YouSaid · the spoken record

Harry Shukman

lines on the record: 41
first: 2025-06-17
most recent: 2025-06-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“When they are being influenced by ideas like race science and eugenics and remigration, we know very little about it, about exactly how this dark money works. I think, you know, it's up to us to make sure that there's some that we do everything we can to try and understand and ideally disrupt some of these mechanisms.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Believers of power. And Britain first, the basket weavers, they are all doing their own version of putting on the mask. They are trying to convince donors, voters, potential members, even people within their groups that are concealing from them their true intentions. Now, that's why I think this form of undercover journalism is justified. People might understandably have their qualms about this type of work and about whether it's acceptable or not. But there are unfortunately a lot of people who work within the British far right who are trying to conceal their agenda. Something that struck me about funding mechanism of the human diversity foundation was that it was all done in private. Andrew Conroe has a foundation, a charitable foundation that declares groups he funds. This was not part of it. This happens behind closed doors. The public, I think, has a right to know.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the solutions vary on aggression and violence, but the diagnosis that there are some cultures and nationalities and even faiths within this country that are completely incompatible with the British way of life, and they have to be removed is something that I heard expressed in the intellectual, so-called intellectual circles and the much more kind of street activist ones. Something that struck me is a shared belief that the way to the path to success lies in secrecy. It lies in withholding the truth about their true agenda. Sabisky described this as putting on the mask and he described how he was encouraging his peers in Westminster to put on this mask, get in the institutions. And one day we'll all have a critical mask to be able to pull the”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He'd also said that anyone who has researched the issue for more than five minutes could see that there are very real racial differences in intelligence. These differences, he said, were significantly, even mostly genetic in origin. And he had this idea that IQ scores should inform how the UK controls immigration. He'd also appeared at this very controversial London conference on intelligence, which is a gathering of race scientists and fire-eyed activists who I had met later in my undercover work. And he had been writing about Britain becoming a majority Islamic nation by 2050, anticipating that there might be violent resistance to this demographic trend. So these are the kind of views that at the time caused Tory ministers to say this kind of person has no place in government, no place in forming policy. So yeah, it was a massive shock to see that he was still.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, just to be despite his avunculi nickname, see, these are some of the things that he had written online. Some of these comments appeared on Dominic Cummings' own blog. A far greater percentage of blacks than whites in the range of IQ 75 or below, at which point we are close to the typical boundary for mild mental retardation.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His idea to write or contribute to a policy paper for Rishi Sunak's number 10 on energy, on nuclear energy. And he told me that he had a load of secret stuff in his bag. He told me that he had a friend number 10, the special advisor Will Dry, who had basically commissioned him unofficially to help inform policy. This was a huge surprise. When Sabisky left his job three years previously, they were even conservative ministers who were saying, you know, this should never be allowed to happen again. We look at hiring practices.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, this guy Uncle Sabs, which is a term that Andrew Sabisky uses to refer to himself. He is a super forecaster, someone who was brought in by Dominic Cummings to work in Boris Johnson's number 10. And he didn't last very long when he was hired in January 2020. Some of his old writings on race science, on IQ, on black people, on poor people were uncovered. And he quit his job. I met him at a dinner for pronatalists and luminaries as it was billed, organized by the pronatalist Malcolm and Samoan Collins, who were visiting the UK. Andrew Sabisky, who was at this dinner, heard that I was this funder and asked me how much money I had. He wanted me to help fund.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Predetermined for greatness. I think that appeals to Silicon Valley naturally. And it also appeals to people who are interested in race science, that your IQ is determined by your genes and there's no amount of education that can improve it, which is obviously not what science tells us. IQ scores are not fixed. They can approve over your lifetime with education. But this view that basically the place you have in society is determined by your genetics. Naturally appeals to people in Silicon Valley who think that they have unlocked the key to the future and they are, well, maybe brings us back to this idea that they're in the vanguard of some future greatness. Yeah.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This kind of rebel sheen that maybe sounds quite exciting and exotic. And perhaps that explains why some of these kind of obsession with finding hidden ideas, finding the right disruptive tool to unlock potential. Maybe there's something in that. There's not something I really go into it in the book. But, you know, just the thought. Certainly this obsession with optimizing that comes in with sometimes they call themselves techno puritans, this view that there are some people who are born who matter and some people who don't. I've seen this idea expressed by Razib Khan that there are 10,000 people in the world who matter, obviously he considers himself one of those lucky few. This kind of this Calvinist type idea that you're...”