SEARCHLIGHT / HOPE NOT HATE /THE COUNTER-EXTREMISM RACKET
Scattered across this site, and in more detail in this section, you will find various references to Searchlight (the magazine/related organisation) and their former front campaign, ‘Hope Not Hate’ (hereafter HNH). Mostly, these references are critical–and given we are resolutely anti-fascist, that might strike some as strange, contradicting our aims. Therein lies a tale, however.
In the shadowy world which HNH/Searchlight inhabit, at the ‘business end’ of the tangled undergrowth where the secret state, media organisations, and fascists/anti-fascists collide, the ‘team’ as Searchlight used to style themselves have long been significant yet plausibly-deniable players/outlets for spook disinformation and all round dodginess. Suffice to say, anti-fascism, especially of a non state-compromised variety, was never high on Searchlight’s agenda, indeed it has often seemed their agenda to at the very least suborn, and latterly crush, such anti-fascism. A large claim, hopefully substantiated by the articles/further references in this part of the site. It might explain, though, why Searchlight, and even more HNH, were in the day so anxious to prevent street mobilisations against the English Defence League (EDL) and the likes of Blood & Honour–not as the result of reasoned reflection, but as the reflex actions of low-grade police pimps.
This section is very much a ‘work in progress’, and will be added to as time permits. We hope to include a segment listing where sources critical of HNH/Searchlight can be found–in time, some hitherto unavailable ones we will put online. Feel free to send us (anti-fascist) suggestions.
In the interim, especially as many will have only come across Searchlight via ‘Hope Not Hate’ (HNH) it might be a good idea to glance at the critique of HNH, extracted from Notes From the Borderland issue 9. This hopefully establishes the continuities between Searchlight and their former front HNH, and the extent to which this new form of ‘virtual politics’ raises troubling questions in itself, not least when the Obama Presidential Campaign in the USA, the BNP’s on-line efforts (before they became a will-chasing shell), and HNH used very similar software and often terminology.
However glitzy and web-wise Searchlight’s (and even more Hope Not Hate’s) current incarnations might be, there is no getting away from it–their politics remains, as it has always been, state-compromised to the core. There are virtually no depths to which Searchlight have not stooped to undermine, spy on, and help crush genuine Leftist dissent. If you doubt that for one minute, take a peek into the malevolent universe, and world-view, uncovered in ‘At War With The Truth’ (still available from our shop–click ‘Other NFB Publications’ once you get there), the introduction and foreword to which are summarised here, as too the antecedent ‘A Lie Too Far’, concerning the antics of Searchlight/state provocateur Tim Hepple (who later became Tim Matthews) and fellow Searchlight thug/racist Ray Hill. There are many incontrovertible sources for what he got up to, with Searchlight’s knowledge & connivance, not least extensive letters in Hepple’s own handwriting. The Hope Not Hate split from Searchlight was highly acrimonious (for the time-line see here EXCLUSIVE: INTRODUCTION & TIME-LINE TO HOPE NOT HATE VERSUS SEARCHLIGHT CIVIL WAR ARTICLE NFB 10)
Do not be fooled into thinking HNH are better than Searchlight: CEO Nick Lowles has recently shown he is just as much a lying sewer-rat as Gerry Gable: see About Nick Lowles ‘Codename Arthur’ (2021) With Special Reference To Vile Personal Attacks Therein (Larry O’Hara 4/5/24)
The 1999 Soho Nail-Bombing Scandal (see featured articles at top of Home Page) implicates both Gable and Lowles of course. Where HNH have been more successful is in hoovering up funds and building establishment connections: both with the security state (whereas Gable was a lowly errand-boy kept outside in the rain, Nick Lowles OBE is welcome inside) and money from rich donors as well as the state. Under a Starmer-led Labour government, Lowles will hope for even more preferment, and funding. The decline of the organised Far Right has precipitated HNH widening their range of targets, including peremptory demands that political parties (including the Tories) expel people they don’t like on often flimsy pretexts. How this is compatible with HNH’s charitable status is a very good question: though the Charity Commission will continue to turn two blind eyes, we are sure.
Just to show few things are new under the sun, savour this from highly-publicised text SEARCHLIGHT FOR BEGINNERS: EXTRACT (for the full publication visit the shop, same location). This deals with similarities between Searchlight’s two big stories/operations involving sinister far right mobilisation over the years–in the 1970s ‘Column 88’, the 1990s ‘Combat 18’. Over and aside the downright lying, mendacity and factual somersaulting revealed by these two stories alone, reading them the thought cannot fail to cross anybody’s mind–was Searchlight’s coverage of the English Defence League straightforward, and uncompromised by other agendas? We think the answer will be obvious. On past form, Searchlight (and more recently Hope Not Hate with National Action: on which see NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND – Issue 12) do their best to build a group up in the media and amongst potential supporters/opponents, using its activities as a reason (cover) for extending state powers, then much later purport to ‘reveal’ such a group was a honey trap for the state all along. They did this with C88 & C18. At the very least, an informed perusal of Searchlight’s past track record shows nothing Gerry Gable or the equally dishonest Nick Lowles (now HNH CEO) say on the subject of state connections of any far right (or indeed far left) groups should be given even a morsel of credibility.
The entire text of ‘Searchlight Fiction Pulped’ (SFP) is here online for the first time–albeit one for the connoisseur perhaps. It was written after a hysterical two page attack on Larry O’Hara in the January 1997 Searchlight (penned we believe by failed PhD student Craig Fowlie), which though a response to ‘Searchlight For Beginners’ signally failed to outline, never mind refute, one sentence therein. A true product of what Trotsky memorably termed the ‘Stalinist School of Falsification’. Although a historical offering, it has contemporary relevance because the tired lies and ludicrous claims SFP refutes in detail are still trotted out occasionally behind the scenes by Searchlight/their fellow-travellers/Hope Not Hate Head Hamster Nick Lowles in order to evade this or that argument raised in/by Notes From the Borderland.
This introduction has talked a lot about Searchlight with good reason: they are the poisoned well from which the now much higher profile Hope Not Hate has sprung. As it happens, NFB had a well-placed and courageous anti-fascist operative inside Searchlight when the internal friction led to outright civil war in 2011-12 between what is now Hope Not Hate and Searchlight. This has been extensively chronicled both in articles here and the definitive treatment in NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND – Issue 10 and NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND – Issue 11. There is also an accompanying critique of HNH’s #MoreInCommon campaign on this site.
Of course, both Searchlight (which after issue 496 in 2025 will pack up anyway) and Hope Not Hate are but two components of what can be called the ‘Counter-Extremism Racket’ whereby academics/pseudo-academics/spurious ‘think tanks’ prostrate themselves before anybody who will fund them, and compete with each other in calling for ever-more state interference in the political and digital domain. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue is one such among many, employing shallow fantasists like Julia Ebner to posture as an ‘expert’. More on these types later….
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SEARCHLIGHT / HOPE NOT HATE / CARR
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