How to defeat the far right with Nick Lowles

Nick Lowles’ first experience with fascism came at the age of ten when he heard a spokesman for the National Front on television say that his party would send home those born outside Britain within six months. This far-fetched threat felt personal; his mother was from Mauritius and although she worked in the community with multiple charities, he grew conscious that some people in his mostly white town of Shrewsbury did not welcome families like his.  

That was 1979, when far-right parties were on the very fringes of society. Today that fringe has swelled and found its way into the mainstream. With anti-immigration policies such as revoking permanent residency for millions of immigrants, detaining and deporting all undocumented migrants, and scrapping the 1951 Refugee Convention, Reform UK is polling ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives.  

Over the last three decades Lowles has worked closely with the anti-fascist movement, and is currently the CEO of Hope Not Hate, an organisation that works in communities vulnerable to right-wing extremism. In a conversation earlier this month with The Conduit’s co-founder and CEO Paul van Zyl, Lowles gave several alarming statistics about the surge of the far-right in Britain, including how they are talking up the chances of civil war in the UK. “The right does not stop talking about it,” said Lowles. “The civil war theory began on the fringe after 9/11, but now the concept is front and centre of the far right.” Lowles cites Elon Musk and his social media following: In 2024, the tech billionaire CEO of X posted a video of riots in Liverpool with the caption, “Civil war is inevitable.” The video was seen over 9 million times.  In January 2026, he posted racial conspiracy theories almost every day to his over 230 million X followers.  

Lowles did not mince words when he told the audience, “Battles we thought were settled in the 1970s are now under debate again. I think we are sleepwalking into something really bad. It is happening here, and perhaps faster than in other countries.” One thing that worries Lowles is that as far-right extremists gain power and influence, the progressive left appears to be shrinking. In the US, President Trump has set his sights on targeting civil society and activists. Businesses that once proudly promoted progressive values have quietly and not-so quietly changed their stance on everything from DEI initiatives, to climate change, to support for the LGBT community. While it is easy to sit back and criticize those lulled by right-wing ideology, Lowles warns that only by addressing the root cause of fascism do we stand any chance in defeating it.  

In his newly released book, How to Defeat the Far Right, Lowles presents data that suggests support for the far right is tightly correlated with areas of high deprivation and low social capital. “We haven’t appreciated the effect of social capital. It’s not about how much money you have, but happiness,” he argues. “The highest levels of anti-immigrant sentiment are not only in poor white areas, but areas where they feel like life has moved on away from them.” 

He pointed out that warehouses have now become main sources of employment in areas that once had coal mines. These are zero-hour contracts and often include night work and long commutes. Many of these jobs are at high risk of being taken over by AI. What Lowles’ diagnosis captured powerfully is the texture of abandonment, the slow erosion of stability, dignity and meaning in places that once revolved around shared labour and collective identity. In such landscapes, resentment does not arise in a vacuum. It is cultivated by invisibility, by the sense that political and economic systems no longer register certain lives as significant. 

Recent data suggest that the story is not reducible to deprivation alone. 

This month, Gallup released its first-ever global poll on attitudes toward immigration, and the results placed the United Kingdom in a striking position. More than one in five Britons now name immigration as the most important problem facing their country, the highest proportion in the world. The next highest-ranking country, the Netherlands, stood at 13 percent. In the United States, where immigration enforcement has intensified and raids have become a visible feature of daily life in many communities, only eight percent of the population lists immigration as their top concern. 

From Gallup 2026 Poll: World U.K. Leads World in Concern About Migration

 What makes the British figures particularly revealing is not only their scale, but their breadth. Concern about immigration is not confined to Reform UK supporters or residents of deprived post-industrial areas. Conservative voters in Britain express higher levels of anxiety about immigration than supporters of almost any other centre-right party in Europe. Labour voters, too, show greater concern than most left-of-centre electorates across the continent. Even among those who report they are “living comfortably,” roughly one in five cite immigration as the country’s primary problem.

Gallup’s analysis points to a subtle but important pattern: concern peaks not among those in the most acute hardship, but among those who feel economically secure enough to fear decline. As the report notes, the fact that people “getting by” prioritise immigration more than those in extreme poverty suggests that anxiety is concentrated not at the bottom of the income distribution, but among those who feel their status slipping, their opportunities  narrowing, their future less assured than promised.

In his book Underdogs, the Truth About Britain’s White Working Class, Economist correspondent Joel Budd argues that Britons have made two mistakes in thinking about class and attitudes towards immigration: “The first is the assumption that white working-class people think the same as each other, unlike middle class people. The second is the idea that white working-class people have derived their views from hard experience.” Budd points out that those working low skilled jobs are more likely to come into regular contact with immigrants, and therefore less likely to harbour negative views of people they’ve grown to like.

In this light, anti-immigrant appears less as the politics of deprivation alone than as the politics of perceived loss of status, of certainty, of cultural authority, of national identity. It cuts across class, party and geography, shaping a broader climate of unease that cannot be explained solely by economic marginalisation or social isolation.

From Gallup 2026 Poll: World U.K. Leads World in Concern About Migration

Still, Lowles’s prescriptions remain grounded in the local. The first, he argues, is reinvestment, not simply in infrastructure, but in agency. Money must return to neglected communities, but so must power. “Supporting communities is a massive thing, and we need to give people agency,” he told the audience. “Repeated administrations made the mistake of not trusting local people.”

Research in political psychology supports the link he draws between alienation and authoritarianism. When individuals feel excluded from decision-making, disconnected from institutions, and unseen by the political system, trust in democracy declines. Disengagement follows. In its place emerges a readiness for strongman politics, simple answers and rigid hierarchies, conditions in which far-right movements thrive.

His second solution is more modest, but no less radical in its implications: fix the small things. He cited a successful community project that almost failed because its directors did not know how to fill out a tax reform. Fixing things like broken streetlights, or revamping shuttered high streets could go a long way to instilling a sense of pride in communities that have been hallowed out by austerity. “If people feel forgotten,” Lowles argues, “they stop believing the system works for them, and once that belief goes, democracy itself becomes fragile.”

Whether it will be enough remains uncertain. The forces driving Britain’s political polarisation are vast, structural and global. But in a political moment defined by abstraction and spectacle, Lowles’ insistence on the human scale offers a counter-narrative to both technocratic complacency and populist rage. If the far right is built on fear, resentment and fracture, his response is quietly radical: rebuild the places where people live, restore the feeling of being counted, and make democracy tangible again.