When Lois Perry video-thanked UKIP members for somewhat unexpectedly electing her as their new leader, she revealed that her focus would be on “future, family, food”. In fact, a fourth “F” would dominate her immediate plans – fleeing for the hills.

What spooked her into quitting after mere days at the helm remains unclear. It can’t have been the shoddy state of UKIP’s finances, because that is common knowledge from its published accounts. And, in any case, Lois is no stranger to iffy-looking balance sheets.

Perry swam into the ken of UKIP’s movers and shakers because of her business, CAR26, a primarily website-based anti-net zero and anti-ULEZ campaign, periodically pumped up by appearances on any nutter-friendly platform, especially GB News.

But, in pure business terms, what kind of set-up is it? A glance at the company’s micro-accounts raises more questions than answers. CAR26’s first accounts statement, covering the period to 30 September 2022, showed little signs of the business having clocked up any day-to-day earnings. What it did show was that someone had pumped about £100,000 into the company. A listing of £108,500 under “Bank loans and overdrafts” implies “no real mystery here”. Well, beyond the puzzle of why a bank would lend that much money to an enterprise with no obvious earning capacity.

With the whole sum marked as “Falling due within one year”, anyone reading these accounts was merely left on tenterhooks regarding how CAR26 was going to suddenly generate the kind of turnover required to repay these loans.

In the event, watchers were on those tenterhooks for longer than they might have anticipated. The accounts to September 2022 were filed on 4 April 2023. Early April 2024 came and went with no fresh accounts, as did late April, and May. Finally, on 7 June, after a 14-month hiatus, we got the answers. Kind of.

Far from showing the £100K as having been repaid, the accounts made up to 30 September 2023 declare that bank loans and overdrafts had more than doubled, to £219,221. Which bank, you have to wonder, is allowing this apparently almost turnover-free business not only to extend a £100K loan into a second year, but doubling down with another £100K loan on top of it?

Also of interest among the sparse details in the two years’ worth of accounts is that Perry has felt free to lend herself chunks of the company’s money. Well, really chunks of the bank’s money, we suppose, since the company barely seems to have any. During 2022, CAR26 generously allowed Lois an interest-free loan of about £40,000, the majority (but far from all) of which was repaid. In 2023, she borrowed another £47,000, and again most of this was repaid. She is shown as of 30 September 2023 as owing the company just under £15K.

We are not, of course, suggesting that there is anything untoward going on in CAR26’s operations, but we do think that, one way and another, it is a rather odd kind of company.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Searchlight

If chopping and changing leaders were a competition, UKIP would be running the Tories a close second, though the calibre of its candidates is even less savoury. Tony Peters charily inspects the vipers slithering in and out of the pit.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Searchlight

When the previous issue of Searchlight went to press, we were confidently predicting the victory of veteran UKIP member and ex-MEP Bill Etheridge in the party leadership election that had just taken place. So were most of the membership.

So it was dropped jaws all round, then, when it was announced that his only-recently-joined election rival Lois Perry had won. And not just won – but stormed it by taking not much short of 80% of the vote. It is fair to say that the bulk of the members, including Etheridge, were stunned.

Among the very few who appeared not to be surprised was UKIP chairman and returning officer, Ben “Rogue Builder” Walker, who has yet to publish the numbers of actual votes cast. This may be to conceal the parlous state of the party membership figures – but, whatever the turnout, Perry pulled off a bit of a coup. Etheridge was favoured by most other senior party veterans. Perry, on the other hand, is an anti‑net zero campaigner who presents as, well, a bit witless.

She may have shown other qualities, however, which would have endeared her to Walker, who was probably missing a female touch around the office. A number of charming, vivacious young females parachuted into HQ as the chairman’s appointments in the past couple of years have not lasted long.

Patrons Co-ordinator (and clairvoyant) Joanna Grzesiak and general secretary Treasure Okwu each survived only a few months before packing up and slipping quietly away. And, of course, there was Rebecca Jane, the former deputy leader, also appointed by Walker, and the most prominent departure, who used the election announcement as an opportunity to fire off a salvo of allegations about Walker’s alleged libidinousness and his less-than-honourable intentions towards her when he appointed her. She even suggested that Walker held a bit of a candle, so to speak, for Lois.

