Ernest Rutherford is supposed to have said that ‘all science is either physics or stamp collecting’. This reflects an enduring perception that, with their test tubes, lab coats, and dense equations, the physical sciences are hard. Biologists, by contrast, have never quite been able to escape the image of themselves as chasing beetles and butterflies—gathering specimens which are arranged in expansive collections, neatly labelled and organised, with as much concern for aesthetics as for scientific advance. Biologists observe and document; chemists and physicists conduct rigorous experiments and take precise measurements.

Among the many great achievements of The Selfish Gene—now re-issued on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication—is that Richard Dawkins conclusively explodes the idea that biology seeks merely to record and classify the natural world.

Living things are the most complex entities in the universe. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Dawkins makes the case that physics and chemistry are concerned with fundamentally simple systems, because the mechanics of those systems are reducible to mathematical description. Living things are not like that. We cannot describe the workings of a single cell—let alone a whole complex, multi-cellular organism—in an equation; we are barely able to map out the intricacies of individual metabolic processes within a single cell.

Explaining the complexity of living things—biology’s central conundrum—is such a difficult problem that the passages of the planets and stars across the night sky were precisely described, computed, and predicted millennia before anyone came close to solving it. A bird’s wing, a frog’s leg, a hawk’s eye: these are highly complicated structures that fit an organism to its particular mode of existence, giving every appearance of deliberate design for functionality. Indeed, design was considered the only viable explanation until—nearly two centuries after Newton wrote the Principia and invented calculus—Charles Darwin developed a workable mechanism by which biological complexity could arise from simpler, pre-existing building-blocks.

Like all of biology, that mechanism is deceptively simple.

Offspring resemble their parents. But all individuals also vary. The resources needed for living things to sustain themselves (water, food, space) are finite, meaning that individuals must compete for access to those resources because many more are born than can survive. These three preconditions, identified by Darwin—variation plus competition plus inheritance—inevitably mean that individuals with traits that make them better fitted to their environment are the most likely to survive and reproduce, and therefore most likely to pass those winning traits on to their offspring. Darwin christened this natural selection, and explicitly compared it to artificial selection brought about by man through selective breeding, for example in dogs or crops or livestock. Where man selects based on his own desires and ultimate goals, nature selects blindly for fitted-ness to the environment.

Under natural selection, the most successful forms proliferate because they are the most successful at reproducing themselves. Telescoped over hundreds of millions of years, this slow, methodical, ruthless process gave rise to earthworms, whales, and pterodactyls—organisms that each seem perfectly designed for their respective ways of life.

The Selfish Gene,published in 1976, marks the end, or culmination, of a long scientific revolution that began with Darwin’s own book, On the Origin of Species, more than a century earlier in 1859.

But the idea of evolution didn’t begin with Darwin. Bubbling up throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a growing scepticism of the classical concept of species as fixed and unchanging kinds, and a shift toward a sense that living things might change over time: the ‘transmutation’ of species. Early modern biologists like the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck envisioned a ladder of life that ascended, bit by bit, from simple organisms like plants and sponges, to mammals, primates, and man. For Lamarck, all life strove upwards toward perfection, with body forms that were fluid through use and disuse in life—the giraffe gets his long neck by continually stretching it up towards tree canopies, and those incremental changes to its body are inherited and accumulated over the generations.

As bizarre as it might seem from our vantage point, Lamarck’s idea of the ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’ remained influential well into the nineteenth century, and offered one explanation for the fact that species seem undeniably designed. Biology at the time was in a state of flux, as scientists sought to harmonise new evidence with old ideas. The early evolutionists laid the scientific and cultural foundations for a theory that living things might change—a conceptual bedrock on which Darwin was able to establish natural selection as a far more convincing and powerful mechanism. Marshalling evidence from across the living world, the Origin acted as a lightning rod, breaking the deadlock and offering an effective evolutionary framework for future biological research.

***

Darwin gave us the process, but the underlying mechanics remained opaque. DNA and even chromosomes—the cross-shaped packages into which DNA organises itself within cells—were yet to be discovered, and Darwin himself believed that heredity—the means by which offspring resemble their parents—was a process of parental blending. It was left to Gregor Mendel, an Austrian friar and Abbot of St. Thomas’s in Brno, working at the same time as Darwin but unknown to him, to deduce from botanical experiments that inheritance was particulate. Traits are passed on through discrete hereditary units, later termed genes, from one parent or the other, such that at the aggregate level offspring might appear superficially to be a blend of characteristics.

Mendel’s work initially fell into obscurity, with its significance only being fully appreciated when it was rediscovered in the early twentieth century. What followed were decades of trying to knit together Darwin’s ideas and the new science of genetics. Mutations at the gene level and the mixing up of genes through mating created variation within a population, and natural selection acted on that variation to promote the survival and reproduction of the fittest individuals. These then passed on their particular (and particulate) genes to the next generation. Over time, this process led to the evolution of complex biological structures from simpler, pre-existing ones. 