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that you could make that point. I mean, the father of Silicon Valley, William Shockley, in the 70s, he was advocating for the sterilization and deportation of black people because of what he considered to be lower IQ schools based on genetic factors. The link between eugenics in Silicon Valley has been around for decades. Why that is, I'm minded of something that you wrote about in your Death of the Gods book about this kind of Silicon Valley mindset of you're either ruthlessly disrupting the status quo someone you quote or you're dead in the water and sinking. And I think that there's perhaps like a renegade alert to some of these ideas that there's a reason why this so-called intellectual part of the far right calls itself the dissident right.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Man in the world, Elon Musk, has been reposting on his ex account one of the race scientists who writes for Eporia magazine. I don't think we have the luxury of treating this as a really fringe topic anymore. Race scientists one day might in the recent past might have been writing on some obscure form on the internet. But as one of the guests who's come on your podcast, Julia Ebner has so impactfully written these ideas are going mainstream in a way that would have once been hard to imagine.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unheard of in these far right circles. And yet he'd been backing secretly this group. He'd also been putting money behind Jared Taylor, who's a white nationalist, an advocate of segregation in the States. What Aporia is striving for is for who they consider elites, you know, billionaires, tech entrepreneurs, policy makers to accept the idea that there are these inherent genetically based differences between races so that that can then influence policy. It can reintroduce segregation. It can encourage remigration, this euphemistic term for forced deportations of non-white people from Europe, from America. And, you know, are they succeeding? They're certainly making more headway than the types of Britain first.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. And this is much more scary to me, you know, far right thugs, right? People will recognize them as dangerous and they're not going to be coming into winning any parliamentary seats anytime soon, touchwords. But the impact that the world of these race scientists is having is working on a much bigger scale. They are getting a lot of support. They're getting access to money and power in a way that might once would have been considered unthinkable. The Aporia magazine team and their umbrella organization called the Human Diversity Foundation had picked up 1.3 million dollars in funding from Andrew Conbru, who made his money in the 1990s tech scene in the States creating a hookup dating website. And that kind of figure is”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not quite right. If you talk to me in stream geneticists, they will tell you that this form of science has no basis in fact. At this conference in Tallinn, I was still pretending to be Chris, the boring strategy consultant, but I wanted to get closer to this magazine called Aporia and its mysterious founder who was talking about receiving a large chunk of cash from a Silicon Valley source. What we found was that Chris was so boring that further attempts to make contact were not getting any traction. So we changed the idea of Chris. We took a risk to say that Chris was no longer just a very kind of boring corporate drone. He also had come into a stack of money, a big inheritance that he wanted to now put into far-right projects. And this opened up a lot of doors for us.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And socioeconomic classes have differences between them because of genetics in this way you'd see discussions that poor people shouldn't be allowed to breed because they have lower IQ or that women should be excluded from higher education because they have lower IQ. And this is because of a, for genetic reasons. So it's a very old form of hatred given this academic veneer, you know, that if you talk to geneticists, they will vigorously deny that sounds like I'm saying a bit.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah. So I attended a conference organized by white nationalists in Tallinn in Estonia that was certainly, they saw themselves as the intellectual or even the more academic end of the far right, attracting people from across the English-speaking world. And there I met a kind of startup founder. You know, he looked like he could have just come off the stage of a TED talk. He described setting up this magazine called Aporia doing stories on HBD, human biodiversity, which is a euphemistic term for race science, the idea that races have measurable differences in things like intelligence that are primarily the cause of genetic factors rather than environmental ones. It's called race science, but it really also encompasses ideas that sexes.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in undercover work, there's often this, I often had this thought that there is the perfect combination of words that you can say in order to maintain cover. Life obviously doesn't work that way, but it's sometimes like tempting to think of it as this almost like this video game where if you push the right buttons, you'll be able to get interesting responses, not without entrapping people and saying anything, but just in maintaining your cover and avoiding suspicion. But so often there'd be, you know, that view would be very mistaken, particularly in these argument instances.