Politically, Perry’s election promised to drag UKIP further and faster down the conspiracy rabbit hole. Whereas Etheridge was an old school anti‑immigration, anti-Europe traditionalist, Perry is right up there with the climate-denying, anti-ULEZ, anti-15-minute cities, anti-net zero conspiracy-obsessed nut jobs. Up until now she has been running the pro-car lobby group Car26 and has said she is not that bothered by immigration.

In a previous incarnation, she was the South East representative of Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party and appeared regularly on GB News. She also claimed that she “had a moment” with Boris Johnson – “something could have happened, but it didn’t …”

Barnacles galore

Only a few days after Perry’s enthronement, Walker was discovered not to have been a Royal Navy Petty Officer, as has oft been reported. Searchlight revealed that “Barnacle” Ben’s Royal Navy discharge paperwork shows him as having left the service not as a PO, but at the (lower) rank of LSA.

Now, to be fair, we have yet to see any evidence that Walker has publicly described himself as a PO. But other people have made the inflated claim on his behalf. It was first spotted in September 2017 in “Team UKIP United” (TUU) press releases, where he was described as “Former Royal Navy Petty Officer Ben Walker”.

Team UKIP United was a “slate” of four UKIP members in the Autumn 2017 internal party elections. Although he was the slate’s putative UKIP chairman, Walker was very much the junior man in TUU. Jane Collins and David Coburn (the other half of the leader-deputy ticket) were both Members of the European Parliament.

So it is possible that the two officer grade candidates ran the whole show, while the other-ranks Walker was kept in the dark about matters such as press releases and did not know how he was being described. In the end, it probably did not matter very much. The slate picked up a little over 4% of the vote.

But just a week or so after that election, Barnacle Ben was quoted extensively by RT UK (often referred to as Russia Today) about his thoughts on the Royal Navy, which he compared unfavourably to “the fishing and rowing boats during our retreat from Dunkirk.” The Putin mouthpiece described Walker as “a petty officer who served in Afghanistan”.

This seemed, to us, to be pushing the envelope too far on two fronts. Walker was not a petty officer. He was also not in Afghanistan. While he was aboard (counting potatoes or whatever) his ship, the destroyer HMS Southampton, it was deployed in the Gulf screening the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious.

This certainly counts as being part of the Afghanistan Campaign – and probably entitles him to the Campaign Medal – but in Afghanistan kind of implies coming face to face with the Taliban, and he certainly did not do that. He cannot even claim to have been in Afghan territorial waters. Afghanistan is landlocked.

But while we have seen no evidence that Walker has actively claimed to have been a petty officer or to have been in Afghanistan, nor have we seen any evidence that he has ever tried to correct any of the references to him that he knows as well as we do to be utter … er … barnacles. Perhaps it is time for him to at least set the record straight.

Pointless posturing

Then came the general election. UKIP’s first intervention, under the new leadership of Perry, was to announce that it was withdrawing from seven seats to help out Nigel Farage and Reform. This was complete tosh: UKIP did not have candidates for most of these seats, was not going to find any candidates, and two of the seats no longer existed anyway.

But even the spirit of the undertaking lasted no longer than close of nominations four days later.

When the candidate lists were announced, it turned out that UKIP was now not only running against Farage himself in Clacton – where, to be fair, no undertaking had actually been given – but also in Barnsley North and Barnsley South, which last year replaced Barnsley Central and Barnsley East following boundary changes.

The latter two were on the UKIP withdrawal list, but UKIP pulled the crafty trick of outsourcing the successor seats to their allies in the English Democrats, with whom it was bound in an officially registered electoral partnership called the Patriots Alliance. And in both cases the opponents included Reform UK.

Then, bursting with excitement that “my friend” Nigel Farage was running after all, Perry announced that UKIP would be standing a candidate, in Clacton, against Farage himself.

Perry’s election and the controversy surrounding it then sparked a series of high-profile resignations and departures from senior posts in the party, the most notable, at that stage, being (retired) Squadron Leader Peter Richardson and Julie Carter, who both resigned as UKIP “spokespeople” and then from the party itself.

