For years, Israeli politics has been trapped between the impossibility of the only two strategies that seemed to offer any long-term answer: a South African-style dismantling of the hierarchy of racial oppression, or a second 1948 in which such a vast number of Palestinians would be expelled from their homes that you could create what most Jewish Israelis want their country to be – a bit of the West that just happens to be in the Middle East, so that tourists could go to Jerusalem, the way they go to New York or to Melbourne, without any consciousness of the people who once lived there. Israeli clubs in the Champions League. Israeli singers on Eurovision.

Israel couldn’t be South Africa because the Jewish population didn’t want it to be (the part of the people willing to vote for that outcome has been shrinking, slowly, but steadily, for 50 years), and because the countries who might have influenced Israel refused to put pressure on them.

Israel could have chose a second Nakba at any time, but for many years the obstacles to that were almost as significant: most Jewish Israelis didn’t want that option either (even if the minority who do has been growing). The Christian and Muslim population of Israel and Palestine is simply too large, it is an almost exact parity with the Jewish population. The custodians of the state knew better than the politicians that it was a risky task – in a world that had been talking ever more about human rights, there was a risk that Israel might become a pariah state.

Part of the reason why the second Nakba is an easier route just now is because America is changed, Britain is changed, becoming at one time both less social democratic and also less democratic countries, intolerant of opposition. As global politics swung right, Israel has come to seem less exceptional than it did.

In the next few weeks, we are likely to see events in Palestine which will be of greater significance than 1967 or 1973, maybe even than 1948. After all, when people talk about the Nakba, what they are describing is a process in which by the standards of recent yeatrs a relatively small number of killings (Deir Yassin was between 100 and 200 deaths), were magnified by radio, and broadcasts in Palestian settlements, to create such a fear of genocide that 100,000s of people fled, only to find when they tried to return home that soldiers would stop them.

If you listen to the Israeli generals and politicians, the sorts of numbers they seem to be expecting are a war in which something like 30,000 Palestinians would be killed – and 10 or 20 or 50 times that number of more would flee their homes, never to be permitted to return. This isn’t just a matter of Israeli policy, listen to the American politicians and they are giving approval in advance to ethnic cleansing on that scale.

I am not saying any of this is pre-ordained, just that – right now – it is the likeliest thing we are going to be witnessing on our screens over the next few weeks.

There seems to be an expectation that everyone who talks about these events – even to their friends, on social media – must condemn the attacks which began last weekend. How could it be just to condemn them, unless we also condemn the history that got us here, or the future which is opening up in front of us?

I prefer to mourn. I grieve the victims of Saturday, who included Palestinian citizens of Israel, Thai migrant workers, Nepalese students. and Jewish peaceniks as well as many other people who had put themselves in service of the occupation. I mourn those who have been killed since Saturday, the doctors, the teachers, the journalists, both the people who thought they were safe because they worked for a part of the Palestinian state that had some functional alliance with Israel, and those who resisted.

I send my love to anyone who has lost family members, and my solidarity to anyone putting their bodies over the next few weeks in the way of the tanks and the barbed wire.

Decolonising Israel remains the only way to justice.

Thirty years ago today, the BNP’s Derek Beackon won a council election in Tower Hamlets. It was the first time his party had won an election. For me, and for thousands of people in my generation, Beackon’s victory was the moment when we became committed anti-fascists.

We had good reasons to get organised. The previous two years had seen the racist murders of fifteen-year-old musician and football player Rolan Adams at the hands of a street gang in Greenwich in 1991, in 1992 of minicab driver Mohammed Sarwar in Manchester, and of school student Rohit Duggal stabbed outside a Wimpy’s in Eltham. The BNP blamed the killings on their victims, demanding the repatriation of black Britons. The party established a headquarters in Welling, after which racist attacks in South East London tripled. 

The BNP had been building a base in East London since 1990, when it had won the support of around a quarter of white voters in a local election in St Peters Ward. A year before Beackon’s victory, it had polled 20 percent of the vote at a previous by-election in Millwall. 

The reports of Beackon’s victory showed young skinheads in bomber jackets chanting “Isle of Dogs BNP,” over and over again. They threw bottles and bricks at their opponents. The Daily Mirror responded with a headline, “SIEG HEIL … and now he’s a British Councillor.”

Figures from the political mainstream had eased Beackon’spath. Millwall ward is a working-class area, to its voters the Labour Party seemed remote obsessed with tailing the rich rathe r than people like them. Tower Hamlets Liberal Democrats had promised to give preference to the “Sons and Daughters” of “local” residents, a coded message of white preference. These promises did not satisfy anti-immigrantvoters, rather they encouraged them to demand more.

Events in Europe showed how parties of the far right could pull politics to the right. The neo-fascist Italian Social Movement had won over two million votes in the first round of legislative elections in 1992. In France in 1993 the Front National won 12.7 percent of the vote. Anti-fascists here feared that Beackon might become as regular a feature on British TV screens as Jean-Marie Le Pen was in France. We refused to let that happen.

Over the following year, the BNP found it harder to sustain its breakthrough than its opponents had feared. Without ever giving up our differences, the diverse tribes of Britain’s farleft worked with one another: the Anti-Nazi League led by Julie Waterson, Youth Against Racism in Europe, Anti-Fascist Action (AFA), Searchlight magazine. 

The morning after Beackon’s election, local government workers struck, refusing to accept him as a normal politician. Anti-fascists took on the BNP paper-sale in Brick Lane.

In October 1993, a demonstration of 40,000 people marched on the BNP headquarters in Welling. Only the actions of the police, wielding truncheons from horseback, succeeded in keeping the building open. The courts sent thirteen left-wing demonstrators to prison. 

Anti-fascists marched with the family of Saied Ahmed, killedby racists on the same night that pro-BNP graffiti went up on the streets of east Oxford. Anti-racists mourned in Camden, after the stabbing of a 15-year-old-white boy, Richard Everitt. The BNP wanted to make Everitt a white martyr, but his parents refused to let him be used like that.

Beackon increased his vote in the next round of elections in May 1994, by 561 votes, but failed to keep his seat. An Anti-Nazi League carnival in May 1994 saw 150,000 peopledancing in celebration. Black and white took part, new age travellers alongside veteran punks. 

The numbers involved in the campaign were every bit as a large as at any of the better-known moments of anti-fascist history: the Anti-Nazi League claimed 60,000 members. AFA grew to over 30 branches in 1994, rising to more than 40 by the following year. Together, we made ourselves a barricadeof solidarity through which the BNP could not pass.

In the following decade, the BNP was able to enjoy a sustained period of success. From 2002, it won severalelection victories. It secured 6 percent of the vote in the 2009 European elections, and the election of two MEPs. At its peak, the party had 55 elected councillors.

To make itself electable, the BNP broke its ties to extra-parliamentary violence. It renounced the fascism which had been its leaders’ reason for founding the party. Voters accepted the BNP’s message that the party was now more moderate than it had recently been.

In 2009, the BBC invited the BNP’s then leader Nick Griffin onto Question Time. Hundreds protested outside Television Centre. The broadcaster, spooked by the controversy, made Griffin the show’s focus. Under the pressure of hostile questioning, he came over as weak and dishonest. Within eighteen months, the BNP was had lost two-thirds of itselected councillors. The last limped on until 2018.

On both left and right, people were watching and drawing their own conclusions. Beackon could not sustain his victoryin 1993, nor could Griffin a decade later. And yet the BNP had proved that it was possible for right-wing parties to succeed in a space to the right of Thatcherism. Others, also on the far right, would prosper better from the same opportunities. UKIP and its successors were more electable, lacking the BNP’s links to fascism. 

There are no books or murals to celebrate the anti-fascists of the 1990s. Welling has not entered popular memory like the Battle of Cable Street. Yet for those who took part in the campaign, ours was also moment of successful protest. We showed that hate will not win.

This is a talk I gave last week to the Focus E15 housing campaign. Their write-up of it is here. It ties what I do in my day job with ideas about how housing should be organised differently, and how far the law can bridge the gap between how things are how they should be.