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the members of Britain first would be loving this because it's shouting at some liberal who doesn't mind refugees in their town and resident maybe becoming like get quite frustrated and angry and maybe even a bit scared at the thought of these kind of dozen guys yelling at them. I'd want to break it up the purpose of this project in addition to being journalistic was also activist. I want to try and disrupt the operation of a far right in this country. And here were far-right activists in the process of dividing communities. And there'd be nothing I could do about it. I couldn't go in and say, you know, stop it. Let's go. Let's just, you know, agree to disagree. That would have been suspicious. And so, yeah, I think they're still feeling a lot of deals about not being able to do that kind of thing.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Chris, that's very close. And I had to kind of laugh it off and kind of just bottle up this reaction to bullying, basically. And I think that I found it very difficult to try and maintain this person of Creus as this affable, dependable guy who could show up week after week and get close to the leadership while also being just like pushing down these reactions I'd have. There were times when it was really, as I said, very messy at trying to work out what to do. During the campaigning with Britain first, they would typically be a kind of argument between a resident who didn't want us in their neighborhood protesting us and the other members. And there'd be this shouting match where someone, the Paul Golding would be yelling at a resident, resident would be yelling back.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There would be these huge worries that I would make and incorrigible slip up where I would accidentally reveal who I was or someone would recognize me and I dreaded to think of what would happen. Luckily, though there were some very many near misses, I didn't get exposed.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Throat of a police officer used to carve up his football rivals with a Stanley knife. And on one occasion he got into my car and I gave him a lift to the pub. The fear what would happen if I was exposed during an undercover meetup, particularly one at this camping weekend just outside Buxton in August of 2023 became a huge, huge worry, particularly in meetups where it's hard to escape, you know, being in a pub in central London, easy to just dash out the door and try and jump on a train, get a cab. But in the middle of nowhere, you know, miles away from anywhere familiar.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. It got to the point where I could no longer really think rationally about being undercover, the times, there are times when texts would come through, calls would come through. And I think, you know, my heart would start racing because I would just imagine that this is the moment where I get exposed. I fear the whole time was that I was about to get, my cuddle would be blown. I'd be showing up to a meeting and I'd have this kind of fantasy that this would be, this would all be organized to sort of expose me in front of a group of yet former criminals. And as you rightly point out, part of Britain first, the head of security, well, I was in the party, was this guy called Andy Frain. His nickname was Nightmare. He is a former combat 18 terrorist, a member of the Chelsea Headhunters football firm, Habitua of His Majesty's prison system, who wants slashed.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An Independence Day March and ultimately getting awarded with an activist of the year medal at a summer camping festival that was held in the Peat district. My racist Oscar was one of the only prizes in my working life that I've been given. Do you still have it? I still, yes, it's not on my mantelpiece. It's in a box at the back of the wardrobe. I had to get my hands quite dirty to get it. I knew that this project would, I'd have to do some distasteful things. But, you know, protesting refugee accommodation, handing out racist leaflets, you know, spending time with former criminals and hardcore racists. It was unpleasant work, but it did kind of have these lighter moments of getting the award. I could never have expected something like that.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mobs outside of asylum seeker accommodation, mosque invasions where they kind of show up to inside mosques to film people a prayer and just get in the faces of worshippers. So through this very slow form of infiltration, it worked because there was someone at each turn vouching for me. And it was a form of patronage, I suppose, someone who could say who could help me bypass the typical application process and there would be just much less attention paid to me because I was someone's maid coming along for the day. So through this way I was able to spend about six months in Britain first, starting as just helping out on their local elections campaign and ending up as a more trusted figure being invited to a trip to Warsaw to join.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the British far right can look like a giant Venn diagram. Not everyone is a member of every other group, but there are people who are members of more than one. And through the basket weavers, I was able to meet a member who invited me into identity England, which is an offshoot of the identitarian group Generation Identity that made headlines in the late 2010s as this European white nationalist organization that was very focused on image, on trying to convince people that its image was less extreme than the one its members really, than the views its members held. And through that was able to meet another member who was part of Britain first, you know, perhaps one of the better known, as you say, groups in the far right that not only contest elections, but also does a very aggressive form of street activism holding a flash.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know makes them, we should, I guess, have I was left with feeling a lot of sympathy for these people who were talking about less so the ones who were more aggressively hoping to kind of connive women. to people who just expressing the feeling that they had these great hopes for life and that they were not working out and that they spent all their evenings and weekends alone just online listening to hours To give some more context, I met a guy who told me, and this quote still haunts me, I feel pretty low down on the totem pole of society. And I think that clearly lots of people are lonely. They don't have the relationships they hope for. And I think that we should try and have a little bit of more understanding about the circumstances that led them to join these groups. Otherwise, we don't have any hope to stopping them.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, exactly, which isn't going to be maybe the best place for women to want to go because they would complain these blokes about the lack of women at these events. Hardly surprising given that women seem to come in their mind in two forms, either as baby making trab wipes or as gullible gullible people who could be kind of deceived using pickup artist techniques into bed that said, some couples were formed through the basket weavers. I think that they all took great encouragement from this. But yeah, a lot of the relationships within these groups that the basket weavers hope for, you know, they feel like have been denied to them either by the makeup of society or just haven't worked out in the way that they yearn for. Obviously.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About taking on this heroic mantle of vanquishing demons and enemies that obviously come in the form of mainstream society. So I think that that provides them with some encouragement and some excitement even when they might not be having the best time even within the group.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Members will get berated publicly in front of everybody discourages dissent or encourages people to become yet more extreme. But I think among the loneliness, you know, there was a report that you had written, I think a decade ago now for Demos talks you about conspiracy theories. And this was a point that was in my mind about Vanguardism, the thing that appeals to a lot of the people in this group is this feeling that they are at the forefront of something spectacular, you know, life society is going swirling the drain, but they are the vanguard that was going to save Western civilization. I think that provides people with a great deal of, and it galvanizes them, it gives them this kind of energy. The basket weavers, they draw inspiration from Beowulf, you know, their umbrella organization is called the Beowulf Foundation. And they talk a lot.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I think this is something that struck me while doing the undercover project. I felt quite sad about it. At the beginning, certainly the extremeness of the group made me feel this project was really justified. But a lot of the people I met were certainly very maladjusted. The relationships and friendships they had expected from life had not yet materialized. And what had attracted them to this group was this lack of community that they sorely felt is a sort of doubly sad that within this group it was intensely hierarchical. It markets itself as a refuge for people whose lives haven't quite worked out the way they'd hoped for. But within that group, Paul remembers get mocked for not being able to afford more expensive events. People who are romantically inexperienced will get teased. People whose views are less extreme than more senior.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of how to avoid scrutiny from the media, from the eye of Sauron as they put it. Police or anti-fascist activists. And although they have an online presence in the form of a Discord server, social media messaging app, they discourage any form of communication on that server beyond organizing in-person meetups. And it is in those places where the magic happens. And this is a definite move away from comparable far-right groups where they're lurking online somewhere is a group chat in which the vilest, most racist extreme things are being said and shared. So I think it represents a kind of increasing awareness of how to stay away from scrutiny that I find quite interesting.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work entirely separate to the mainstream. By numbers, it might be one of the largest groups in the UK in the far right. And what I think is interesting about it is that it provides a lot of young people with a low barrier to entry in far-right activism. You know, they are not doing ending on the street. They're not politically organizing. They are, you know, to put it bluntly, just hanging out, they are within those groups, you know, fantasizing about murdering progressive civil servants and forcibly deporting non-white people from the country. And yet they, because they are not engaging in, you know, politics or metapolitics, they provide people with a really easy way in. And from there, they might join other more sinister groups like patriotic alternative. Another thing that I found really interesting about them is that they have a really sophisticated understanding.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the basket weavers are a typically young community building organization. The name is chosen as a deliberately innocuous sounding term to avoid scrutiny. And they've successfully done that for some years since they've been set up. They've been going for about five years now. And they came to our attention because they were advertised on the website of an obscure and now disgraced academic who is quite popular in far-right circles. And so they have chapters across the country and indeed across Europe and the US and Australia and beyond. And what they do is they organize meetups. And although that doesn't sound particularly sinister, it sounds like any kind of other community organization perhaps, they are doing this with a view to create a separate society in which they can live and”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that the safest way to maintain an alterigo like that for a long period of time is to not make it that different to your ordinary personality. So I wasn't pretending to be anyone radically different. Some of my views, of course, would be different. But it's not like I was acting. It was more like lying. When I came up with my own personal history, you know, my parents' names, my siblings names, these were... So they went by their middle names instead of their first names, for instance. I didn't want to do anything radically different about because then I might get caught out or I might not be able to maintain that fiction for so long.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I was a strategy consultant in support function optimization, which even now is a combination of words so boring that makes my own eyes glaze over. But we had all these projects that I would have worked on to elicit maximum tedium in anyone I spoke to. The idea being that I would just be able to not ruffle any feathers and not prompt any additional questions about me. So to that end I had a very boring wardrobe. To be honest, there's a lot of choice already. I didn't have to search too hard to find, you know, fleeces and sad anorax and white shirts and depressing slacks. And so this is, yeah, this was part of the person who I pretended to be for the best part of, well, more than a year.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so obviously I couldn't go under my real name during this undercover project. So I became Chris. Chris was designed to be a kind of normal and quite boring guy who could sit at the back of rooms and just be able to listen and take everything in. So my colleague Patrick Hermanson hope not hate we came up with this person who would be very tedious with the most boring”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Messiness, but you know, clearly there are a lot of, there is a lot of time and energy spent in far right groups on how to, as you say, hoodwink the public on their version of events.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that they have quite as a sharp understanding of what is and isn't an acceptable idea. And I think we see this quite, quite often. If journalists who some journalists at the Times tried to cover the Homeland Party this week, a fascist party and were made to sign a memorandum of understanding that they wouldn't be allowed to make any approaches to party members. These are the kind of constraints that far-right organizations will put on mainstream reporters. I'd argue that it's only by spending time with them perhaps as a fellow traveler, as someone undercover are you able to see something a little bit closer to the truth, the thing that they are trying to conceal from the public. But, you know, it's its own type of work, you know, not all journalism could be undercover. It comes with its own difficulties. It's ethical.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the fact that we did this project over the course of a year meant that we learned so much more from repeatedly seeing people. And I think that you're really right to point out the fact that journalists who do attempt to go for the more traditional route find, I think, have a really difficult time in finding out being able to properly interview far-right activists, people on the fringes who are very distrustful of mainstream media. A lot of the people who I ended up meeting thought that ordinary news organizations were part of some sinister and baroque and very complicated fantasy in which they were doing the bidding of the state and more sinister people besides. So they wrote, I mean, the fire activists I spent time with are very well practiced at withholding their actions and their intent from the media.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just one or two different forays into pretending to be someone else in order to secure a story. And so during this period, I changed tack and I started approaching groups as a fellow traveler. And I found that this opened doors and people would talk to me in a way that they never otherwise would have. Doing this, I came into contact with hope, not hate, the biggest anti-extremism organization in the UK. And we started working together, working out a longer-term undercover project that ultimately turned into the book that you mentioned, Year of the Rat.”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I continue to ask myself that question, but to rewind a few years ago, I was a journalist interested in during the COVID pandemic, they're teaming up of these two groups that had seemingly never worked together before, anti-vaxxers who might typically come from a left-wing background and far-right activists who obviously come from the polar opposite. And it seemed like during the pandemic they were working together on anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine protests. And I wanted to kind of learn a bit more about that and report on them. But I found it really hard. I found it really hard to be able to spend time with them, report on them, do normal approaches saying I'd like to interview you, like to hang out. I found that my request interview request just fell on deaf ears. But previously, in an earlier job, I experimented a tiny bit with undercover reporting just”
2025-06-17 · Intelligence Squared · Is Britain in Denial About the Far Right? With Harry Shukman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT