while we have, for good reasons, been focused lately on the threat from the left, the menace from the other direction has in no way diminished.Shukman is a reporter, and writes like one. He offers subjective descriptions of the people he meets and he records his own emotions as his undercover mission starts to frighten and consume him – but he does so clearly and perceptively. That he undertook this dirtiest of jobs for the advocacy organisation “HOPE not hate”, one of the rare self-labelled anti-racist organisations that has shown the slightest interest in challenging left-wing and Islamist antisemitism, is another strength of the book.
Plausibility is their currency; “far-right, moi?” their byword
His account moves among monsters who are all too human. There are the familiar old-school nationalists and fascists, the thuggish far right of the popular imagination. But as Shukman shows, intimidating as they are at ground level, they now represent the least of the movement’s broader dangers, thanks to their innate and frequently comical inability to disguise themselves. Far more insidious are the manosphere influencers, grifters, intellectuals, political insiders, entrepreneurs, scientific racists, pro-natalists, eugenicists and sundry slippery combinations thereof who form a loose but tautening network which aims to infiltrate institutions. Plausibility is their currency; “far-right, moi?” their byword. Some, such as Andrew Sabisky, a “race science” enthusiast hired by Dominic Cummings during the latter’s stint as chief adviser to then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, have come very close indeed to the levers of power; and, as Sabisky hints to Shukman, perhaps remain so. (Sabisky resigned following criticism of alleged past remarks on pregnancies, eugenics and race).
Even liberal Jews, faced with outpourings of bile from the left, might seek the dubious shelter of the fash-curious right. Shukman underlines why this is a moral and strategic mistake. Many of his cast of grotesques are shapeshifting themselves through the porous borders of what used to be the right-wing mainstream – much as the far left has customarily pursued entryism into the Labour Party. (One reason journalists seldom go undercover in the far left is that the problem isn’t inducing their subjects to talk, but getting them to shut up.)
In times of crisis one tends to cleave to whatever friends one can find. But people who champion Jews because they themselves hate and fear Muslims, who support Israel because the left despises it – the provocateur and fraudster Tommy Robinson comes to mind here – are allies only in the sense that Germany was Russia’s ally between August 1939 and June 1941. They have other fish to fry right now. “The far-right belief I most commonly encountered,” writes Shukman, is the Great Replacement theory, which holds that Jews are behind a plan to supplant the West’s white populations with non-white immigrants – a conspiracy theory, he adds, “that was perhaps first articulated by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf.”
If you are inclined to ask, online-style, “BUT Y THO?”, you are making the error of expecting rationality from the same people who a century ago insisted that Jews were somehow simultaneously the puppet-masters of both capital and Bolshevism. It doesn’t matter why they believe it. Only that they do. Should they succeed in their animus against other minorities, one does not need to be Nostradamus to foresee who will be next in their sights.
Shukman notes how “old tropes that targeted [Jews are] also being [adapted] against Muslims”.
It is certainly true that the far right and those attracted to it seek to characterise Muslims not just, in the way of “ordinary” racism, as incompatible outsiders, but as a sinister, clannish “enemy within”, secretly pulling strings and plotting to commandeer the societies into which they insinuate themselves.
It is also true, alas, that antisemitic attitudes are more commonplace among British Muslims than the general population. Year Of the Rat details compelling reasons for Jews to make common cause with those Muslims who do not accommodate such bigotry, against a far right that is rising without trace into the wider polity.
Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right
By Harry Shukman
Chatto & Windus
