It’s always tempting to self-soothe when the far right is on the march. Tommy Robinson’s new book, Manifesto: Free Speech, Real Democracy, Peaceful Disobedience, briefly topped Amazon’s bestseller chart last week – above Boris Johnson’s memoir, but also above Richard Osman, the fastest-selling hardback fiction author in British history, and Sally Rooney. Oh well, I thought. Maybe the book itself is not that bad? Maybe he’s turned over a new leaf?
It is that bad: I will not read it, because I will not buy it, because the day I put £24.99 or any fraction thereof into the pocket of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is the day I’ve parted company with the material world. But here’s how it is described in the blurb: “For decades the political class have openly planned to replace the indigenous people of Europe and in Manifesto we focus on how they are doing this in the UK.”
This is the great replacement theory, the organising principle of white supremacists: it isn’t voguish any more to simply hint that white people are better. When you’re looking to get racism off the sofa and generate a bigotry with some observable output, you have to create the sense of an active threat. This is where you bring in grand conspiracies, where Muslims seek to overrun the Judeo-Christian order by first arriving and then breeding faster. It’s an unabashed and disgusting assertion, taking as its first principle that every baby isn’t as precious, as miraculous, as exquisite as the next.
So maybe Manifesto’s readers aren’t real readers? Isn’t this what dark money is for – setting up bot factories to disrupt democracies, and bulk-buying far-right trash to make it look more popular than it is? That might account for some of the sales, but there are enough real people to put real reviews on Amazon, and they’re all a variation on the same thing: “the truth is all coming out”; this is “the book the government do not want you to read”; “as long as there are people like Tommy, all is not lost”; “it unravels the web of lies we have been told for decades”.
There are some personal touches, such as “it will sit on my shelf alongside works of Churchill, De Gaulle, Enoch Powell, Tom Holland and Douglas Murray, to name but a few”. But generally speaking, it’s the same sentiment, in very similar words: politics is a lie and the modern world is an elite conspiracy, hellbent on silencing, impoverishing and ultimately vanquishing the Indigenous peoples of the west. How it would help this nefarious elite to engineer a clash of civilisations is a bit unclear. But the argument has moved beyond the point at which a careful critique of its internal logic would deflate its adherents.
Many argue that Amazon shouldn’t have stocked the book in the first place. It had no problem removing Robinson’s 2019 book, Mohammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill for Islam (co-written, like Manifesto, with Peter McLoughlin), on the grounds that its content was “inappropriate”. And Manifesto, after last week’s sales, is now unavailable, with the opaque message: “We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock.” Amazon could have removed the book for its political outlook, or it could have run out of copies. Either way, Robinson’s supporters will take that as proof of one of their arguments: that they are being silenced by a liberal conspiracy, or they are much more numerous than the world cares to admit.
This question has been smouldering for years, igniting in a single event now and then – such as the appearance of Nick Griffin, then leader of the British National Party, on Question Time in 2009 – only to die back down, unresolved, unextinguished, and it is: what is society’s duty, with the storytelling of the far right? Does it have to be aired, in order that it can be fought? If it’s silenced, will it go away? Is it always better to know what bigots are thinking, rather than pretend they don’t exist?
The sheer length of this debate makes it feel familiar, but in fact this territory is not familiar. Having the great replacement theory at the top of the charts is a new world, where the argument about freedom of speech – whether it has to extend to hate speech, what hate speech means – is already over.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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