Scary, dangerous and bad for your weekends: Going undercover with the far-right

By Shannon Keating

During the spring of 2023, undercover reporter Harry Shukman sat among a group of far-right campaigners in a fortified back patio belonging to Paul Golding, the Salford-based leader of Britain First, and he was terrified. Shukman had spent the day pamphleting for the party under a secret identity – his fellow pamphleteers knew him as Chris – while he wore a hidden camera. As the group sat around the high-walled, barbed-wire lined patio of Golding’s second home in Dartford, eating takeaway pizza as twilight fell, Golding was staring directly at Shukman’s chest. 

This was a man who had been previously jailed for aggravated harassment. “I felt so uncomfortable, like my heart was about to explode,” Shukman recalls. Golding was looking “dead at my chest, drilling his eyes in, and I felt myself get very hot, like, ‘Fuck, has he seen it?’” Immediately, Shukman began plotting his getaway, though he quickly realised with mounting horror that he was several doors away from the exit. There was “no way I could escape.”

To Shukman’s extraordinary luck, Golding, it turns out, was simply staring off into space. He had no idea that Shukman was in the midst of over a year spent deep undercover, investigating multiple far-right networks across the UK and Europe for the anti-racist and antifascist organisation HOPE not Hate. The first in a series of articles documenting Shukman’s sprawling investigation – which found a company dedicated to the advancement of junk race science has been secretly funded by a multimillionare US tech entrepreneur, among other revelations – was published this week, while a documentary, Undercover: Exposing the Far Right, will be streaming live on Channel 4 on Monday night. He’ll also be publishing a book next May with Chatto & Windus called The Year of the Rat.

If Shukman’s name rings a bell, that’s probably because you were a Miller back in 2021 and 2022, when he worked for us. Having previously been a reporter for The Times, he moved up from London to join the Mill team part-time, mainly as an editor. But he also did some reporting of his own, including a story about far-right figures harassing asylum seekers outside hotels which later became crucial to our understanding of the 2024 riots. In his non-Mill days, Shukman started a newsletter about the far-right, which then led to his decision to go undercover with HOPE Not Hate. 

Shukman tells me it took “hours and hours” to recover mentally and emotionally from that night at Golding’s house. Even on less eventful days, decompressing after pretending to be someone interested in dabbling in anti-immigrant racism took a lot out of him. “I never got used to it,” he says. For 15 months, he had nightmares almost every night about being exposed. But during all that time, no one across the far right world ever confronted him, though some people “certainly did have their suspicions.” Not even Shukman’s colleagues here at the Mill knew that he was also making regular trips down to London and around the country to infiltrate the far-right organisations gaining a disturbing level of ground in modern Britain.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Shukman became fascinated with the ways that “organic, hippie-type yoga people” were teaming up with the far-right to oppose and spread disinformation about the Covid vaccine. He quickly noticed that these groups were “intensely hostile” to journalists – people would either “ignore you, or tell you things that you knew weren't the truth”. He realised that were he to approach them as a “fellow traveller,” they “would tell you things they never would otherwise”. 

In October 2022, Shukman reached out to HOPE not Hate for advice on attending a far-right conference in London, since he knew the organisation had infiltrated this same group some years before. Out of that discussion bloomed a plan for a long-term investigative project. Shukman had gone undercover before, but never to such a significant extent. Essential to his success in this uncharted territory was his ‘handler’ at HOPE not Hate, senior researcher Patrik Hermansson, who’s an “absolute pro” at this kind of work, having gone undercover himself with what was then called the ‘alt-right’ in the US. (Hermansson had been at the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally in 2017, where he witnessed a white supremacist terrorist murder the peaceful protester Heather Heyer in a hit-and-run.) Shukman would take a day off from The Mill, pop on the train down to Euston and visit Hermansson at museum cafes and pubs, where together, over weeks of preparation, they constructed from whole cloth “the person I planned to be”. 

After deleting his social media profiles and taking down as many online photos of himself as he could find, some of the most essential preparation came in the tiniest of details. “You need to have biographical questions at your fingertips,” Shukman tells me. “You cannot hesitate. Do you have siblings? What’s your dad’s name? What did you do for your A levels, where did you go to uni, where did you grow up? Biographical questions need instant answers.” The more ideological and abstract aspects of his identity, interestingly, didn’t have to be so concrete. “One of Patrik’s great lessons was that it’s OK not to have a perfect answer to what you’re doing in these spaces,” says Shukman. Questions like: Why did you come here? What do you believe? Hermansson suggested that Shukman as Chris present himself as someone who’s relatively new to the scene, and curious what it’s all about. Chris has watched some far-right YouTubers who have piqued his interest. Chris is concerned about where the country is going. “There’s a perception in the far right that an infiltrator will be the most extreme person in the room,” Shukman says; they conjure visions of an FBI informant dropping into group chats and saying things like, “‘Hey guys, heard about any new hate crimes? What do you think about those Jews?’” Since the groups are so alert to the possibility of infiltration, it turns out being a “normal-seeming” layman gave Shukman the best possible cover. 

But that isn’t to say there weren’t many frightening moments. Besides that evening in Golding’s back patio, Shukman was once meeting with someone connected to the pronatalism movement when he took a video call under his real name – normally he’s careful to be logged in only to his Chris accounts while he’s undercover. Another time when he was with Britain First for a camping week in the Peak district – kind of like a “racist Glastonbury” – he had to make small talk in his car with former Chelsea hooligan Andy Frain, known as “Nightmare”, who’d once been imprisoned for seven years for slashing the throat of an undercover police officer. “I gave him a ride to the pub.” 

When I ask him about the psychological toll it must take to pretend to hold such vile views in order to ingratiate himself with white supremacists, Shukman quotes Ecclesiasticus 13:1: “He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled.” Put another way: “It is really nasty to go into these groups and talk and nod along. There’s no way to do it without getting your hands dirty.” One of the hardest things, he felt, was pamphleting for Britain First – actually disseminating these racist ideas in public – though he was heartened when he went up to one house and a woman leant out of her window, yelling at him to “Fuck off with your Nazi propaganda”. 

But it was also difficult for Shukman to “befriend people so that you can ultimately betray them”. “It’s hard to explain,” he says. Even though these were people who said and did incredibly racist things, they were still people, who told Shukman about their friends and love lives, their gardens and their holidays in Spain, their divorces, their parents getting old and sick. “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to empathise with them on some level,” Shukman says. “Even though, if they knew who you were…” 

One of the things Shukman discovered in his reporting is that one of the far right’s goals is moving the ‘Overton window’ — that is, changing the kinds of ideas deemed publicly acceptable — to include more explicit racism. He discovered that a Nazi-affiliated eugenics organisation called the Pioneer Fund, thought to be essentially defunct, is actually alive and well, having rebranded as the Human Diversity Foundation; the group includes a scientific racism research team and a publishing arm in the form of Aporia, a website that runs stories about “human biodiversity”(racist junk science that posits there are meaningful biological and intellectual differences between races). 

Are the HDF and other organisations succeeding in shifting public opinion? “Dispiritingly,” Shukman says, “certain aspects of scientific racism have taken hold in the mainstream.” Aporia’s predecessors in terms of white supremacist publishing, like Mankind Quarterly, were not very well read and were quite difficult to find, while Aporia’s popularity has grown to the extent that a Conservative MP, Neil O’Brien, approvingly shared one of their articles on his Substack last year about “The West’s Fertility Crisis”. Shukman points out that “discussions about IQ and genetics are also animating the American presidential contest”, with Donald Trump recently telling a conservative talk show host that “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” raising the spectre of Nazi eugenics. 

Shukman also went undercover inside the pronatalism movement encouraging people to have more babies – though only the right kind of people having the right kind of babies. Global figures as powerful as Elon Musk have scaremongered about declining birthrates leading to the collapse of society. But while the pronatalism movement at large paints itself as interested in increasing fertility wholesale, Shukman’s investigations have found that “the quantity of babies being born is less important than the genetic quality of their parents”. Shukman met undercover with the Collinses, a married white couple who used to be tech workers and venture capitalists but have now dedicated their lives to becoming the most famous faces of the pronatalism movement. Though they publicly disavow racism and reject the label of eugenicists, they believe not enough “smart” people are breeding and have endorsed the racist “Great Replacement” theory.

Reading Shukman’s reporting on the Collinses — who, earlier this year, published a podcast episode titled “Would Taking Away Women’s Right to Own Property Solve the Fertility Crisis?” — made me wonder what he’d discovered about the links in the far right between white supremacy and misogyny. “The statistics speak for themselves,” he told me: he estimated that about 90% of the people he met across various far-right networks were men. “It was six months before I met a woman for this project.” 

“The sexism in these groups is absolutely pervasive,” he says. “And in different ways. There would be people I met more in the ‘manosphere’, who listen to pickup artist podcasts, who practised ways they could hoodwink women into bed with them. Others were more ‘trad’ in their outlook, whether they claimed to venerate women as baby-making machines or whether they saw them as intellectually inferior creatures.” Being around “a barrage of regressive and violent views – it was depressing and dispiriting.”

One of the most significant ways the far-right is succeeding in making their more extreme views palatable to the mainstream is by scapegoating migrants during a cost-of-living crisis and blaming them for Britain’s decline. Did Shukman come away from this investigation with a better sense of how so many men are getting radicalised? “There are various explanations for radicalisation, some of them competing ones,” he says, though the one he favours most is called “significance quest theory”, or the idea that people’s needs for social standing and belonging can lead them to taking on extreme beliefs. People who are “knocked by a difficult experience” can lose sight of their own value in the world: maybe they’ve fallen into alcoholism, or their family was torn apart during a divorce. “Devastating setbacks” like that, Shukman says, “can shake our feeling of personal significance, and you want to get it back. And some people will seek to get it back in extreme ways.” 

For Shukman, one of the hardest things about this whole experience was being unable to tell most people in his life what he was doing for so many weekends over so many months. His partner knew about his secret identity, but most of his friends and family didn’t. “It was actually hard. As a journalist I’m a natural blabbermouth, I want to tell everyone everything.” Now that he’s turned off Chris’s old phone, where some of his former confidants had started reaching out after his investigation went live, he feels “enormously relieved” to be done with it all — and glad to be himself again.