Let me start with housing. I’m a barrister, which means I’m a lawyer and represents people where they’re in court. I don’t meet clients outside hearings, Solicitors do that. I don’t write letters; I don’t gather documents: solicitors do those tasks too, I show up for the first time at the court hearings, and after the trial you won’t see me again.

Some of the time, I’m trying to get homeless people housed. In those cases you’re always suing a local authority. Since 2013, the governments have been cutting their budgets every year. Something else happened too. During Covid, many experienced housing officers left the work they were doing and the councils have never replaced them. Their absence means is that homeless people are sent decision which make no sense, or which get the law completely wrong. As if the authors were making the first excuse that leapt into their heads, good or bad, to stop them housing the people in the homes they need.

In other cases, we’re arguing about repairs, windows that don’t close, water escaping into the property, or walls thick with mould. Councils won’t do the work, nor will most housing associations. It’s my experience in those cases, that the legal answer’s obvious. Everyone accepts that the landlord needs to make repairs. The landlords are delaying in the hope that tenants will give up, make peace with the fact that their homes are rotting, and the landlords will save money if the work’s never done.

I also represent people threatened with losing their homes. There, I would say, the story is more optimistic. We’ve got the same problem – landlord incompetence – but now it works in the tenants’ favour. Landlords think they can evict a tenant through a section 21 notice, but it’s amazing how rarely they complete all the steps in that procedure. Show me 100 claims for possession based on section 21, and I won’t find ten of them where a landlord has completed all the steps. Tenants win those cases, one after another.

So, what would social justice mean, in housing in London? The first and most basic thing is that we need more homes. That’s the issue in my homelessness cases: local authorities aren’t lying when they complain they have waiting lists of 20,000 or 30,000 people waiting for a proper home. They’re telling the truth when they say they have no spare 3 or 4 bed homes. There are some very obvious reforms that the Labour Party under Corbyn used to talk about: ending the sell-off of council housing, allow local authorities to borrow to build more homes. Any new housing needs to be local authority housing; it is the cheapest and gives tenants the most protection against eviction.

Homes need to be better built. For forty years we’ve been relaxing housing standards, allowing the giant building companies to make smaller and smaller homes, without proper fire safety, and new-build properties with such poor design that of course they’ll leak. Or homes, like the Grenfell towers, where rich Londoners insisted that the council put bright, colourful, plastic sheets around the building’s front, so that all the middle-class homeowners in Kensington wouldn’t need to be reminded of the poverty in which the neighbours lived. And then, of course, it was the cladding that burned.

We need to change the attitude of the landlords. I mean all the landlords. I’m tired of representing tenants in the county court in disrepair cases, where the local authority has ignored the matter for six years and the solicitor has sent them so many complaining letters that when the case is finally before a judge, the solicitor’s bill is £50,000. Yes, the tenant will get compensated too, but I’m talking about the fees claimed by tenants’ solicitors. Think how many hundreds of thousands of pounds each year, millions even, most housing associations and local authorities would save if next time a tenant complained to them, on the first complaint, the landlord said, they’d do the work, with no further prompting.

I’ve seen possession claims brought by landlords who didn’t think about what they were doing but had pound signs ringing in their eyes. They were just thinking that if they could get rid of their existing tenant, how much more rent they could charge. We should say of all private sector tenancies – from now on – so long as the tenant wants to stay there, they have a right to live there for at least ten years. Think of what a revolution that would be if every time a landlord rented out a flat they were thinking. “This isn’t mine anymore. I’ve let go of this property. It isn’t a chance for me to make money, it’s my tenant’s home.”

That brings me on to my third and last topic, the law. Like most left-wing lawyers, I spend much of my time supporting tenants unions, housing campaigns, anybody who’ll organise local residents and bring you all into one room, and fight together for the reforms you need most. But most tenants have no real access to the law.

You can find a lawyer without having to pay if you qualify for legal aid, but most people don’t. If you work and are a single person, you can’t get legal aid if your income after housing costs is more than £800 a month. The government sets that figure as low as it can, to reduce to the minimum the people who are protected.

The law is slow. That’s a good thing if you’re trying to stop possession. Landlord claims for possession can take a year and a half to reach a hearing. But it’s a disaster if you’re the tenant with mould on your walls, and you’re begging for works to begin.

It can feel as if politicians drafted the law to make it incomprehensible to anyone apart from the lawyers and the judge.

Often, when I talk about the law, I’ll be speaking to a room of teachers, professors, even junior lawyers. I’ll ask them how much law they know.

I’ll ask what are the most important terms of their employment contract? What rights do they have, which they could enforce at an employment tribunal but which are missing from their contact? If those right are missing, can they still compel they employer to honour them? How about their obligations to their employer, do they know what they are?

Most people, when confronted with those questions say “I don’t know.” If teacher doesn’t know, if a solicitor doesn’t know what about someone who works in a shop, or is a nurse?

Each of us are bound to each other by mutual duties, the content of which most people don’t know. And yet those obligations are there, and they’re real. They surround us.

The higher you go up the legal system, that sense of the law as unknowable only hardens. Here are a few judges talking about immigration law: they have called it “abstruse”, a “shanty town”, “an impenetrable jungle”. Lord Justice Jackson said that immigration law has “achieved a degree of complexity which even the Byzantine emperors would have envied”. “Immigration law is a total nightmare,” said judge Nicholas Easterman. “I don’t suppose the judges know any more about it than the appellants who come before them.”

As a campaigning group is that you don’t always have to go through the law. Let’s say that someone in your block of flats is being threatened with eviction. Let’s say there’s a date and the bailiff’s are coming at ten o’clock.

Again and again, I’ve represented people and what they till me is they tried to go to the county court to stop the eviction. There were guards in front of the court buildings, they couldn’t get in, they didn’t know if there was a number to phone.

But, if you’re in a block of flats, and you know that on Monday at 10 o’clock someone is due to lose their home, there is nothing stopping a group of you from helping each other, blocking the door. Earn the tenant more time. That can be enough to go back to find a lawyer, go back to court, see if there was a defence available to them.

And then, there are the disputes of the future. Here, in London we’re four days away from the biggest set of co-ordinated strikes this city has seen in years: hospital cleaners, teachers, civil servants, driving instructors, lecturers, train drivers all out together. The government says, if the workers strike, it will change the law – make strikes illegal. Wouldn’t the right answer be to say, if you do change the law, we aren’t going back to work?

Or climate change, does anyone in this room believe the rich would tolerate the strong laws we’d need, to stop them from burning the world?

I hope you get organised. For some you, that will include bringing cases. If it does, I’ll stand with you in court. But the theme of what I’m urging is to organise both inside and against the law.

If any readers are interested in this piece, and what I’ve written about the limits of the law, you might also my book, Against the Law.

I waited six weeks before watching David Baddiel’s Channel 4 programme, ‘Jews Don’t Count’. There’s no good reason for the delay, but I’m glad I waited.

If I’d watched it immediately, I would spent too long worrying about how the exchange was seen on social media. Does David Baddiel have a problem with black people? Undoubtedly. If you’re going to make a 56-minute programme about how antisemitism is growing and the only three living example you mention are all black, then the problem’s not just them it’s you.

Is it good enough to say that Jews shouldn’t be caught up in the politics of Israel/Palestine simply because David Baddiel doesn’t identify with Israel? Not really, when there’s a state which defines citizenship in ethnic terms, which removed the people who lived there and invites Jews to “return” and replace them.

It’s odd that Baddiel’s programme occupies a transatlantic space, the first four Jews interviewed as Sarah Silverman, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Schwimmer, and Dara Horn without ever mentioning the long history in America of “Blacks versus Jews.” As if the world has never seen Cynthia Ozick on one side or Louis Farrakhan on the other. As if when we talk about what’s wrong with the current government in Israel, it’s “far-right” counterpart: we aren’t talking about exactly a group of people (Meir Kahane’s supporters in the successors to his Kach party) who were formed not in Israel, but in New York especially, via the New York City teachers’ strike and the JDL, via the murders carried out by Baruch Goldstein, etc…

On the other hand, when Baddiel shows a Jewish school its alarms ringing so that the 6-year-old kids can prepare for a shooting – I believe him. I can tell you about the security gate through which you need to walk to enter a London synagogue. And where that fear comes from, which isn’t history or fantasy – it’s from the such real and recent events as the Tree of Life shooting.