Carter, from a longstanding UKIP-supporting family and until November an NEC member and the party’s Education Spokesperson, was previously the UKIP election candidate in Ealing Central and Acton. Richardson was the party’s Defence and Veterans Spokesperson, and only last year its candidate in the Somerset and Frome by-election.

There are rumours that both were troubled by recent coverage of UKIP’s internal affairs, most notably in Searchlight, and that, when some dissident elements started circulating a dossier of revelatory articles, their thoughts and intentions crystallised and they decided to call it a day.

Gone so soon …

On 15 July, came the first bombshell: Perry, in a small-hours tweet, announced that she was resigning as Leader, citing health issues.

Although the timing was dramatic, in the middle of the election campaign, it was not altogether surprising. Recent events had betrayed a possible division of loyalties: only two days earlier Perry had a “lovely lunch” with Reform UK leader Farage, for whom she made no secret of her drooling admiration and whom she endorsed in the election, even though UKIP was standing in the same Clacton seat. Then she publicly endorsed renegade Tory MP Lee Anderson, also running for Reform UK.

It was also never clear, when she stood for the party leadership, that she fully understood the snake pit she was jumping into, not least of all:

• The increasing financial and organisational opacity of the party
• The allegations of libidinous behaviour swirling around Walker
• Walker’s sacking as a magistrate for misleading the Ministry of Justice about his previous convictions, and
• The criminal convictions of other party members such as Dan Morgan, convicted in a major fraud case for robbing vulnerable people of their savings, but still allowed to play a prominent role in the party in south Wales.

Then, the second bombshell: only days after Perry resigned, former deputy leader Rebecca Jane used the good offices of Searchlight to publish an open letter to the UKIP membership. It was an excoriating attack on Walker and the direction in which the party was heading. “UKIP is over” she said, “its members are simply lining one man’s pocket.

Anyone left?

For Etheridge, Perry’s defeated leadership election rival, it was also time to speak out. Having kept his counsel and remained loyally silent since the result was announced, he now let rip. Interviewed on the right-wing online Freeman Report, he poured scorn on the idea that Perry had been elected fairly.

“I’m prepared to believe that a large number of activists and people involved in the party appeared to have voted for me, yet the vote turned out to be about 80% to 20% to Lois …

“So I’m prepared to believe that a lot of people who aren’t actually active members must have voted, and all voted for Lois. I’m prepared to believe that …

“I believe, actually, that Father Christmas sometimes delivers my Xmas presents and that when kids lose a tooth, the tooth fairy puts a little penny under them …”

And when it was put to him by host James Freeman: “… it looks like Farage and Lee Anderson have managed to convince Lois that UKIP don’t stand a chance and so she should collapse the party and put the party into disarray, right before the general election”, Etheridge went full Francis Urquhart. “What an interesting theory. I couldn’t possibly comment on that theory, other than to say I find it fascinating …”

As the election results were counted, it became clear that UKIP had polled miserably: some 6,000 votes nationwide divided among 26 candidates.

The resignations continued: Pat Mountain, UKIP’s party director, resigned her party positions, then from the party, and then as a director of UKIP Ltd. Of all the recent departures, this was one of the most significant. Mountain had been a member of UKIP for more than a decade. She was interim leader during the 2019 general election and deputy leader for a period after that, and was a party candidate in local council, parliamentary and European elections on numerous occasions. Mountain was also one of the group of “plotters” who delivered the chairmanship to Walker in 2020.

Most recently UKIP has lost Home Affairs Spokesman Steve Unwin, who quit saying he does not have the time or the inclination to be involved any more, and Agriculture Spokesperson Pat Bryant, who died of lung cancer in July and whom they are struggling to replace.

These are significant losses. Bryant was a longstanding senior member, and for the most part blindly loyal. There were signs, however, that before she died the scales had fallen from her eyes and she made no secret of her loathing for Chairman Ben Walker.

Unwin was also a veteran of the party and is believed to have quit because, like so many others, he lost faith entirely in the leadership vote which led to the election of Perry.

Down in the gutter

So, as we approach the deadline for this issue, the party is shrivelling on the vine and members continue to leave in droves – some reports suggest they are now in the low hundreds.

