Reform UK showed its true colours this week when one of Nigel Farage’s chief lieutenants – veteran spin doctor Gawain Towler – admitted that Farage’s old party UKIP had shared information with the ‘anti-fascist’ organisation Hope not Hate.

Interviewed by Spectator journalist James Heale, Towler said: “we worked with Hope not Hate to winkle out the fascists from our own ranks. At that time, when we were ripping them out of our system, there were times when one of the guys in the press office was in touch with them, just to double check: ‘We think this guy’s dodgy, is he on your list.'”

Challenged on Twitter/X by the anti-immigration activist and Homeland Party member Steve Laws, Towler confirmed: “In about 2010, one of the staff would run names past a HnH staff member, UKIP was riddled with former NF and BNP fanatics, we didn’t want racists then or now.”

Towler began his political career as “Lesbian and Gay officer” for York University student union – he later married and has a daughter who is a left-wing lesbian activist.

Having worked for a Tory MEP at the European Parliament in Brussels, Towler defected to UKIP where he worked as a press/PR officer for thirteen years until 2018 when he left to create his own PR firm CWC Strategy. He continued working for Farage in his various ventures until last month, when he parted company with Reform as part of its reorganisation.

Let’s be clear what Towler was admitting. His staff (perhaps we should say one of his camp followers) in one or more of Farage’s parties shared personal information about party members with an organisation dedicated to wrecking the lives and careers of those it deems to be on the ‘far right’.

HnH grew out of the ‘anti-fascist’ magazine and intelligence organisation Searchlight, which itself has roots in a violent organisation called the 62 Group – mainly made up of Jews and communists who fought Sir Oswald Mosley’s followers on the streets of London and other cities.

It’s long been known that some of Farage’s fellow ‘civic nationalists’ and eurosceptics collaborated with Searchlight. Sir James Goldsmith used Searchlight‘s services to purge his Referendum Party during the 1990s, and UKIP’s founder Alan Sked worked with Searchlight and the Cook Report television programme as part of an investigation into Nick Griffin and Sked’s former associate Mark Deavin.

But there was a time when to obtain personal details of their enemies, Searchlight had to steal them rather than have fake patriots betray their own comrades.

According to Enoch Powell’s biographer Simon Heffer, during the 1970s Searchlight obtained private letters and other documents from a burglary at the home of Powell’s political secretary Bee Carthew.

More than a decade earlier, the people who were to form Searchlight worked with other criminal ‘anti-fascists’ in a burglary at the headquarters of Edward Martell’s newspaper and political network that was beginning to challenge the political establishment. The theft of a large quantity of paperwork (in those pre-computer days) had a devastating impact on Martell’s organisation.

This record of criminality makes it all the more extraordinary that a former Searchlight staff member is now Attorney General in Keir Starmer’s government.

A few days ago Lord Hermer KC – gave the prestigious Bingham Lecture on the topic “The Rule of Law in an Age of Populism”.

Yet as a student in Manchester during the early 1990s, the young Ricky Hermer was a militant anti-fascist. He edited a journal associated with the Union of Jewish Students: this paper called itself On Guard, a deliberate reference to a much earlier journal of the violent Jewish anti-fascist 43 Group, some of whose members were also part of Zionist terror gangs in Palestine during the 1940s.

Hermer admits that his mentor and inspiration in his own anti-fascist work was Searchlight‘s northern representative Steve Tilzey.

Older H&D readers will remember our previous exposé of Tilzey, who (several years before his involvement with the future Attorney General) was imprisoned for his part in the kidnapping of a young National Front activist. Passing sentence the judge told Tilzey and his fellow conspirators, who included leading figures in the Trotskyist ‘Socialist Workers Party’: “the weapons you took with you are quite dreadful, capable of inflicting the most serious injuries and of killing in many cases.”

Tilzey and Manchester’s anti-fascist militants were proud of their connections with IRA sympathisers, and most notoriously with one of England’s most infamous gangland assassins, Dessie Noonan – leader of a Salford crime family.

For years Searchlight worked closely with the Anti-Fascist Action organisation whose London headquarters was in Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency office. One of AFA’s main London activists, Patrick Hayes, was imprisoned for planting an IRA bomb that exploded at Harrods department store in Knightsbridge in 1993.

This is the world of militant anti-fascism. And yet (while there is no suggestion that they were personally aware of or involved in political violence) both Nigel Farage and the Labour government’s Attorney General have admitted working with the UK’s leading anti-fascist intelligence organisations.

At least Lord Hermer is in a sense ideologically consistent.

Nigel Farage and Reform UK by contrast are cheap and nasty imitations of patriotism. Anyone who believes that they can be trusted in the slightest, needs to think again.