He’s right when he says the left is rubbish at responding to Jewish anxiety. The problem saying “Jews Don’t Count” makes it sounds like only Jewish people get this treatment. So what about Anna Chen and what happened when she wanted the left to organise Chinese workers? What about Flame? What about the way that for 25 years, the likes of Sivanandan or Darcus Howe were ignored – where in the British left between 1990 and 2010 could you find anyone other than their closest living allies urging you to read them?

That’s one frustration of “Jews don’t count”, the way it pretends there’s an audience of British white leftists who’re engaged with the rights of every single minority except Jews. When the honest accounting would be, every racialised group without exception has had to fight for the limited solidarity the left has given it.

If I’d written this six weeks ago, that’s where the piece would have ended. But-

But watching the same programme now, I was much more interested in the last ten minutes, in which Baddiel was speaking to Jason Lee – and Baddiel apologised – and Lee chose not to forgive him. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a piece of television with so little text and so much subtext.

This is what we get. It begins with Baddiel telling Lee: “I’ve come here to say sorry, Jason. I’m sorry for wearing a costume and makeup that was racist. I’ve said I’m sorry in print. I said I’m sorry in TV by there’s something missing…” He continues, “What we lost sight on in those sketches was the human being at the other end of those sketches, which is you.”

Lee responds by reminding Baddiel that for years Baddiel had wronged him, but had never spoken to him or admitted anything face to face: “Yeah, I think it’s important for people watching this, listening for the first time to realise that we’ve never spoken.”

Awkwardly, Baddiel admits, “We’ve never spoken.”

Lee says, “I mean my first question would be why’s it taken 25 years for you to reach out really and have this conversation, man to man?”

Baddiel, “Yeah, that’s my bad as well. I’m sorry it’s taken so long. To explain it, there’s shame, there’s awkwardness, there’s fear. But it took me a while to understand I think, how much we fucked up and also stuff happened to me that made me realise how you must have felt as I became more well-known, especially as I put my Jewish identity a bit more front foot, suddenly I was getting racist abuse.”

“Yeah,” Lee answers.

Baddiel says, “And I hated it and it did start to shift in me at that point, of course, this is how Jason Lee must have felt.”

Hearing what feels like insight, Lee smiles for first time. He says, “As much as I hold you accountable for it because you were the person obviously who costumed up, I hold so many more people accountable, BBC2 at the time, people you was working with, was there anybody at stage who said maybe you’re going a bit too far here?”

Baddiel, “Not at that point.”

Lee, “Because I was successful?”

Baddiel, “And because it was in a culture at that time, and again, people use that as an excuse, I’m not using it as an excuse, I’m just trying to answer your question, there was an acceptability at that point in time-”

Lee: “Hm.”

Baddiel, “To that kind of comedy at the time, which is not acceptable.”

Lee is still pressing to see how far Baddiel will go: “It’s nice to hear you say that” (smiles). “Now, if that had come out earlier maybe people might have understood.” Then, for the first time, he speaks as if he is willing to see the hurt over: “But, as I say, I was able to deal with whatever was thrown my way. Doesn’t mean I should have to deal with it.”

“No,” Baddiel acknowledges.

Then Lee takes the conversation in a different direction. First to politics: “You know, I’ve got family and friends who live in Stoke Newington, where there’s a large Jewish community. There’s a real strong connection between the black community and the Jewish community in that area” (smiles). “These are communities coming together supporting each other who can probably identify with the struggles.”

Then to football. (It’s worth knowing, although the programme never explains, that Lee now works for the PFA where he is an Equalities and Education executive, and that he has often written about the racism he encountered both from Baddiel himself, and from the fans who took their cue from him).

Lee says: “You mentioned in your book about allyship, I mean, I would say to you that I would be an ally. I agree with you 100% that using the Y-word in a stadium, and for me, you know, in terms of football, and would Tottenham can do, it would be helpful if they could take a lead. Because they identify with that word.”

He continues: “My focus is on players. Players can bring it to our attention and if a Jewish player was to bring it to our attention and to say, Look I’m being discriminated against. 100% that player would get the same support as any other minority group.”

Baddiel, appreciating that their time is ending, goes for an upbeat note: “You saying that, as a black player, that antisemitism 100% should be challenged. That is allyship and I’m 100% grateful for that.”

Now, what really interests me about this exchange is what Lee doesn’t say. At its start and at its ends, it feels to me as if Baddiel was pushing for forgiveness. And, if Lee had indeed spoken the magic words, then undoubtedly that would be of real value to Baddiel. Since every time anyone criticised him on Twitter he’d be able to say. “Look, I know what I did was stupid but Jason Lee forgives me so why can’t you?”

So why doesn’t Lee forgive him? Here are some possible explanations:

• Who cares?As a perpetrator, Baddiel has no right to forgiveness. It is always the victim’s choice. They are entitled to be unwilling, unready. A perpetrator has no right even to an explanation. It’s the victim’s decision, and if they want to be silent, arbitrary, unwilling etc then good luck to them.

• There are things said by Baddiel and Lee in the exchange which “may” provide an answer. In particular – the 25 years and nothing said. Maybe all that was going on was Lee thinking: it’s been too long, you’ve not done enough. I want to hear more insight, and a better promise that there’ll be no repetition before I forgive you. (In which case, fair enough: see “a”, above)

• Maybe Jason Lee thought that Baddiel’s apology was not made in good faith. After all, from halfway through the programme, Baddiel was signalling that much as the programme is about a community (Jews) it’s also about a single person (Baddiel) and that among all the great injustices suffered by the Jews was the fact that people are still monstering him online. To which Lee would be perfectly entitled to say: I don’t owe you anything. If you’re willing to apologise properly to help me, then I’ll accept that. But this programme isn’t about me. This scene isn’t you apologising because you regret doing harm. It’s you apologising to look good in front of other people. And that’s something you’re doing not for me but for you. So, on that basis, I’ll hold on a bit longer before accepting what happened.

• Maybe Jason Lee didn’t want to play the role of token black person. I mean – one unspoken message of the programme is that’s what black people just do. They’re Martin Luther King. They’re Christians, for god’s sake. Of course they forgive. When they’re not bad, unkind, black people like Malcolm X or Dawn Butler. Maybe Jason Lee couldn’t be bothered living up – or down – to a role fixed for him.

• Or, the opposite explanation, maybe Jason Lee thought that David Baddiel wasn’t being Jewish enough. I mean, read Maimonides on apologies and there’s a pretty clear route mapped out. First you name the harm and taken ownership (which in fairness Baddiel did, just about) then at step two you change you have “the power to repeat a transgression” but choose not to exercise it (at best, judging by the programme, this one was a maybe), then you make restitution, which in this case might be something like – being seen to take up publicly the causes that mattered to Jason Lee – hell, in the programme, he even told Baddiel what they were, the demands of a new generation of young footballers confronting racism in the game, help them, make their lives easier, amplify them (as far I can see, he hasn’t even started on that one), and only then do you make an apology. The sequences matters. The public apology has its weight, and should be accepted, as the final act of someone who has already proven how much they have learned.

Personally, I’ll take the last of those explanations. A good apology is all about restitution. It’s not about the moment, the performance. On that score, Baddiel’s words were perfectly acceptable, but it’s not the test. Sometime, you can apologise and by your acts restore your victim to the exact position they were in before you hurt them. You stole £10. Alright, give them another £10 back. They’re at the start again. Now, you can say sorry.

Sometimes, you can’t restore the victim to their exact position in which they started. Because time has passed, because they’re dead. Because certain hurts are irreversible. So, you make a symbolic gesture. Like when a person who has been punched gets the chance to punch their oppressor back. And they never put their full force into it. Because it’s not the chance that matters, it’s the right, it’s the entitlement that counts.