Perry has been replaced by Nick Tenconi, brought over from Turning Point UK, who joined the party only weeks before his appointment first as deputy leader, then leader. That itself is a subject of much discontent among the remaining members.

A cunning and nasty piece of work by all accounts, Tenconi tweeted two years ago, describing himself as a “huge fan” of Kyle Rittenhouse, the US right-winger who shot dead two people at a demonstration, and who was acquitted of murder in 2021, and has been a darling of the extreme right ever since.

 As leader, Tenconi lost no time in sitting down with Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox, Katie Hopkins and their ilk to discuss working together, in the process dragging UKIP even further down into the gutter.

It’s all such a far cry from forcing David Cameron to hold a referendum.

Caption

‘A lovely bunch’ Lois Perry (top) reigned over UKIP for even less time than Liz Truss was Conservative leader, to be replaced by blow‑in Nick Tenconi (right), but Ben Walker (bottom left) is the man with his hand on the tiller (and the bank accounts)

National Rebirth Party leader Alek Yerbury and his partner Katie Fanning have ramped up their bitter public dispute with rival nazi outfit Patriotic Alternative, of which Yerbury was once himself a member.

Yerbury has already seriously cheesed off Patriotic Alternative leader Mark Collett by ridiculing PA’s strategy of building white homeland communities, and then successfully challenging him (below) to an online debate about the future of the nazi movement where Collett came a clear second.

Now Yerbury has become a regular target of abuse online from more lumpen and conspiracy obsessed fascist elements who see any criticism of far right comrades as something akin to treason, and find in Yerbury’s military background sufficient cause to suspect him of being a ‘state actor’.

Things got heated a few weeks ago when Yerbury’s partner, Katie ‘Sanity’ Fanning reported an apparent PA member to the police for threatening her child, prompting Collett to describe both her and Yerbury, who defended her actions, as “grasses”.

And Fanning has since done little to repair relations, with her constant snipy attacks at PA Deputy leader Laura Towler, for whom she has a peculiar loathing and whom she has taken to calling ‘Fatty Towler’.

Yerbury’s latest move is to launch a moral crusade, denouncing general standards of behaviour in the nazi movement. Of course, we all know that this has always been a movement populated largely by grifters, thugs, and criminals; indeed, this is something to which we have been calling attention since, well, since Searchlight was launched close on 50 years ago. But Yerbury has plainly has PA in his sights and is not pulling any punches:

“The culture in nationalism for the last decade has been one of, ‘Anything goes, as long as the person says the right things,’ and it’s how the movement has ended up with problems like paedophilia, thievery and fraud…”

Let’s just stop and run that again: “paedophilia, thievery and fraud…”

These are serious charges, and historically true, but this is new coming from an aspiring leader of the nazi movement, and there’s little doubt that the current target is PA, one of whose members has for years been the subject of stories – which he denied – that he tried to entice a 15-year-old girl to his hotel room for sex at a conference.

The charge was echoed even more clearly by Fanning only this week, when she posted about the case of the nazi rioter in Manchester who was revealed to be a serial child sex offender.

“I hate peadophiles (sic)” she wrote, “National Socialists should not tolerate nonces of any kind.

“Including those who take underage girls back to their hotel rooms”

As for the “thievery and fraud” – we need look no further than Fanning’s recent rant about Laura Towler’s crowd funder for ‘political prisoners’ jailed for their part in the riots, which Towler claims has already raised £10000.

Fanning wrote: “If it wasn’t bad enough that certain peoples like to pretend they’re the most persecuted peoples in the world as a means of grift.

“They now want to exploit the fact that other peoples are being persecuted to increase their own grift fund…

“How despicable is that?

“An absolutely disgusting display by fatty Towler once again

“It’s not going to go to what you think it’s going to go towards or the people you think it’s going to help”

Fanning, incidentally, announced last weekend “A rare livestream appearance from myself” on far-right channel The Writers Block, hosted by white nationalist Nicholas Jeelvy. She was to discuss “the UK protests, their aftermath and the legal fallout that’ll inevitably follow”.

Now this would be an especially appealing gig for Fanning who fancies herself as a bit of a legal whizz, though in truth she’s more akin to the barrack room variety. So it’s sad to report that such pearls of jurisprudential wisdom as she may have spent the weekend polishing up were rather lost on the national socialist masses. An audience of only 6 was recorded watching her performance and, as two of these were from Searchlight and another was in all likelihood her partner and party boss Yerbury, we can deduce that the real audience was, well, bugger all, m’lud.

This article appears in the Summer issue of Searchlight

On Monday 29 July, a teenage boy armed with a knife entered a Taylor Swift-themed holiday dance class in Southport and attacked children and adults. Three young girls were killed, others seriously wounded. It was a terrible crime and a dreadful tragedy. A time for grief and mourning.

But some had other ideas. Almost at once far-right agitators and “influencers” went into online overdrive claiming that the attacker was a Muslim and a migrant who had arrived in the country on a boat last year. Some claimed he was Somali, others published an Arabic-sounding name they claimed was his.

All of this was false.

It triggered an outpouring of anti-Muslim hatred and violence that did not abate even when it was revealed that the accused was a 17-year-old, born and bred in Cardiff, whose parents had come to Britain from Rwanda. In other words, he was just as British as Rishi Sunak or Kemi Badenoch. Or Bukayo Saka. And he was far more likely to be Christian than Muslim. That meant nothing to the Islamophobes. The anti-Muslim campaign of hatred that they had dreamed of for years was unleashed and was not to be quelled easily.

The day after the killings, Southport itself was the scene of serious disorder, as racists launched an attack on a local mosque. Police who tried to hold a line defending the building were subjected to a brutal, sustained assault with bricks, masonry, wheelie bins, traffic cones and fireworks from around 1,000 racist thugs. Dozens of officers were injured. From then on, similar outbreaks of violence continued unabated for over a week: in Westminster first, and then the following weekend and subsequent days, in towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland.

So who was behind it?

Fascist groups including Patriotic Alternative (PA) and Britain First, who have done their damnedest to incite such angry racism for years, were secretly whooping with delight at what was taking place. But let’s not make the mistake of believing that they actively organised it.

Some members of these groups were spotted at particular incidents (no one wears a Free Sam Melia T-shirt at random!), but by and large they were just piggybacking events that were perhaps more football-hooligan flash mob in nature.

These parties (and especially their leaders) are very happy to stand back and let events take their course, without suffering any legal repercussions themselves, and without seeing their small memberships depleted by long prison sentences. And all the time, of course, wringing their hands and saying: “We warned you this would happen…”

PA Deputy Leader Laura Towler, for instance, the wife of race-hate jailbird Sam Melia, went online to specifically deny the group had organised anything.

For Britain First’s Paul Golding it was the predictable script: “I don’t condone violence, but can you blame them in Southport for attacking the police…?”

The British Democrats also sought to distance themselves from the violence: “While protesting and demonstrating are within our rights, we must not allow our anger or outside influence to turn the protest into a riot.”

But don’t be misled. This arse-covering blather was purely for public consumption. They may not have been orchestrating things, but privately they were delighted at developments.

And even out on the further reaches of the right, there was – predictably – nothing like unanimity.

Dover fascist Steve Laws, who was arrested at the London thugfest on the Wednesday, was disappointed “to see our own disavow the people willing to do what was necessary” (translation: attacking the Southport Islamic Society Mosque and battering the police).

But Peter Rushton, Deputy Editor of the neo-nazi umbrella outfit Heritage and Destiny, asked: “And just how does a bunch of rioters attacking a mosque (in response to a crime committed by someone with no apparent connection whatever to Islam), or burning a police car, take us any closer to getting our country back? Wasn’t last night a step backwards?”

Alek Yerbury, leader of the emergent National Rebirth Party, denounced the Southport rioters as “feral”, writing the morning after: “By all accounts, there is significant collateral damage to the local population, with gardens destroyed, property smashed and even a shop looted.

“Therefore my recommendation to nationalists in Merseyside is to go to the street in question and offer assistance to the predominantly white British population there in remedying that collateral damage.”

If you want to apportion blame for the rioting, then most of the opprobrium must fall squarely on the sun lounger-surfing Tommy Robinson, his sidekick Danny Tommo and their supposedly more “respectable” enablers such as Laurence Fox, Katie Hopkins and UKIP ersatz leader Nick Tenconi.

Those last three were at “The Fugitive’s” Trafalgar Square rally two days before the Southport killings, giving Robinson’s hate-filled activities their shabby seals of approval. Even before that, they had been lionising him on social media. They bear a heavy responsibility.

When the Southport murders were reported, they lost no time joining in peddling the lie-filled narrative doing the far-right rounds, that the alleged killer was a Muslim and an illegal migrant.

L to R: Katie Hopkins, Laurence Fox, Nick Tenconi

“Hatie” Katie Hopkins: “His name is Ali al Alketi… The police are… covering up for illegals.”

Laurence “Looza” Fox: “Enough of this. We need to remove Islam from Great Britain. Completely and entirely.”

Nick Tenconi alleged that the Southport killer was acting “under orders”.

And then there was Nigel Farage.

On the Wednesday, this irredeemable wretch of a man went on TV to ask if the public was being deceived about the motive for the Southport attack. Like other attacks, he said, the police have said it was “non-terror related”. Why, he asked, were we always told that such attacks were “non-terror related”.

“I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us. I don’t know the answer to that, but it is a fair and legitimate question…”

Let’s bounce that back and ask: “Is Nigel Farage a child molester? We don’t know the answer to that, but it is a fair and legitimate question…”

Neither of those is, in fact, even remotely a “fair and legitimate question” because, of course, there is not the faintest shred of evidence to support either proposition. Both are false. It is just an utterly dishonest way of floating a scurrilous suggestion in the hope that it will gain some traction.

Days later, interviewed by Tom Swarbrick on LBC, Farage doubled down, claiming that he was simply echoing questions being raised by prominent people online, and that the identity of the attacker should have been made known immediately, as it was, for instance, in the case of the London Bridge attackers in 2017.

What he omitted to mention was that the London Bridge attackers were all shot dead at the scene and would never face trial. The Southport attacker was in custody and was, in any case, a young person whose anonymity at this stage was protected by law. But then, Farage was never the sort of person to let the facts discourage him from outright deceit. He ploughed on presenting this as concealment by… well, whoever.

And when challenged about the “prominent” people who were the sources for these claims, he came up with just one name: Andrew Tate, the misogynist “influencer” currently facing charges of rape and human trafficking in Romania. It was not until August 5 that Farage issued a statement deploring the violence. And, even then, he seemed more concerned about the fact some people were calling these dreadful events “the Farage riots”.

In the background, of course, is the poisonous influence of ‘respectable’ politicians like Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, and other leading conservatives who have relentlessly cranked up fear and hatred towards migrants and asylum seekers for their own malign ends. The widespread acceptance of the message peddled by the likes of Farage, Hopkins and Fox has been reliant on the medium of 14 years of bigoted government.

Although Braverman looks now to be ploughing a different furrow, the noises coming from several of the candidates for the Conservative Party leadership prompt a feeling of weary resignation that we are in for more of the same from the Tories.

But the men who bear more responsibility than most are Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) and his mate and right-hand man, Danny Tommo. Tommo (real name Daniel Thomas) is a criminal lowlife with a conviction for attempted kidnap at knifepoint. He has become, more than ever, Robinson’s UK representative since Robinson fled the country the day before Southport.

Yaxley-Lennon (left) and Danny Tommo (Daniel Thomas)

It was Tommo who broadcast the first call to riot online on the Monday night. It was directed to his 68,000 YouTube followers and thousands more on Twitter, many of them their mates in various hooligan gangs and football firms round the country – the dregs of the now disbanded English Defence League – and was the rallying call to which the racist hooligans and far-right thugs responded.

Just recall what he said, filmed fuming in his car:

“Every city has to go up.

“Get prepared. Be ready. We have to.

“It has to go off in different cities.

“We have to show them we’ve had enough.

“I’m ready to go. I know that a lot of you are. I’m speaking to other people at the moment.

“We’re ready to go. We are, literally, ready to go.

“Just get ready.”

