Al Jazeera’s new documentary Contract Killers and the Far Right makes for a sickening watch, casting a blinding light on the violent underbelly of Britain’s far right.
Across 46 minutes of hidden camera footage, leading members of the racist organisation Turning Point UK – a group endorsed by both leading Tory and Reform figures – are shown time and again to be working hand in glove with organised neo-Nazi thugs and armed hitmen.
For years, these far-right thugs have tried to pose as peaceful ‘free-speech’ campaigners, just calling for ‘stricter limits’ on migration rules and bravely standing up to the ‘violent Antifa mob’.
Now, an undercover reporter who spent five years inside Turning Point UK has completely exposed these lies.
At one point, the documentary shows Turning Point’s CEO Jack Ross – at the time a member of the Conservative Party – offering to help the reporter hire Allan Nesbitt, a member of the Northern Irish loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and a known contract killer.
Turning Point’s chief operating officer (and current UKIP leader) Nick Tenconi is then filmed openly discussing his intentions to make use of links to violent groups to “build an army” ready to “just fuck things up, basically.”
Hypocrisy
These shocking revelations have been met with deafening silence from both the government and the bourgeois media.
Perhaps they were too busy weeping crocodile tears over the Green Party’s motion declaring that ‘Zionism is racism’, or clamping down on schoolchildren for committing pro-Palestine ‘thought crimes’. No rest for the wicked!
Tory Party leader Kemi Badenoch did eventually feign some grave concern – the UVF is a proscribed terrorist organisation at the end of the day, so some gestures had to be made.
But, naturally, she has nothing to say on the fact that it is her party which has welcomed Jack Ross with open arms, allowing him to carry out his dirty work without issue for years.
This is the utter hypocrisy of the bourgeois establishment: they’ll arrest your nan in an instant for holding a Palestine Action placard, and then give a slap on the wrist to those in their own ranks wining and dining with actual terrorists.
Their meagre response consists of Ross being suspended from the Tory Party and a heavily delayed police investigation being launched by Police Scotland. Apparently, support of a right-wing terrorist organisation is deserving of just a slap on the wrist: a punishment for the crime of getting caught, rather than for the act itself.
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Wake-up call
This documentary should act as a wake-up call for the labour movement.
As it stands, the plans of Britain’s anti-racist ‘leaders’ stop at calling on us to chant ‘hope, not hate’ and march behind priests, pacifists, and politicians.
As we have explained elsewhere, these toothless methods will not sweep these thugs from the streets of Britain. They all have their heads in the sand over this mountain of evidence that the far right are not interested in making their point through peaceful ‘A-to-B’ marching.
We only have to look at recent actions by Patriot Platform – itself a wannabe paramilitary – in Dover, where its members were able to march freely through the streets, passively escorted by minimal police.
However, we must not lose our heads. Al Jazeera’s investigation exposes the bloodlust of sections of the British far right – but also the shallowness of their forces.
As one former UVF member admits, “the far right in the UK is a toothless tiger.” And Nesbitt himself is more of a criminal ‘gun for hire’ than a committed far-right militant – at one point, the undercover reporters recruit his ‘services’… for a hit on an entirely fake rival businessman.
The fact that the far right rely on such opportunist, erratic elements is a sign of their weakness. The far-right street movement is led by grifters and opportunist criminals who lack a large social base. If the workers’ movement acted as an organised militant force, the far-right movement could easily be obliterated.