If you can’t undo the exact hurt, you can do something like it. And, in this case, Lee was telling Baddiel what that would be – take the steps of public allyship, so that next time a different 25 year old black footballer won’t get that treatment at all – everyone will know it’s stupid and racist and something shameful. There’s the path, all mapped for Baddiel.

Now let’s see if he can follow it.

Dear Maya,

I hope you don’t mind me writing to you here, but as you’ve commented previously on my blog, I thought I’d use this as an occasion to correct a conspiracy theory which you (and other people) have been sharing about me online.

On 7 December 2022, you wrote on Twitter that I had “recorded Allison Bailey’s private phone conversation in order to shop her for wrong-think”:

This is a common belief among Gender Critical feminists; however it is untrue.

Part 1 (of 4): Showing that it is a lie

The best way for me to show that it is untrue is by referring you to the judgment in the Bailey case. Of the 400 paragraphs in the judgment only one of them refers more than in passing to me. This is what that para says in its entirety:

If you look at it now, you’ll see that what you wrote on Twitter was untrue. Did I “recor[d] Allison Bailey’s private phone conversation”? No. Did I “shop her”, i.e. share anything with her employer? No. Leaving aside the fact that we’re barristers and there is no employer – I spoke to one other member of chambers – a junior member of chambers like me, with no position of authority. I said that Allison Bailey’s behaviour in criticising fellow members of chambers to the press had been inappropriate, and when I was asked whether I wanted to go further with that said, No. After that, nothing happened.

Did I criticise her “for wrong-think”? In the final, bracketed sentence, the Tribunal was saying that they heard what my evidence, that I had been annoyed by my colleague speaking inappropriately in our room, that was all that had been going on, and they believed me.

I appreciate that you have only read a small part of the documents from the case, and that you have been simply repeating what you read online. But the untruth you have been sharing has been using by other people to cause me harm.

Part 2: Origins of the conspiracy theory

My marginal involvement in Allison Bailey’s case received no significant online discussion until 5 May 2022, when a person I will call “BT” posted the following message on Twitter:

I invite you to look again at that final sentence and read it yourself a couple of times.

The tweet was widely read, with 950 likes within a day, 163 retweets and led to a thread containing discussion of the case and speculations about my identity.

Part 3: BT tried (again) to summon a mob against me

BT waited a week, and then she posted again. On 12 May, she wrote:

In response, other Gender Criticals called me, “the Stasi”, a “fucking grass,” a “stool pigeon,” a racist, a “snitch,” a “stoolie,” an “idiot,” a “shit,” and “vile”.

BT’s tweet of 12 May was (again) widely read, with again over 900 likes, over 250 retweets and led to her followers sleuthing about me, my full name, my family, who I might have known at school or in later life, my career as a barrister. etc.

BT had coined the verb “spy”, and you can see its use and development by other people who responded to her and denounced me:

I have also had to endure BT’s followers writing to my chambers and calling, in not very coded terms, for them to remove me.

Part 4: A member of BT’s audience made death threats against me

One of the tweeters – who I’ve chosen not to anonymise – fantasised about shooting me:

That message was still on BT’s wall, not challenged or corrected, a week after she had originally posted.

In conclusion, I hope you will understand that by continuing to share this message, you have awakened what has been an unpleasant moment for me.

Obviously, there are lots of other places where we disagree. But I am sure you would accept that the way I have been treated since May has been inappropriate, and I would ask you to retract your tweet about me.

The account which follows is structured in three parts. First of all, I will say a bit about who Bottomley was. Then, I’ll discuss two main periods in Horatio Bottomley’s life: the second part of my paper will cover his upbringing and its impact on his beliefs from his birth in 1860 up until 1905 when he was elected to Parliament as a Liberal (indeed left-Liberal or “Radical”) MP. The third part will explore the last four years of his political life: his second stint in Parliament between 1918 and 1922 and his relationship then with the right and far right.

(1) Who was Bottomley?

Horatio Bottomley had, multiple careers: one in Parliament, one in the media, and one in business. In terms of Parliament, he was the MP for South Hackney between 1905 and 1912 and again from 1918 to 1922. He was initially elected as a Liberal MP in 1905, although he had abandoned that party by about 1910, made overtures to the Conservatives unsuccessfully, and from 1910 to 1912 he was effectively an Independent, and experimenting with creating a party of his own, the John Bull League. He was made bankrupt in 1912, after which he was forced to stand down from Parliament. He was then re-elected in 1918, again as an Independent. At the height of his power, in his second stint in Parliament, he had the support of about 10-12 MPs in a loose party caucus of Independents. Several of them had been elected as “Anti-Waste” MPs, a label I will explain in due course. This part of Bottomley’s life has, effectively, been forgotten, for a couple of reasons. One is his disgrace in business which overwhelms every other part of his life story. Another is that he was trying to create a party, outside the Conservatives and to their right, but not fascists. Future generations have found it incredibly hard to imagine what that could mean – our sense of the far right has been so swallowed up by the memory of Hitler and Mussolini – that until recently we couldn’t imagine what it would mean for there to be a group of people, attacking the Conservatives from their right and yet falling short of doing what the interwar fascists did and using violence repeatedly against their enemies.

As a press magnate, Bottomley founded John Bull magazine, building it to the point where between 1914 and 1918 it had a regular paid sale of between one and two million copies per issue. (It sold about ten times as many copies, in other words, as the most popular news weeklies in Britain today). John Bull was a “populist” magazine; it spoke constantly of “the people”, while excluding from the ranks of the people all sorts of enemies: trade unionists, lesbians and gay men, suffragettes, and campaigners for Irish independence. When miners struck during wartime, John Bull insisted that they should be “arrested, treated as deserters and punished according to martial law”. Bottomley’s most important campaign was one encouraging hatred against German civilians living in Britain. Of them, Bottomley wrote, “You cannot naturalise an unnatural beast – a human abortion – a hellish freak. But you can exterminate it.” As for German soldiers, he wrote, “I would put in the field an army of Zulus and Basutos and other native and half-civilised tribes – and let them run amok in the enemy’s ranks. I would give them all the asphyxiating gas they wanted.” Within days of that piece, riots had broken out against German civilians living in Britain. Bankers gathered wearing top hats on the steps of the Stock Exchange to pass a motion, “No Germans must be left in the City”. In Poplar, crowds attacked the houses of those suspected of harbouring Germans. This part of Bottomley’s career survives in public memory better than his time as an MP, but only a little better, essentially because John Bull magazine outlasted him. Julius Elias, a twenty-four-year-old owner of a small printing business when he met Bottomley in 1905 and became his publisher, switched on Bottomley’s demise to the Daily Herald and was made a Labour peer in 1946. John Bull magazine closed in 1964.

As for business, Bottomley was known in the press as a company promoter. In the early 1890s, he had a plan to amalgamate the printing and media industries within a single business, the Hansard Union. That failed in 1893, leading to a first fraud trial. From then, till 1905, he was promoting Australian mining businesses. In around 1905, Bottomley met a fellow crooked businessman, Ernest Torah Hooley, after which for several years, Bottomley gave up on company promoting, and worked instead by a method which was a form of very barely concealed theft. Essentially, he would find individual rich people, and prey on them to swap tens of thousands of pounds of their money for bogus shares. There were several court appearances, leading to his bankruptcy in 1912, and his first departure from Parliament. Between 1918 and 1922, while Bottomley was back in the Commons, his major project was a “Victory Bond Club”. Subscribers could buy shares which were supposedly tied to one-fifth of the government’s Victory Bonds (“Bonds”) by buying shares in Bottomley’s Club for £1 each. Bottomley took around £1.1 million in Club memberships, stored two-thirds of that sum in his private bank account, and paid various debts to his horse trainer, tame MPs, mistresses, and so on. Bottomley was tried in 1922, convicted and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. It is this trial, above all else, for which Bottomley has been remembered ever since. He became, in effect, one of those great rogues of history, whose name is remembered in collections of true crime stories, a shorthand for the corruption of Edwardian England.

