Nick Lowles

Campaigning background

Nick Lowles has spent a lifetime fighting racism, fascism and extremism – first with the antifascist magazine Searchlight and then with HOPE not hate, the organisation he founded back in 2004 in response to the rise of the far-right British National Party.

Nick first got involved in campaigning whilst at school in the mid-1980s and before long had focused his attention on fighting racism and fascism. In 1989, while studying at Sheffield University, he met Searchlight founder and editor Gerry Gable and within a few weeks had created a small research group to work alongside Searchlight.

Moving down to London in the summer of 1993, Nick volunteered with Searchlight, eventually becoming its head of Intelligence in 1997. During the 1990s, he played a pivotal role in undermining and dismantling the violent Nazi group Combat 18, including being involved in stopping one terrorist attack and helping to identify the London nail bomber.

It was the rising electoral threat from the British National Party that helped persuade Nick that his antifascist research needed to be supplemented by campaigning. With the far-right party winning 30-40% of the vote in local elections, Nick realised that traditional town centre demonstrations and rallies were not enough and instead they needed to work in the communities most susceptible to the far right. Just as importantly, voters needed to be treated with respect and understanding, even those attracted to the BNP, whilst also addressing often legitimate concerns and grievances. He also understood the need to be positive in one’s opposition to hatred, hence HOPE not hate was formed, first as a campaign slogan and then as the name of the group itself.

Over the next 10 years, HOPE not hate helped politically defeat the BNP, most notably in Barking and Dagenham in 2010, where the far-right party had a real chance of taking control of the Council. Over the course of three months, Nick’s team helped mobilise over 1,500 people, including 542 on one campaign day alone, and distributed 355,000 newspapers, leaflets, and letters.

The defeat of the BNP led to the group’s collapse. This allowed HOPE not hate to turn its attention to broader efforts to better explore why people were supporting the BNP and UKIP, and to devise remedies to counter this.

Nick has also pioneered data-led campaigning and has worked with data scientists to estimate political, cultural, and economic opinion down to a postcode level. In recent years, he has led a project to share this data analysis with the wider progressive eco-system.

Nick has written eight books and worked on numerous TV programmes, including Panorama, Dispatches and World in Action. He was played by the actor Jason Fleming in the ITV drama, The Walk In, which recounted the true story of how a HOPE not hate mole inside the banned Nazi group National Action provided information that saved an MP’s life.