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Hate, My Life In The British Far Right

claphamboy

claphamboy

The wheels on the bus go round and round....
- not me, the book :D by Matthew Collins, forward by Billy Bragg.

Has anyone got a copy yet?

Just ordered a copy, sounds like an interesting journey from being a out & out Nazi cunt, to informer, to hiding out down under for 10 years thanks to a hastily arranged trip by the Special Branch, to his return to Britain to work full time at searchlight.


Interview in The Independent.

Order via Hope not Hate.
 
Think my order has been sent off over the last day or so - look forward to reading it when it lands here.
 
My copy arrived today, which is handy as I've got a day off tomorrow and the forecast is looking great, so I'll read it tomorrow whilst sunning myself in the garden. :cool:
 
Its very good , fats paced and very funny but from it there are some political conclusions which need to be drawn
 
i thought it was pretty shit. what you look for in books about people who radically change their views is a conversion narrative, something which is to my mind rather unconvincing in 'hate'. in addition, it's pretty obvious who 'mr "x"' is so i don't know why collins has resorted to a codename. some of it i can verify from my own knowledge and experience of the period, but there are other things which i am less certain about.

the relationship with searchlight is never fully explained, that is why did he a) got to searchlight and b) stay with them? ray hill's holey conversion narrative was better than collins'.

not impressed and raises a number of questions collins doesn't even attempt to amswer.

oh - and there's rather too much about wanking in there too.
 
I thought it was quite good. Chapter 17 explains why he went to Searchlight it also explains how young he was and that he had no politics at all. It is laugh out loud which makes it extraordinary. I think there is plenty to learn about that period. I was a student living in London at the time and went to a few anti-fascst demos. What is very good about it is how very honest he is about his politics, his comrades and his wn desperate life. The excessive wanking is also a way to explain how young and confused he was. It is probably one of the better books on the far-right around (and I have read them all) It doesn't have that sort of macho nonsense about how he and his crew won every fight and beat everyone up which sadly is pathetically overriding in books by anti-fascists from the period as well as the boring need to explain everything on the pin head of extreme politics. It is an autobiography after all, a very personal one.

The MR X stuff is a little confusing. I assume there was a legal reason why he could not just name him? I expected this book to come out a year ago so there must be a good legal reason why it did not? The lack of pics I understand is another legal problem.

All in all it gives a good insight into one of the more interesting personalities in the anti-fascist movement. Certainly one of the better and more honest speakers at least. I think the book would be quite uncomfortable for Searchlight in places (another reason for the lack of pics?) But what politics there are in the book-in particular his analysis- are quit comfortable reading for those who could the awful mess that new Labour would leave the world in.

To be honest, it delivers more than it promised even if for some it may be a little in-your-face.

It's about time we had a book as frank as this.
 
Cathartic for Collins writing this book no doubt, but overall I'm not impressed with it's content, but there again it's not a book written for the likes of me.

The book is clearly aimed at those white working class youth drawn to far-right groups and may play a part in influencing those of the same mind-set as Collins was. For that reason I can understand why it's been published now.

If it has an impact on some youth attracted to the far-right then all well and good.

"Hilariously funny" it ain't.
 
Hull on Fire said:
I thought it was quite good. Chapter 17 explains why he went to Searchlight it also explains how young he was and that he had no politics at all. It is laugh out loud which makes it extraordinary. I think there is plenty to learn about that period. I was a student living in London at the time and went to a few anti-fascst demos. What is very good about it is how very honest he is about his politics, his comrades and his wn desperate life. The excessive wanking is also a way to explain how young and confused he was. It is probably one of the better books on the far-right around (and I have read them all) It doesn't have that sort of macho nonsense about how he and his crew won every fight and beat everyone up which sadly is pathetically overriding in books by anti-fascists from the period as well as the boring need to explain everything on the pin head of extreme politics. It is an autobiography after all, a very personal one.

The MR X stuff is a little confusing. I assume there was a legal reason why he could not just name him? I expected this book to come out a year ago so there must be a good legal reason why it did not? The lack of pics I understand is another legal problem.

All in all it gives a good insight into one of the more interesting personalities in the anti-fascist movement. Certainly one of the better and more honest speakers at least. I think the book would be quite uncomfortable for Searchlight in places (another reason for the lack of pics?) But what politics there are in the book-in particular his analysis- are quit comfortable reading for those who could the awful mess that new Labour would leave the world in.

To be honest, it delivers more than it promised even if for some it may be a little in-your-face.

It's about time we had a book as frank as this.
Click to expand...
in ray hill's book there's the bit about an incident in south africa to explain why he began to change his mind. in collins' book there's nothing similar. the problem doesn't appear to have been racism or fascism, it seems to have been if anything the people he was hanging about with. i don't recall reading in the book anything which suggested he decided that fascism was right after a reappraisal of his politics. and far from having no politics, we're told that he threw himself into reading nazi political books and tracts, such as 'mein kampf'. he had numerous discussions with people like richard edmonds. he spent fucking ages with ian anderson. he wrote a (regular?) bulletin. it's not like he stood off to one side or was one of the hangers-on, he actively pushed himself into various positions of responsibility. he most certainly had politics, although there were, as he admits, wide gaps in them. but then again, how many teenage socialists could say too much about the beliefs of the far-right? given the milieu into which collins took himself, it's no great surprise he didn't have 'politics' in the way most people here would understand them.

i appreciate that there's a level of honesty about the book - things i was told about in the early 1990s corroborate much of his story. but i suspect there's a lot of dishonesty there too. for example, we're not told why he remains with searchlight. it would be good to know more about his involvement with special branch and mi5. and blogs like 'i intend to escape ... and come back' have in the past asked some searching questions of collins which he has not answered.

returning to the wanking theme which runs through the book, there are a large number of ways to indicate how young and naive someone was. going on and on and on about, he talks about it way too much for it to be explained away so easily.
 
The brutality Collins witnessed and took part in (he stated in the book he only attacked men attending) at a meeting in Welling, when elderly Asian women were viciously attacked and in particular when a pregnant woman hiding in the toilets was targeted, seemed to be the incident that first led Collins to question his beliefs?

Wonder if Collins reference to wanking is related to someone still involved? I can't think why else he would refer to the subject the many times he does so in the book?
 
audiotech said:
The brutality Collins witnessed and took part in (he stated in the book he only attacked men attending) at a meeting in Welling, when elderly Asian women were viciously attacked and in particular when a pregnant woman hiding in the toilets was targeted, seemed to be the incident that first led Collins to question his beliefs?

Wonder if Collins reference to wanking is related to someone still involved? I can't think why else he would refer to the subject the many times he does so in the book?
Click to expand...


I wondered that too? But it would also appear to be a book meant for a sort of mainstream audience so perhaps little quirks etc are important to give it a broader appeal.

I clearly (as you do) see the chain of events from Welling onwards, but I do take the point made in the book by the writer that he just had no politics and neither apparently, did many of the others.
It is also quite clear that he moved around between many groups as may others did tend to at the time.

On another point made earlier I understand that Ian Anderson has since died which may be another reason for the book being held up.

I think this is an excellent book for its purpose. Fast paced, easy to read, personable, humorous and I suppose warm and touching if that is your thing. The final chapter (34 aftermath ) I have read three times now. He seems to write that he is at odds with Searchlight on a number of issues and he clearly nails the needs for a class analysis which is sadly lacking from the mainstream fight against the fascists. He is gracious to the many people who also took the fight physically to the fascists
and gives justification for those actions.

I hope to have the opportunity to meet him soon and put a number of questions to him.
 
I had forgotten I had started this thread. :facepalm:

Anyway, I thought it was a fairly good read, certainly not "hilariously funny", it did make me smile at times, but not laugh out, it was certainly good enough to keep my attention to read the whole book in a day.

As Pickman says it was somewhat flaky on the subject of him changing sides as it were, clearly the Welling encounter started him on that path, but I would have liked him to have drilled down a bit more on his thoughts about his politics and how and why they changed, rather than leaving the impression that it was just the violence that he no longer wanted to be part of.

The Mr X thing is annoying, because I seem to remember something about that at the time, but be buggered if I can recall the name now, as Hull on Fire says it's probably due to legal reasons, so may be not be a good idea to post in public, but if anyone knows it, please PM PC me and solve the riddle for me.

Overall I would recommend it as a good read, even if it leaves some questions unanswered.

Oh yeah, regarding all the wanking, I can only assume the point was that you have to be a massive wanker to get involved in the far right. :D
 
sim667 said:
Im going to keep an eye out for this, sounds like a pretty good read.
Click to expand...
i don't know about a *good* read but it's certainly a revealing read. as i mention above, i have independent verification of quite a few things from the book, based on things i was told years back by people who knew. however, i think the point about conversion needs to be emphasised. nothing in the book that i could see shows collins turning his back on the nf and bnp because he became disenchanted with eg racism. rather, he became disenchanted with the social inadequates who make up such a large proportion of the far-right. and to be honest he doesn't come across as the lone social adequate in there. the initial approaches to searchlight are glossed over - when he, and apparently others, phoned up searchlight offering them tittle-tattle. instead of putting everything behind him and describing it as a youthful mistake, collins, for reasons he does not go into, decided to become a mole and indeed to devote a substantial proportion of his subsequent life to working for searchlight. is this because he couldn't get another job? the only other searchlight 'mole' who leaps to mind who's spent a fair portion of his life after involvement with the far-right working for searchlight is ray hill. others, like tim hepple, seem to have ridden off into the sunset.
 
Well id consider it good if it informs me, and I do like autobiographies/biographical books.
 
Pickman's model said:
. instead of putting everything behind him and describing it as a youthful mistake, collins, for reasons he does not go into, decided to become a mole and indeed to devote a substantial proportion of his subsequent life to working for searchlight. is this because he couldn't get another job?
Click to expand...

I also found this odd. I read the book in two nights. The constant need to tell the reader about his wanking got boring after the first time. Still pretty insightful with regards to life in the far right and the NF. Eddie Whicker seemed like quite a character.
 
Bit late to this book, i had been meaning to get it for over a year and i wish i hadn't bothered.

Really struggling through it. There is far too much inaction (sitting around in a shitty room with a crap couch drinking tea) which doesn't require page after page after page about.

Maybe it's the way he writes or the fact that i don't feel that he is telling us a great deal but so far (180 pages in) it feels like a big book of wank.
 
I have met Matthew Collins on numerous occasions and I can confirm I have never actually seen him wanking.
 
Hull on Fire said:
It doesn't have that sort of macho nonsense about how he and his crew won every fight and beat everyone up which sadly is pathetically overriding in books by anti-fascists from the period
Click to expand...

Would you like to expand on this? I take it you are referring to 'No Retreat' but I don't want to mind-read you.

e2a; Just seen the date:facepalm:
 
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