In the rest of this paper, I will focus on Bottomley politics, its origins and his destination.

(2) Bottomley’s politics 1860 to 1905

In all previous biographies of Bottomley, two key details are mentioned, in passing. First, his mother Elizabeth was a secularist, as was his uncle George Jacob Holyoake. These details are used as props to get at what writers really want to talk about, a juicy piece of gossip, encouraged by Bottomley himself in later life, that he may have had a secret parentage, with either or both of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant having perhaps been his real parents.

On the secret parentage, this is utterly bogus: Besant and Bradlaugh did not meet until Bottomley was 14. Bottomley kept the story secret until Bradlaugh was long dead, so that the old man could not contradict him. The story caused distress to surviving members of Bradlaugh’s family. The one fact which supports it was that Bottomley, like Bradlaugh had a large, fleshy face. On the other hand, they were in other ways physically different: Bottomley as short as Bradlaugh tall. In any event, we do not know what the father named on Bottomley’s both certificate, a former shipwright, turned tailor, William Bottomley looked like. Without his picture, we can make no meaningful comparison with Bradlaugh.

Some new scraps of information have emerged about Horatio’s mother, Elizabeth Bottomley, who was a secularist. Stories have survived of her attending Bradlaugh’s talks at the Islington’s Hall of Science, and these traditions are corroborated, by several mentions to “E. H.” in the secularist press. A donation in that name of five shillings made on the launch of the newspaper, The Reasoner, which seems almost certainly to have been given by Elizabeth, She was then 14, and still living in Birmingham with her parents. Two decades later, Horatio’s birth was noted, with approval, in his uncle George Jacob Holyoake’s engagement diary. There was even an article written in The Reasoner published a few weeks before Horatio’s birth, a friendly review of Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help, which can plausibly be attributed to Elizabeth.

Understanding that Elizabeth Bottomley was an active secularist, and her brother George Jacob Holyoake the founder of that movement, helps to explain the earliest years of Horatio Bottomley’s political engagement. He was a Radical Liberal, and a contributor to the secularist newspaper, The National Reformer. He helped by sub-editing that newspaper. In 1876, when Bottomley was 16, he attended lectures delivered by the English positivist and recent supporter of the Paris Commune, Professor Edward Beesly. A contributor to the National Reformer, “H. B.”, which must be Bottomley, summarises Beesly’s talks diligently.

At its top, secularism was a family business. Holyoake had been Bradlaugh’s mentor. Another Holyoake, George Jacob and Elizabeth’s brother, Austen, was Bradlaugh’s election agent. By the early 1880s, the Secularists could afford, in effect, three full-time workers bound by ties of close friendship: Bradlaugh, Besant, and Besant’s new lover, Edward Aveling. It may well be that Horatio Bottomley hoped to be the heir to the family business. But, if so, he flunked his audition. “Young Bottomley will turn out a bad man,” Bradlaugh said.

While the secularists had spurned Bottomley, he continued to idealise them. The best way to understand his career, between about 1880 and 1905, is of a series of attempts to persuade the secularists, or perhaps just himself, that he was carrying on the family tradition.

In 1882, when he was 22, Bottomley founded a first newspaper, the Hackney Hansard. He was employing the skills he had learned from his uncle and from Bradlaugh. In 1887, Bottomley was selected as a Liberal candidate for the first time, for Hornsey, after which he was chosen as the candidate for North Islington, then as today, a Radical constituency. He supported temperance and Irish Home Rule. This was the immediate aftermath of Bradlaughs victory in Northampton, and the debate over whether Bradlaugh could sit as an atheist.

In 1888-1889 Bottomley became the first Chairman of the Financial Times. He used the paper to reports of speeches delivered by his favourite politicians, principally Bradlaugh. Elected in 1905 as an MP, one of Bottomley’s first act was to deliver a speech to the Bradlaugh Fellowship, recalling the bitter days of Bradlaugh’s isolation before he was vindicated: “Wasn’t he a dangerous and vulgar agitator, a man who knew no God, a Republican who had dared to impeach the House of Brunswick?”

Occasionally, it has been argued that the great mistake made by the left made between 1880 and 1910 was to encourage the break-up of the Liberal coalition. (Those with long memories may recall Tony Blair arguing that, others have made the same point independently). The argument goes that in Victorian politics there was a single party on the left (the Liberals) and one on the right (the Conservatives). The left fractured, the right didn’t. And this is said to be why the Conservative kept winning elections in the twentieth century.

Yet it is worth seeing this period through the eyes of workers and trade unionists. So, as the Radical chairman of the Financial Times in 1888, Bottomley could have supported the matchgirls’ strike. This, Bottomley refused to do, insisting that the real victims of the ‘matchgirls’’ strike were not the workers with their low pay, and their phossy jaws, but the employers. Bosses in London wanted to pay more. What held them back, he wrote, were “the much cheaper productions of Sweden,” where wood cost almost nothing.

After 1900, when Bottomley was a prospective parliamentary candidate for South Hackney, he faced a recurring problem of workers from the local trades council threatening to stand candidates against him and his party. They called Bottomley “an unscrupulous Company Promoter” and “a City swindler”. In return, he threatened the Gas Workers and General Labourers’ Union and Hackney Trades Council with libel action: “your action leaves me no alternative but either to apply for an immediate Order for a criminal prosecution, or to impose a Writ against you for damages…” Bottomley’s stance was typical of a whole period of British politics. The left deserted the Liberals because of how little the Liberals offered them.

(3) Bottomley’s politics 1918 to 1922

There are various reasons why Bottomley moved to the far right. One is that he failed as a Liberal MP in 1905 to 1912. His strategy was to be such a loose cannon that the party had no option but to offer him a prize ministerial job. But the Liberal party was sitting on a shrinking parliamentary majority: it lost seats in 1910. It already possessed external factions: the Irish and Labour causes. It spent more time on them, sensibly, than it did on him. Bottomley’s magazine John Bull was such a commercial success, and his editorial line so anti-Liberal, that the stakes were too high for his party.

Where new people were breaking with Parliament in around 1910, as Bottomley did by launching the John Bull League, and calling for the replacement of politicians by businessmen, they tended to move to the right – Hilaire Belloc was another member of the generation and his book The Party System is indistinguishable from Bottomley’s thinking. 

The war fixed Bottomley’s new, right-wing, politics in stone. Initially anti-Serb, Bottomley realised that the war would be an opportunity to undo the stain of his bankruptcy and help him get back to Parliament. He therefore switched to taking a pro-Seb, and anti-Austrian line. After that, when not penning articles attacking German civilians or strikers, he was delivering public lectures, 300 of them altogether, calling on other men to risk their lives.

From 1914 onwards, the trend of his politics was outside and against democracy. Under a Business Government, Parliament (that “played-out institution”) would be abolished in favour of military rule. All his allies were on the far right: in 1916, Bottomley backed Noel Pemberton Billing with his claims that an “Unseen Hand” (i.e. Jews) were controlling Labour and the unions, and that a “black Book” held the names of 47,000 gay men and women a “Cult of the Clitoris” who had been blackmailed into giving support to the German war effort.

Another of Bottomley’s friend was George Makgill, founder of the Economic League, with his lurid fantasies of “Jews in every secret society, Jewish Anarchists and Communists especially”. In 1918, Makgill and Bottomley founded a People’s League, to lead the anti-Communist campaign against the left which they thought the Conservatives had abandoned.

Where Bottomley’s politics were taking him was shown by the anti-Waste campaign of 1919-21, during which seven by-elections were won by “Anti-Waste” (i.e. pro austerity) candidates opposed to the Liberal-Conservative coalition government. The context was the resumption of ordinary politics after the end of the 1914-18 war at a time when the composition of the Cabinet had not changed. Most right-wing voters hated Lloyd George. They despised his politics, seeing him as the inventor of the state pension, national insurance and rent controls.

