Let me tell you about hate.

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“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”

— James Baldwin

“I had just grown tired of all of this. More pertinently, on a personal level, I had grown tired of spending my time fighting those battles in the country of my birth. Naïvely wishful as it seems, I had thought that there would by now have been a better public understanding of why so many immigrants seek to come to the United Kingdom. I had thought that there would be a greater level of awareness about the British Empire and its historical role in shaping the world as we see it today. But I was wrong, and to that extent I had to admit some form of defeat.”

— Musa Okwonga

**Note: there’s a racist term in this post. Just so you know.

In that sweet spot of childhood, old enough to start forming memories but not quite old enough to create the events that precede them, experiences are stored without enough context to understand their significance. You see a replica World War 2 plane fly very low over your back garden and think it’s a normal event that happens to everyone (this really did happen to me).

In those fuzzy days of the 80s, my life in a middle English town was like that easily portrayed on television and in films. Rows of tightly packed terraced houses, curved and heavy Ford cars on the streets, corner shops selling paper bags of sweets and the local pub, rarely more than five minutes walk, selling cheap pints of lager and bitter.

My dad would go to our local pub often, a few pints with his mates after work, especially at the end of the week. Turn right out of our house, walk about two hundred paces, turn right again, and you were there. An old British boozer facing out from the corner of two roads, brass fittings, wooden furniture and all that.

On more than one occasion, my dad unexpectedly appeared at home midway through his evening at the pub, marched into our kitchen, grabbed his old hockey stick and stormed out again.

Now, I never saw my dad play hockey. He was over six feet tall and strong, the kind of strong you become when you only do manual work, but I never thought of him as sporty. In fact, I never saw him play any sport or do exercise of any kind other than work and walk.

So I’d wonder, in the way a seven-year-old does, why he was coming home for his hockey stick in the middle of the evening. The next day, one of my brothers would tell me. “There was a fight at the pub, someone started on dad and the others. That’s why he came home for his hockey stick, to beat them up.”

I was slightly puzzled by this because the hockey stick was a sorry-looking thing, the white tape grip tape peeling off from the top, and the wood all faded. Still, it was solid timber transported all the way from northern India along with my dad, so I supposed it carried some purchase when swung in earnest.

The undertone to all this, sometimes made explicit, was that my dad or one of his mates would have been racially abused in the pub. Being Sikhs and being working men too, this was not something they were going to turn the other cheek to. Pride at stake, dignity at stake, safety at stake too.

I just assumed that all this was the norm, and to some extent it was, throughout my childhood. You’re walking down the street, you get called a Paki (or something just as malicious), and you either stand your ground or you run. I always did the latter. I had no hockey stick, nor any instinct to use it, and I wasn’t much of a fighter.

It’s hard to say for sure how things like this shaped me, only that they certainly did. Kids in these situations develop a strong radar for dangerous situations and people, and I certainly did. That’s not to say the radar isn’t sometimes oversensitive or gives false readings, but you get pretty good at reading people, their real intent, the ‘vibe’ they give off.

I was no different. I can smell malicious intent a mile off, particularly when it’s relating to race. Growing up and living with racism imbues you with an education and instincts you would prefer not to have, things like spotting subtly coded racist language or noticing the double standards in which stories are told in the media and which are absent or obscured.

Nowadays, this intent is increasingly dressed up in sophisticated narratives about things like migration, national identity, and religion. And once again, there are always things worthy of debate in these theme but what modern racists do quite well is create binary arguments or false intractable choices: if you don’t believe immigration is only a problem then you must be someone who believes in open borders; if you don’t denounce all migrants for the actions of a few, you’re someone who’s ok with violent crimes.

I say this messaging is sophisticated, but it’s not really. It’s convincing enough if you’ve never really explored the history of countries like the UK and the US, or questioned why they have so many migrants from other parts of the world. It’s persuasive too if you’ve never looked at some basic data about migrant contributions to UK society or questioned things like why almost a quarter of NHS staff are born overseas (clue: shortage of British doctors & nurses - UK tuition fees, student debt & housing costs vs the salaries the NHS pays).

This is not to say that things like immigration are not up for debate; they absolutely are when done in good faith and based on some actual reality. It is, quite understandably, easy to blame the Other or outsider when things get really hard, especially when you’ve been drip-fed hateful narratives for decades. To people like me, though, we can not only see that the Emperor is wearing no clothes but also that he has some quite unpleasant slogans tattooed on his body.

Something new is happening now, though. In the last year, I’ve had three conversations with people who told me that they think the far-right activist and violent criminal, Tommy Robinson, has some important ideas and is worth listening to.

All three of these people would comfortably fit the description of middle-class, educated and materially successful. Two of them, one of whom has never lived in the UK, suggested I should take off my blinkers and be less prejudiced about someone like Robinson.

I’m fairly certain that none of these people knew much about Tommy Robinson five years ago. I’m also fairly certain they were unaware that I’ve known about him since around 2012 because he sits at the intersection of several things I’ve long had an interest in: football, politics, racism and hooliganism.

None of these people would think of themselves as endorsing racist views, which only adds to the curious situation in which they’re openly supporting the views of someone like Robinson. This is a man who is known by a fake name (‘Tommy Robinson’ is a name he adopted from a notorious Luton Town football hooligan; his real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), has eight criminal convictions including two for violent assault (the first of which was kicking a police officer in the head), has become popular for expressing and platforming hateful views about Muslims, migrants and asylum seekers, and is taking money from far-right sources in the US, Russia and Israel.

So even setting aside his views for a moment, part of me wants to scream, “This is your guy? This is the guy you think is leading the charge to save Western civilisation, the one who spread a conspiracy theory online about a 15-year-old schoolboy, leading to him and his family having to leave his school and town, and he later had to admit in court it was a lie? The guy who was arrested for leading a brawl of 100 football fans? The guy who was arrested for using a fake passport and convicted of mortgage fraud? THIS IS YOUR GUY??”

So something else is happening here, and at least part of it is how people consume information and what it has done to their ability to reason and make judgments. All three of these people referenced YouTube videos they had watched, ones that portray Robinson as a heroic figure leading a crusade against the corruption of European civilisation. A reminder here: these were middle-class and middle-aged people I was speaking to.

This is how hateful ideas really spread, especially in the world of algorithms and social media. It is not just a hardcore of ill-informed, homogenous and oblivious people pushing a single narrative; it is millions of narratives, constantly mutating and adapting to speak to different audiences, with highly selective emotive triggers delivered through rational arguments.

These plausible and intelligent-sounding pieces of content are absorbed by people who think they are learning something special that helps them see through the noise; it reinforces the idea that they are smarter than everyone else.

Which is how it came to be that a white middle-class woman told me that I should wake up and join the revolution that Robinson is leading, seemingly blissfully unaware that if she spent any significant time in the company of him and his retinue, she’d most likely be utterly repulsed and possibly worse.

One of the many lesser-told stories of British history is how the UK flirted with fascism in the 1930s when Oswald Mosley was in Parliament. As an MP, he openly courted Hitler and Mussolini, expressed antisemitic views and founded the British Union of Fascists political party.

Mosely had support in high places: wealthy industrialists, the upper classes and members of the Royal Family amongst them. In October, it will be 90 years since he and his Blackshirts marched on East London, eventually being ousted by counter-protestors in the Battle of Cable Street. It was only after the UK went to war with Hitler’s Germany that his party was outlawed and Mosley was briefly imprisoned.

That was not the end of it. Less than thirty years later, Enoch Powell MP made his Rivers of Blood speech in the House of Commons, showing once again that hateful, violent rhetoric was flowing from the very top of British society - and the last 20 years have shown that these views and narratives have not gone away; they have instead mutated and returned with even greater force.

I was of the generation that experienced Powell’s legacy. Before I was even 10 years old, I knew of the British National Party, the National Front and extremists like Combat 18 (the number denoting Adolf Hitler’s initials). These were the spiritual descendants of the hate that Powell promoted. I would hear terrifying stories of hate crimes committed by these and similar organisations, brutal and random attacks on the streets, stabbings, murders and relentless abuse.

One day, my eldest brother, the gentlest of all of us, came home with a huge, swollen lip which was split and bleeding down the middle, and a badly bruised cheek. He had been walking down the street when a stranger, a white guy, had decided to punch him in the face. My brother was 12 years old, and I was 8.

So I don’t need to watch Tommy Robinson’s Oxford Union Speech. I don’t need to sit down and consider Nigel Farage’s views on migration. I have no interest in listening to Rupert Lowe, Elon Musk, JD Vance and all the other merchants of hate out there claiming their ideology is one of care and love for the native community. I know who these people are. I have lived the consequences of their ideas. They are dangerous, nasty and utterly dishonest individuals.

As I write, race riots have erupted in Belfast and Glasgow, sparked by a violent crime and fuelled by a steady stream of online misinformation, hate and incitement to violence, from the usual sources. Gangs of men broke into the homes of people of colour, regardless of their citizenship or nationality. These have rightly been described by some as pogroms, derived from a Russian word meaning devastation or the wreaking of havoc.

It has all reminded me once again of the Oscar-winning short film, ‘The Long Goodbye’, which depicts the logical conclusion to this direction of travel. It seemed uncomfortably plausible to me when I watched it six years ago and even more so now.

This is getting worse. Poison is dripping into our society. It has been for some time, and the ugly effects of it are now showing up in everyday conversations where well-meaning people are naively promoting the views of a violent racist and his grotesque ideology, all whilst thinking they are nobly engaged in saving Western civilisation.

I have no neat conclusion or suggestion for how to counter this, other than to do what you can. Engage people. Listen to their real concerns. Be aware that it is mostly a small number of powerful people seeking to spread darkness. Counter this with knowledge and empathy.

I saw a street sign in London last week that read: ‘Stay alert. Trust your instincts.’

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

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[main image, the local pub my dad used to frequent.]