It goes without saying, though, that when it did “go off” in Southport, Tommo was nowhere to be seen.

He it was who also helped launch the call for another demonstration in London on Wednesday night, as did Robinson from afar. This, too, ended in violence and mayhem, but Tommo – predictably – was not among the 100 or so arrested. According to witnesses, at the first sign of trouble he legged it. The following weekend towns and cities in England and Northern Ireland were subjected to sometimes terrifying outbreaks of racist‑inspired violence. Property was destroyed, police officers were battered and injured, and communities, especially minority communities, were left traumatised and terrified.

And it wasn’t just mosques that were targeted: in Liverpool, a library and community hub were destroyed. In Sunderland, the offices of the Citizens’ Advice Bureau were burnt out. The true face of fascism was being revealed: racist yes, but also the deadly enemy of ordinary, decent, working people.

A few days later, Tommo’s video was taken down from YouTube (“by the uploader”), but not before Searchlight – and, we imagine, many others – had recorded it for posterity and for possible consideration by a jury. Tommo has tried to say that any suggestion he tried to incite riots is absurd and that he’d urged demonstrators to be calm and peaceful.

The simple question is: Which bit of “Every city must go up” is a plea for calm?

We trust the police will not delay too long before knocking on his door and inviting him to help them with their inquiries.

Robinson also started to panic. Two days before the Southport killings he had headlined an anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rally of some 15,000‑20,000 people in London, the second such rally in two months. He was then due to appear in court in London on the Monday morning to answer a charge of contempt of court for which he faced a likely jail sentence.

On the Sunday, however, in a farcical series of events, he was first arrested at the Eurotunnel in Kent while trying to leave the country and charged with an offence under the Terrorism Act. Then, unaccountably released on unconditional bail, he promptly headed to St Pancras Station and jumped on a Eurostar train to Europe. Tracked down to a luxury holiday complex in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, he proceeded to post a series of increasingly eye-popping and desperate rants online, whining: “They’re coming to get me…They want to lock me up”, and then directly threatening the families of journalists who dared to investigate him.

The man of many aliases – but whose real middle name is “Gutless” – also tried distancing himself from his many incendiary online rants about Muslims and Islam, and from the criminal acts of those who attacked police officers whilst chanting his name. “We will not win our country back by throwing rocks. I fully understand your anger & I stand with the heartbroken & devastated community in Southport…”

A community whose heartbreak he and his vile chums had added to immeasurably.

Then, having been caught off-guard by the speed with which events had unfolded after Southport (and that is not intended as a criticism), the anti-racist movement stirred itself. Local racist rallies mobilised anonymously online were met on the weekend after the Southport attack with decent, if patchy, responses from local anti-racists.

Over the next few days, the movement mustered the most impressive response to racism and fascism that this country has seen since the days of the Anti-Nazi League in the 1970s and 1980s.

When an anonymous post appeared that first weekend with a thinly veiled call for an attack on an Islamic centre in Belfast, Searchlight called for anti-fascists to turn out to physically protect the building. When a hit list of solicitors offices and immigration advice agencies was posted a few days later, calling for them to be attacked on August 7, that is exactly what the movement did. Anti-racists in their thousands turned out all over the country to surround and protect those targeted offices, in a massive, inspiring gesture of solidarity and support to the communities – and those helping them – who had come under such sustained attack over the previous ten days.

Huge crowds of decent folk turned out in their home towns and cities, seizing back the racists’ slogan and themselves saying “Enough is Enough”. Even the police were moved to comment that this had a major effect in turning back the racist tide. Special credit must go to Stand Up To Racism for pulling out all the stops and achieving such a magnificent, historic response.

The rapid processing of racist rioters through the justice system also had a salutary effect: sentencing was brought forward for guilty pleas and on several occasions televised live from court. Reports of grown men – oh, so brave a few days earlier, out in a mob throwing bricks or attacking passers-by – crying in the dock as they were sent down for two or three years will hopefully have the deterrent effect that was needed and intended.

For the moment, the tide has been turned. But the pressure against the fascists and their followers must be kept up in the following days, weeks and months. They have been driven back and marginalised, but they have certainly not gone away. And nor will we.

¡No pasaran!