Everything seemed to be coming together, but persistent paradoxes remained. 

***

Most conspicuously, if evolution selects the fittest individuals, how could we explain the occurrence of unselfish, altruistic behaviour in nature? Why do some animals share resources within a group—like wolves or wild dogs sharing meat with the rest of their pack—when it would make sense for an individual to monopolise a resource for their own benefit? Why should a bee sting a predator in defence of its hive, when that act means certain death?

If natural selection is all about survival, why sacrifice anything that could increase your chances in the high-stakes game of life?

Perhaps, through so-called ‘group selection’, bands of individuals within a species competed against one another, propagating the attributes of successful groups into the future. A co-operating, unselfish group might well defeat a group of treacherous, back-stabbing individuals. The question became one of what natural selection was actually selecting. The individual or the group? Or something else?

Group selectionists were in good company. Even Darwin himself occasionally drifted into group-based reasoning—the subtitle of the Origin talks not about the survival of the fittest individuals, but the ‘preservation of favoured races in the struggle for existence’. But even as a group-level framework seemed to solve some evolutionary problems, it raised others.

Consider a group of meerkats—small, burrowing African mammals. Individual meerkats take turns serving as a look-out for predators, while the rest of the group gets on with their daily tasks of foraging, feeding, and so on. Such a behaviour could feasibly evolve via group selection, because co-operative groups might out-compete non-cooperative groups. But suppose we introduce a genetic mutation—a cheating gene—which makes an individual actively avoid sentry duty. Our cheat relies on the alarm calls of other meerkats, but never takes the risk of serving as look-out himself. A gene that promoted such cheating would likely be very advantageous, and a cheat might survive longer and sire more offspring than an honest meerkat, passing that gene on. Before long, we would have more cheats than honest meerkats in our group and, with no reliable system of sentries and alarms, the social system of co-operation would break down: degenerate into every-meerkat-for-himself.

A similar problem arises in the sterile workers of ants and bees. On a straightforward group selection account, colonies with more co-operative workers should outcompete less co-operative colonies because helping behaviour enhances the efficiency and survival of the whole group. But such an explanation is vulnerable to the same sort of cheating we saw in our meerkat group: if a mutant worker can gain a direct reproductive advantage by withholding effort or by diverting resources toward its own reproduction, then that variant should spread within the colony. In that case, individual-based selection within groups would erode the co-operative system from the inside.

The vulnerability of co-operating groups to invasion by cheats posed a major challenge to early group selection explanations. It is not enough to say individuals work ‘for the good of the group’, let alone, as some of the more extreme group selectionists argued, that they regulate their own population size ‘for the good of the species’. There must be something more.

***

The key to solving the problem of altruism came from looking within individuals, at the genetic information that acts as the recipe for building every organism.

A child shares half of all their genetic information with each parent. And with a grandparent, one quarter. By aiding a relative, therefore, an individual might help to ensure that some of that shared genetic information flows down the river of time and into the next generation, even if not through its own offspring. Although worker ants do not reproduce directly, they each share half of their genes with the queen, who does reproduce. A hypothetical cheat worker ant who could breed might be able to mate, and pass its genes on directly. However, if helping the queen produce large numbers of relatives carries more copies of a worker’s genes into future generations than direct reproduction, sterile ‘helping-only’ behaviour could evolve as a stable strategy. A co-operating worker, in other words, could end up with more (proportionately closer) relatives in the next generation than the cheat. This idea was pithily summarised by British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, who allegedly said he would ‘lay down [his] life for two brothers or eight cousins’.

By building individual bodies that co-operate, genes can increase their chances of surviving into the next generation—even if they do so by proxy, helping a relative that shares much of their genetic information to survive and reproduce in their stead.

***

Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection, then, acts not at the level of species or groups, nor even, in truth, at the level of individual organisms, but on the invisible genetic units that are the building blocks of all life. Genes work together to build bodies: automata in which they ride, do battle, and engineer their own proliferation. Genes endure—the ‘immortal replicators’—passed down from individual to individual through the generations, and we are merely their ‘survival machines’.

In The Selfish Gene, that vision—the gene-centric view of evolution—is painted in vivid prose, and with such clarity of reasoning that it has become far more than a classic of popular science. Just as evolution did not begin with Darwin, the gene’s-eye view did not begin with Richard Dawkins. One finds it being painfully pieced together throughout the mid-twentieth century, by R. A. Fisher (The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, 1930), W. D. Hamilton (‘The evolution of altruistic behavior’, 1963), G. C. Williams (Adaptation and Natural Selection, 1966), and many others. Indeed, these names are among those most frequently cited in Dawkins’s oeuvre, particularly in The Selfish Gene.

And yet, more than any other single work, The Selfish Gene crystallises the synthesis of natural selection and genetics, making the most coherent extended explanation of the fundamental, gene-based mechanics underlying evolution. With a gift for crafting a turn of phrase, Dawkins coined expressions and concepts in the book that have since proven highly successful replicators of their own, spreading vigorously in the public imagination. Through clarity of reasoning and metaphor, Dawkins not only popularised evolutionary theory but also solidified a genuine shift in the conceptual paradigm of the field.

Fifty years after its publication, The Selfish Gene remains a cornerstone of modern evolutionary biology and continues to be read by students around the world. In the epilogue to the new edition, Dawkins himself reflects on this startling fact: ‘In 1976, the very word ‘genomics’ had not yet been coined. The human genome’s presidentially celebrated completion was a quarter century in the future. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique had not been invented, nor DNA fingerprinting […]’. While the world around has changed, the book’s central argument remains as relevant, and as invigorating, as when it was first written.

***

I have tried to set The Selfish Gene within the context of the growth and development of evolutionary theory more broadly. Some might ask why tracing this path through biological history matters: science is about progress, they may say, not ruminating over the errors of long-dead predecessors. But to understand the importance of Dawkins’s contribution we must see how, together with On the Origin of Species, it book-ends one hundred years of striving towards a coherent understanding of evolution. Even today, the jigsaw is not complete; there are still holes scattered across the puzzle. But posterity will surely say that Richard Dawkins let us see, more clearly, the true nature of the picture we are working towards.

And that picture is one of breathtaking scope—the grand theoretical implications of the science of biology. The story of The Selfish Gene spans the history of life on Earth, from the simple self-replicating molecules that swarmed in prehistoric slime, to the evolving cultural replicators (‘memes’) of complex human societies. It is a tale of such power it must surely break free from the parochial confines of our own planet: ‘Not only could it have been published one hundred years ago: The Selfish Gene, or at least its message shorn of detail, could be published on any planet in the universe where life exists.’

Wherever there is life, there is Darwinism.

Related reading

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’: interview with Richard Dawkins, by Emma Park

‘The Genetic Book of the Dead’: A Dawkinsian Medley, by Daniel James Sharp

A farewell to Dawkins? by Samuel McKee

Why Design Arguments Necessarily Fail, by Samuel McKee

Linnaeus, Buffon, and the battle for biology, by Charles Foster

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Crystallising Darwinism: 50 Years of ‘The Selfish Gene’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

From his chaotic experiences at the 1819 Peterloo massacre, to his romantic escapades in prison, this warts and all portrayal places a courageous hero of freethinking in a new, surprising, and very humanising light…

The LOOSE CANNONS book crowdfunder is currently live, here. Please donate if you can.

You can discover more freethought and humanist history at heritage.humanists.uk and on the Unholy Histories podcast. You can also find Madeleine and Paul’s previous work for the Freethinker here and here, respectively.

The post Richard Carlile, a LOOSE CANNON appeared first on The Freethinker.

Sahar Delijani is an Iranian American writer and activist. She is the author of the 2013 novel Children of the Jacaranda Tree, which was translated into 32 languages and published in more than 75 countries. Her second novel, For Every Person You Kill, is due to be published in 2027. Both novels deal with the Iranian dissident experience. She is also a regular contributor to various magazines and journals.

Born in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, Sahar is the child of secular leftist revolutionaries who were arbitrarily detained as political prisoners in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution, or rather counterrevolution, of 1979. She grew up in Iran, eventually leaving for the US and Italy. She now lives in New York City. You can find out more about her on her website, here, and follow her on Instagram, here.

In this interview, we discuss Sahar’s life and work, including what it is like to be a dissident in a fractured world and her views on Iran, Palestine, and anti-imperialism.

The post Interview with Sahar Delijani: Iran, Palestine, and anti-imperialism appeared first on The Freethinker.

There is just one book that’s completely word and letter perfect from the first time it was not even written down, but recited. Now, demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes, nor do they lead to peaceful or tolerant regimes. And I’m not going to ask you which Muslim country you would like to live in.

– Christopher Hitchens, from a debate on Islam with Tariq Ramadan in 2010

Hitchens is not alone in his scepticism. Muslim scholars regularly ponder similar themes, though (of course) from a different perspective and in baffled tones. They often ask, for example: ‘Why are Muslims out of touch with modern times?’ Let us take Turkey as a brief case study. Though Turkey is secular by constitution, it is increasingly dominated by Islamism, and its record on the rights to freedom of and from religion is problematic, to say the least. One recent notable example: in April, the Turkish government vetoed the conferral of an honorary degree by a Turkish university on English professor Peter Atkins for his public criticism of religion. