How to Defeat the Far Right

About

If you’re shocked and disconcerted by the recent rise of intolerance and hate, you’re not alone. As we find ourselves in May, in the wake of local elections, none of us are sure what the landscape will look like. Will compassion and empathy have triumphed over divisive and damaging rhetoric or will we be painfully assessing the aftermath of an eruption in British politics?

Brighton Festival brings together a group of speakers to respond live to the place we find ourselves in. Headed up by campaigner and founder of HOPE not hate, the UK’s leading anti-fascist organisation, Nick Lowles, whose book, How to Defeat the Far Right: Lessons From Hope Not Hate, addresses the real and present threat of the far right, explaining how its ideas are proliferating, why Britain isn’t immune to its rise, and what we can all do to defeat it. Lowles entwines his inspirational story with hard-won lessons from decades of activism, with topics covered including HOPE not hate’s undercover work and on-the-ground campaigning against the EDL, BNP, UKIP and Andrew Tate.

About Nick Lowles

Nick Lowles MBE is the founder and Chief Executive of HOPE not hate. He first got involved with the anti-fascist movement as a student volunteer at Sheffield University and was previously a freelance investigative journalist, working on BBC Panorama, World in Action, Channel Four Dispatches and MacIntyre Undercover. Between 1999 and 2011 Lowles was co-editor, and then editor, of Searchlight magazine. He founded HOPE not hate in 2004 and was awarded an MBE in 2016 for his services in tackling extremism.