~ Anti-fascist update with Alex Robert ~ 

What can you tell us about activist monitoring of the far right? Are people being exposed as fascists?

There isn’t so much of that going on, at least outside of more liberal research organisations who have always seen the State as part of their antifascism. We live in a time in which there has been a crumbling of the barriers between the ‘mainstream’ and far right. The Tories and Reform compete to present the most cruel immigration regime they can muster. Labour chases Reform by doing much of the same.

And we have far right commentators and social media influencers accessing large platforms and generating huge audiences because the disciplinary role old Twitter had on bigoted speech has been swept away by Elon Musk. Influencers no longer have to be careful to avoid being banned from the platform. GB News is another platform for far-right arguments to proliferate. As a result, being outed as a far-right activist no longer holds the same fear it once did. It is possible to be a public fascist in a way it hasn’t been for decades.

That said, monitoring still has its uses, information can be made available to movements, to activist groups and the like. Having accurate information about what is actually happening, who is growing, how groups function and who leaders are is vital

How (if at all) do current modes of gathering info on the far right feed into the community-grounded side of anti-fascist opposition?

At the moment not much, this needs to change. People have wildly wrong assumptions about the political landscape on the right. It’s not good enough to call everyone on the far right a fascist, however useful a pejorative that is or was. Like any movement, the far right is a contradictory mess of feuds, alliances and splits. There are different politics within it. To defeat the political project you have to understand how it can break apart, where to apply pressure and who holds it together and which parts are likely to be co-opted by the liberal mainstream.

From your general monitoring, how much benefit do you think Tommy Robinson’s wing is seeing in the aftermath of Unite The Kingdom?

The man is in an ascendancy. He has built his power over many years and Unite the Kingdom is just the latest peak in his career. However, while he can draw a crowd, he has still yet to prove capable of building a coherent political organisation. His connections to Musk, who he has said is paying his legal fees, are going to benefit him hugely. His Zionism is a liability for some sections of the far right and fascist movements though. He’s attached himself to Ben Habib’s Advance UK. They claim to have 40,000 members but in reality their reach will be patchy and they’ll be drowned out by Reform, at least for the short term.

More broadly, do you think the undoubtedly successful summer the far-right had is coalescing into sustained activity for the longer term?

If there isn’t a coherent political alternative put forward by the left then we’ll certainly see the kind of far right movements we have not seen for decades. Although unlike in the past there isn’t going to be one hegemonic force. That could be a strength if each part of the movement finds its own niche, and alliances, either explicit or tacit, can be forged between the different sections. Mark Collett has spoken about using Reform as a vehicle for his white nationalist politics for example.

Is there much evidence of a hostile turn towards surveillance and street action against the left?

A new phenomenon has been the emergence of right wing streamers who flock to protests in the hopes of catching disorder/ aggro/ arrests on camera. There’s a financial motive for it too of course, the more people they have watching the more they make. Other than that, there has been a really concerning surge in violence against people taking down flags, with incidents across the country. This is something we need to take very seriously.

~ Alex is an anti-fascist researcher and host of 12 Rules For WHAT

This article first appeared in the Winter 2025/26 issue of Freedom Journal