Why would a trustee of an antifascist charity join a group run by a close associate of the far-right English Defence League? Sonia Gable investigates the curious activities of Charlie Flowers.

Our front cover photo taken at an English Defence League rally in March 2010 shows Charlie Flowers holding the loud-hailer for Alan Ayling, who at least until August 2011 was one of the Islamophobic EDL’s financial backers, and perhaps still is. It was in Ayling’s £500,000 Barbican flat that Ayling, who used the name Alan Lake, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the EDL’s street leader, Paul Ray, one of the EDL’s founders, and others met in 2009 to bring together “the ideological and political side with the boots on the ground”, according to Ray. [1]

Flowers purports to oppose extremism, as indeed does the EDL itself [2], though the extremism the EDL opposes does not include its own. Flowers opposes extremism so much that he has formed the so-called Anti-Extremism Alliance [3] as well as a Facebook group called Cheerleaders Against Everything, formerly Cheerleaders Against Islamic Extremism [4], a pointer to the limited nature of the extremism Flowers opposes.

Adam Carter finds individuals and organisations with explicit links to the extreme right behind a series of New Right publishers

Although Searchlight has mainly focused on the British aspects of the New Right group, whose bi-monthly London meetings have gathered together racists and antisemites from across the UK extreme right, it is important to recognise that it is part of an international movement espousing similar ideas. The meetings themselves, as reported last month, have drawn speakers and attendees from a number of countries in Eastern and Western Europe, as well as from America and Australia, and some of them have been influential figures within their respective nationalist political movements. On the level of personal contact and networking the New Right is itself an international movement.

However, in addition to the face-to-face meetings, there is a complex cultural ecosystem of blogs, websites, magazines, book publishers, radio stations and even music companies, operating on an international scale, which exist solely to support the New Right worldview. This should be no surprise as the New Right ideological struggle is primarily a cultural one – the belief that by influencing culture, one can later shape politics – so one would expect the movement to be extremely active in transmitting and disseminating propaganda via a variety of media. In this strategy, publishing activities, such as books, CDs, magazines and online postings, play a crucial role in spreading the anti-egalitarian, antisemitic and racist message of the New Right and are vital to the wider political and intellectual objectives of shaping social values and reframing the mainstream discussion of issues such as race, immigration, identity and equality.

Since 1975 no fascist has ever prevented Searchlight being published. Last month, threatened legal action from another source forced a delay. We cannot give further details, but rest assured it has not, and will not, stop us being published monthly in future. This is the genuine Searchlight, beware of imitations.

Some other organisations have been damaged by infiltrators and are still being led by the nose up a path strewn with disinformation (see page 14). While we might not always see eye to eye with some organisations, the greater good of the antifascist movement must be paramount and we will help identify those individuals whose “support” is not what it seems.