In January 1920, a pro-Bottomley independent was elected at Wrekin. The following January, at a by-election in Dover, an “Anti-Waste” candidate won with the support of Bottomley and the press baron Lord Rothermere. At the campaign’s height, there were ten anti-Waste independents, generals and company directors, sitting in the House of Commons. Growing numbers of Conservative associations announced their support for the broad thrust of the anti-waste campaign, while others – among them a young Oswald Mosley – joined campaigns intended to copy it, including a Conservative-sponsored People’s League for Economy.

By spring 1921, Rothermere and Bottomley, the two pioneers of this new strand of militant Conservatism, were at odds. Rothermere believed an attack on social reforms would help crystallise middle-class politics around a shared distrust of the poor. If you could make the Conservatives the sole anti-socialist party, he thought, they would win every time.

By contrast, Bottomley’s aim was not a reinvigorated Conservatism. He did not want a Britain where Conservatives and Labour alternated in government, even if the former held power for longer. Unlike Rothermere, he wanted to see something more, in other words, left MPs in jail.

Anti-waste was ostensibly a movement united around a single cause, of shrinking the state, but the longer Bottomley was involved with anti-Waste, the more he quibbled with its basic premises. He wanted the army expanded, not cut. He liked to imagine British power extending across the globe. He tended to downplay “the cutting down of pensions”, which he reasoned would alienate as many as it attracted. His vision of a growing far-right was closer to the experiments in right-wing politics emerging in Germany, Italy, and Spain.

In the incipient split between Bottomley and Rothermere, Bottomley had a keener sense of the direction in which politics was heading.

Even in Britain, the Conservative party would grow in the 1920s and 1930s by exploiting other causes than Rothermere’s. They would win through an anti-Communist culture war (the Zinoviev letter) then, from 1932, an imperial tariff which enabled the party to link welfare benefits to the maintenance of the Empire.

Horatio Bottomley’s fraud conviction in 1922 brought an end to his political career. During his trial, the central issue was whether he had been loyal to the soldiers who had volunteered for the army then wagered their savings on him. He told the jury, “I hope to satisfy you, if they were the last words to pass my lips, that I am incapable of robbing an ex-soldier.”

Sentencing him, Mr Justice Salter said, “the crime is aggravated by your high position, the number and poverty of your victims, by the trust which they reposed in you and you abused.”

One way to read his life is as a play on an old theme; that patriotism really is the last refuge of the scoundrel. The other way to see it is an illustration of a different piece of political wisdom, one developed by the 1880s left: that Liberalism and Radicalism had been exhausted. And that nothing good would come from attempts to continue them.

(The above text is a talk I gave yesterday to the Socialist History Society; anyone who enjoys it is encouraged to consider buying a copy of the book, currently on 33% off at the Routledge website).

There are few things wrong with Britain that cannot be traced back to the influence of our tabloid press. But where did this model of journalism originate? The usual answer is to date the tabloids’ rise to Lord Northliffe, the founder of the Daily Mail in 1896, or his younger brother Lord Rothermere who ran the same paper in the 1930s when it backed Mosley’s blackshirts. Before the career of either took off, however, the distinctive forms of the tabloid newspaper, its reliance on celebrities, its dumbing down of the news, its defence of the police, as well as its advocacy of tax and welfare cuts, had all been set in place. The founder of this model was a journalist five years older than either of them: Horatio Bottomley MP.

Bottomley launched his career with the Hackney Hansard, written for the local parliaments movement of the 1880s, in which local Conservative and Liberal politicians would meet and hold set-piece debates in emulation of their counterparts in Parliament. From there, Bottomley moved to the Municipal Review, which published puff-pieces abut local mayors, and then to a penny weekly, Youth magazine, which published improving short stories aimed at an audience of teenage boys. Bottomley was paid £150 to take over the magazine, also recruiting the paper’s ambitious sub-editor a barrister’s son named Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe).

In 1888-9, Bottomley served for a year as the first Chairman of the Financial Times. Bottomley turned that paper into a gossip sheet, puffing up the companies who were willing to advertise on his pages, and printing hostile rumours about those who refused. “Gold discovered – good prospects,” a typically baseless Bottomley story began.

In 1902, Bottomley bought an evening newspaper, the Sun (no connection to today’s paper of the same name). Bottomley hoped to build a mass readership by reporting crimes, especially murders. Alone among the Liberal press, the paper supported the Boer War. Bottomley tried to boost its circulation by recruiting celebrity guest editors, including the Test cricketer Ranjitsinhji. There was also a racing column and a lottery of sorts (‘Sunspots’).

His real breakthrough came in 1906, shortly after Bottomley was elected to Parliament as the MP for South Hackney. Bottomley launched a weekly newspaper, John Bull, which had achieved by 1916 a paid sale of around 2 million copies an issue – making it not merely the best-selling news weekly of its day but a far more successful publication that any equivalent magazine since – selling ten times more copies than today’s Economist or Private Eye.

The idea of “John Bull” had been coined around 150 years before, by a Tory journalist John Arbuthnot, who lampooned his eighteenth-century enemies as wasters of the public finance, wrong because they listened to England’s enemies abroad. By the 1850s and 1860s, John Bull was a regular character in Punch magazine, the incarnation of the patriotic Englishman.

Bottomley did not create that image, but he was content to plagiarise it. John Bull was “populist” in the sense that the term is often used today: to mean that it spoke constantly of the people, while excluding from the ranks of the people all sorts of enemies including trade unionists, suffragettes, and campaigners for Irish independence.

John Bull was at the height of its influence between 1914 and 1918. Bottomley wanted his paper to the most patriotic magazine you could buy – and was unafraid of seeming violent, cruel or even unhinged. There were tens of thousands of German civilians living in Britain. Of them, Bottomley wrote, “You cannot naturalise an unnatural beast – a human abortion – a hellish freak. But you can exterminate it.”

Nor was extermination a mere linguistic flourish. He had put careful thought into how to murder them – without wasting the precious resources needed for the war. “I would put in the field an army of Zulus and Basutos and other native and half-civilised tribes – and let them run amok in the enemy’s ranks. I would give them all the asphyxiating gas they wanted.”

Within days of that article, riots broke out against German civilians living in Britain. Bankers gathered in their top hats on the steps of the Stock Exchange to pass a motion, “No Germans must be left in the City of London”. In Poplar, crowds broke into the houses of those suspected of harbouring Germans.

The British and the German populations had mingled for several generations. In thousands of homes, in all social circles, there was anger and disgust at the position he had taken. Yet rather than being isolated for such violence, Bottomley was rewarded. Lord Northcliffe, previously employed by Bottomley, made him one of the best-paid columnists in Britain Northcliffe’s papers spread the story that Bottomley was on the verge of a Cabinet appointment, covering London with placards reading “Bottomley wanted”.

And this message of war to the death was applied to all of British capital’s enemies. When miners struck, Bottomley and John Bull insisted that any workers following suit must be “arrested, treated as deserters and punished according to martial law”.

It is from the rise of John Bull onwards that we can see the essential character of the British tabloid press: its craven attitude towards the rich and those with the most social power, its hatred towards workers and the poor.

Yet there were always people trying to fight it. One of the first was a shorthand copyist Clarence Henry Norman, a member of the Independent Labour Party, the Society for Abolition of Capital Punishment and the Penal Reform League. Norman was a conscientious objector, one of 16,000 people in Britain to refuse conscription. Imprisoned, he had fought with his jailors. Confined to a straitjacket, he was force-fed through a nasal tube.

From his prison, Norman grasped that if he was going to defeat the war, he had to campaign against the people propagandising for it. He smuggled out a pamphlet: “Mr Horatio Bottomley has never ceased to claim that he is the best interpreter of the mind and morals of the ordinary hard-working decent British citizen.” He wrote about Bottomley’s career outside the media and politics, as a businessman whose scheme had repeatedly ended in business failure.

Norman ended his account, “With that we leave Mr. Horatio Bottomley, only reminding our readers that nothing could be more conclusive proof of the rottenness of British democratic and political life than the fact that such a man is consulted by the rulers of this country.”

Bottomley schemed to have Norman’s pamphlet banned. He found an intermediary, a Birmingham printer named Reuben Bigland, and asked him to find someone to have Norman’s pamphlet copied. Bottomley sued the printer who reproduced it, John Greaney. Greaney did not attend court, but sent a barrister to plead his case on his behalf. Greaney’s barrister (paid for by Bottomley) admitted libel and called on the judge to order the harshest punishment of his own client: “Whatever may be the result of the case, Mr Bottomley may leave the court at all event with the certainty that in one respect he has performed a public service, and that is by the skilful and temperate manner in which he has conducted his case”.

Bottomley was acting at the furthest edges of the law: inventing cases, bribing his supposed opponents, securing a conviction with the help of a naïve judge, Mr Justice Darling.

Three years later, however, the memory of this scheme came back to haunt him. Bigland broke with Bottomley, admitted his part in the fraud and then when Bottomley sued Bigland for criminal libel, Bottomley found himself in front of the same judge, Darling. This time, he was no longer willing to believe the lies Bottomley spun.

In 1922, Bottomley faced his last court case. After the war had ended, he had launched a Victory Bond Club, offering shares at £1 each, supposedly mirroring the value of the government’s War Bonds. He was accused of fraudulent conversion (in other words, using investors’ money for his own ends). Bottomley was sentenced to seven years in prison.

At the heart of his criminal trial, was the question of whether Bottomley had defrauded the patriotic former soldiers who bought shares in his Club, and whose support had made John Bull into a commercial success. “The dear boys”, Bottomley insisted, “whether they are sleeping or still with us, know that I have not betrayed them.”

But this is exactly what Bottomley had done, and what the tabloid press always does. It turns to its readers and invited them, on the basis of the patriotism they share with the editors of their newspapers, to suspend all critical intelligence. Having found a paper that agrees with them, they are expected to think that Conservatives are to be trusted, that the royal family is a model to the nation, and that no-one better understands the British economy than the ghouls who dominate the City. Bottomley used the gullibility of his audience to make himself rich. In the long years since, not one of his followers has behaved in any way differently.

[This is a taster for my new book, Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism, which is published by Routledge today].

[I’ll also be speaking about the book at a meeting of the Socialist History Society, later today (24.11.22) – all welcome].

George Jacob Holyoake

In the 1820s and 1830s, by far the most important figure on the British left was Robert Owen, Born into relative poverty (his father was a saddler), Owen became in 1800 a manager at the New Lanark textile mill, near Glasgow. New Lanark became famous as a model workplace, where work was well paid, the workers were productive, their children educated, and there were neither police nor courts. In 1817, Owen announced his conversion to socialism, after which he toured the United States and Europe arguing for similar utopian communities.

The Owenite newspaper The Pioneer told its readers to break apart the great houses of the rich and to share their wealth: “At a very early period, we shall find the idle possessor compelled to ask you to release him from his worthless holding.”

“Every pupil,” Owen wrote, “shall be encouraged to express his or her opinion.” Religious instruction would not be imposed on anyone. Everyone would be encouraged to learn, irrespective of their career or their parents’ standing: “All shall be treated with equal kindness. Both sexes shall have equal opportunities of acquiring useful knowledge.”

We can get a sense of the appeal of the Owenites by looking at the lives of some of the movement’s recruits, for example George Jacob Holyoake, how had been employed from the age of ten as a metal-worker Eagle Iron Foundry, one of two dozen factories in Birmingham making pots, safes, weights, garden rollers, gear wheels, gates and fire hearths.

In June 1836, George Jacob heard Owen speak for the first time. Six months later, aged 19, he recorded in his diary that he himself “spoke for the Owenites” at a meeting.

Holyoake followed Owen in advocating Mechanics’ Institutes, in other words, part-time colleges providing teaching at evening and weekends to an audience largely composed of skilled workers who had left education (as was common) before their teenage years.

In February 1838 Holyoake joined Owen’s new Association of All Classes of All Nations. He also participated in the Chartist movement, which was demanding a vote for every man, for annual parliaments, for secret ballot, for payment of MPs and for reform of electoral districts. A petition delivered to Parliament by Birmingham’s Radical MP Thomas Attwood, was signed by 1.3 million people. Holyoake attended Chartist rallies in Birmingham.

He walked to Derbyshire, dreaming of liberating himself from the factory, and all workers from slavery. “Over the foundry walls where I worked had come gleams of the sun, which had made me long to see the outlying world on which it shone unconfined. Now I was in that world: happy days were those, for my heart was as light as my purse.”

In 1840, the Owenites thanked Holyoake for collecting funds to enable the purchase of a socialist chapel in Lawrence Street. In August he lectured in Worcester, after which the Owenites there invited him to join them as a full-time worker. The socialists in the town offered him 16 shillings a week, enough to feed his wife and their daughter, Madeline.

In 1841, the Owenites made him a “social missionary” in Sheffield, and his salary doubled to £80 per year. The Owenite headquarters was in Sheffield’s Rockingham Street, with a school with fifty pupils which held meetings in the evening and at weekends.

From the early 1840s onwards, it is possible to trace a decline of Owenite radicalism. Chartism may have provided the socialists with a mass audience, but they struggled to recruit within it. A movement of hundreds of thousands of people, hazy as it was about its end goal, seemed more attractive than building a smaller caucus of the convinced.

Part of the problem for the Owenites was that they struggled under attack from their opponents in working-class districts. Increasing numbers of churchmen made it their business to denounce the socialists and demand their prosecution. This posed a sharp tactical question to the Owenites: should they ignore religion, or counter it with attacks of their own?

Owen argued that his followers should ignore the Church, and win converts by appealing to the areas of socialist strength – their programme of mutual aid and social transformation. Several of Owen’s followers, including Holyoake, disagreed.

In 1841, Holyoake’s friend Charles Southwell had also been made a social missionary, in Bristol. The first issue of Southwell’s newspaper The Oracle of Reason had sold six thousand copies, in large part because of the atheism which ran alongside and obscured its socialism. In his paper, the Bible was described as the “disgust of wise men. It is a history of lust, sodomies, wholesale slaughtering and horrible depravity.”

Southwell was arrested and charged with blasphemy. Holyoake demanded that the Owenites support Southwell. William Galpin, General Secretary of the Owenites, replied with tepid reassurance that the Owenite Central Board would “not fail to assist Mr Southwell all they can.” Nevertheless, Southwell’s chosen course of confronting the Church, “was in direct opposition from what the Board have always advocated.”

In January 1842, Southwell was convicted, fined £100, and sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment. In Sheffield, Holyoake renounced all religion. He had been “born pious, and nursed in orthodoxy,” but any beliefs he had once held “in the humanising tendency of Christianity” had been destroyed. “The persecution of my friend has been within these few weeks, the cradle of my doubts, and the grave of my religion … my faith is no more.”

Holyoake left Birmingham to help Southwell. In May, he addressed a meeting of the Cheltenham Mechanics’ Institution on ‘Home Colonisation’, the Owenite proposal that poverty be resolved with a positive programme of public works taking the form of self-sufficient working-class villages. Around 100 Chartists and socialists were present to hear him. A Mr Maitland (a “sort of local preacher”) noted that Holyoake’s speech had made no mention of chapels. Did the socialists, he asked, see no role for religion in their future society?

At first Holyoake stuck to the Owenite script, acknowledging that he had avoided all talk of God in the body of his speech. But why was he here, if not to help his friend Southwell? He said, “I appeal to your heads and your pockets if we are not too poor to have a god? If poor men cost the state so much they would be put like officers on half-pay. I think while our distress lasts it would be wise to do the same with the Deity.^”

On 26 May, after a meeting with Southwell in Bristol, Holyoake saw the Cheltenham Chronicle’s third-page report on his lecture on Socialism, under the title ‘ATHEISM AND BLASPHEMY’. Socialism, yelled the newspaper, was “more appropriately termed, Devilism”.

Holyoake was tried for blasphemy in August 1842. He spoke for nine hours in his defence, expounding the doctrines of socialism, and appealing to the principle of free speech: “What can we think of the morality of a law which prohibits the free publication of opinion?” At the end of the hearing the judge sentenced him to six months imprisonment.

1842 also saw another great wave of Chartist activity, a second petition was signed, this time by three and a half million people, there were strikes in the Midlands and the industrial North and riots in the Potteries (with 116 men and women imprisoned), and Feargus O’Connor and almost every member of the national executive was prosecuted.

On release Holyoake toured Gloucester and Cheltenham before giving a lecture in Rochdale to the Socialist Society, on the merits of Owenite land colonies and co-operation. The following year, 28 skilled artisans, with Owenite socialists prominent among them, would establish the first modern cooperative society, the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society.

In 1846, having settled in London, Holyoake founded his own newspaper, its first issue declaring: “The Reasoner will be Communistic in Social Economy – Utilitarian in Morals – Republican in Politics – and Anti-theological in Religion”. This communistic social economy was a reference to Owenism, and early articles addressed themselves to supporters of the movement: “The late retardation of our views has opened our eyes, not damped our ardour.”

When Chartism and the battle for the People’s Charter surged again in 1848, Holyoake had become one of its best-known speakers. On 10 April, some 20,000 Chartists marched from Kennington Common in South London, along a route lined by more or less sympathetic 200,000 spectators. The government signed up 85,000 special constables to prevent disorder, and placed 7,000 soldiers around Westminster.

After this last flowering, the campaign declined. The press attacked the Chartists, insisting that the petition’s numbers had been inflated. Mocked, the Chartists came to believe in their defeat. Feargus O’Connor, their best-known leader, became an alcoholic. In 1852, he struck three of his fellow MPs, after which he was held in an asylum. The same year Robert Owen converted to spiritualism. He had never stopped believing that human beings could live under fairer conditions; he now presented the dead as their allies in that struggle, titling one pamphlet, The Future of the Human Race; or Great Glorious and Future Revolution to Be Effected Through the Agency of Departed Spirits of Good and Superior Men and Women.

The socialists splintered; many emigrated. Holyoake sought to keep the movement going by mixing his socialism and atheism, and moderating his opinions. He ceased to be a socialist pioneer, and became a leading figure in the emergence of secularism.

The generation below – including Holoyoake’s nephew, Horatio Bottomley – were to split in yet further directions as the century wore on, but that’s another story.

[This is a taster for my new book, Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism, which will be published by Routledge on 24 November].

[I’ll also be speaking about the book at a meeting of the Socialist History Society, this Thursday – all welcome].

Bigotry does not always need deep roots. When it suits the interests of the state or of the rich, it can be summoned into being quickly. One of the worst race riots in British history occurred a little more than 100 years ago; their victims were a group of people who had never been previously been treated as any sort of racialised other – German civilians living in England after the outbreak war in 1914.

The war enabled grifters to make themselves rich by performatively attaching themselves to the conflict, even as they lived their normal lives hundreds of miles from the fighting. The worst of the jingos was Horatio Bottomley, the owner of John Bull magazine. In his columns, Bottomley allowed no distinction between Germany as a state and her people, even as increasing numbers of the latter were demonstrating their opposition to war. He told his readers all Germans were evil even those who had no connection to the fighting: “If by chance you should discover one day in a restaurant that you are being served by a German waiter, you will throw the soup in his foul face, if you find yourself sitting at the side of a German clerk, you will split the inkpot over his vile head.”

There could be no restraint against the Germans: “War is the eagle’s business, with neck outstretched and beak stern for combat, with talons outspread ready to fasten in the back of the foe and never lose hold until every drop of blood has dripped from the quarry.” In Bottomley’s view, this was not a matter of nationality alone, but one of race. A person born in England to a German father and an English mother was outside the British race. They too had no right to remain in Britain – and no right to live.

Where prejudice came from

Britain and German had never previously been at war. Up until the 1890s, Germans had been the largest group of migrants to the UK from the Continent. As late as 1914, around 100,000 Germans lived in the United Kingdom. Whole areas of life saw British and German people correspond and co-operate: science, literature, socialism, sport, music.

The historian of Anglo-German antagonism, Paul Kennedy, has spoken of British and German elites “drit[ing] steadily apart” between 1900 and 1914 over the former’s imperial conquests, and the latter’s economic competition. The press targeting of Germans had begun even before the war began with stories of Teutonic spies exploring the southern coast, and novelists including William Le Queux and HH Munro imagining a German invasion. The ground had been prepared for increased military spending – and for anti-German xenophobia.

Race riots

Bottomley’s campaign reached its height in mid-1915, following the sinking on 7 May of the passenger ship HMS Lusitania, in which 1,198 people died: 785 passengers and 413 crew. Many of the crew were from Liverpool. The first attacks occurred there on the evening of the sinking, with crowds of people smashing up the shop of businesses with German-sounding names: Fischer’s, Dimler’s, and Deeg’s.

Bottomley’s response to these attacks appeared in John Bull on 15 May. He proposed that German people in Britain should be made to wear badges. The German civilians should be deported. If that was impossible, he urged his readers to wage a blood feud, “You cannot naturalise an unnatural beast – a human abortion – a hellish freak. But you can exterminate it.” Nor was this call for genocide a mere linguistic flourish. Bottomley had put careful thought, into the mechanics of mass killing, “I would put in the field an army of Zulus and Basutos and other native and half-civilised tribes – and let them run amok in the enemy’s ranks. I would give them all the asphyxiating gas they wanted.”

John Bull was the best-selling weekly news magazine in Britain. “On the same day that Bottomley’s article appeared,” writes Panikos Panayi, the historian of the Anglo-German community, “riots broke out through the country.” Germans were attacked in Poplar, in Deptford, in Keighley and in Crewe. British nationals with German-sounding surnames found themselves having to advertise their Englishness in the press. “I, William Andrew Utz,” one such announcement read, “am a British-born subject. I was born at 42 High Street Poplar … I have been in the business of a butcher for many years, following my father in his long-established shop at the said 42 High Street Poplar.”

Smithfield porters hung signs from their necks: “No business transacted with Germans.” In Poplar crowds swarmed into the houses of those suspected of harbouring Germans. Bankers gathered on the steps of the Stock Exchange where a mass meeting passed a motion: “No Germans must be left in the City of London.”

Fostering hatred – and resisting it

The press was not alone in encouraging hatred. Brigadier-General Crozier wrote in 1915 of how army training had to be used, to break the widespread anti-war instincts of new recruits: “I, for my part, do what I can to alter completely the outlook, bearing and mentality of over 1,000 men … blood lust is taught for purposes of war in bayonet fighting itself and by doping the minds of all with propagandic poison. The German atrocities (many of which I doubt in secret), the employment of gas in action, the violation of French women and the ‘official murder’ of Nurse Cavell all help to bring out the brute-like bestiality which is so necessary for victory. The process of ‘seeing red’, which has to be carefully cultured if the effect is to be lasting, is elaborately grafted into the makeup of even the meek and mild… The Christian churches are the finest blood lust creators which we have and of them we make free use … The British soldier is a kindly fellow … It is necessary to corrode his mentality.”

Others, meanwhile, were fighting for a world without racism or war. East London was the base of the Sylvia Pankhurst and the suffragette left. The Women’s Dreadnought complained of unnamed newspaper magnates “fill[ing] their columns with articles intended to inflame the populace to anti-German riots, articles which consume ignorant, nervous, excitable people with a suspicious terror that transforms for them the poor Hoxton baker and his old mother into powerful spies, able at will to summon fleets of Zeppelins.” Two members of the East London Federation of the Suffragettes who had married German men found their homes under attack, while another member was hurt in her efforts to stop the rioting.

In West London, libertarian socialists organised a communist kitchen, deliberately staffed by both French and German workers. The unemployed themselves peeled potatoes, prepared the vegetables, and washed dishes, pots and pans. According to one regular diner, Rudolf Rocker, “It was wonderful to see German and French workers engaged together in this common work of help, while over on the continent millions of German and French proletarians were killing each other on the orders of their governments.”

[This is a taster for my new book, Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism, which will be published by Routledge on 24 November].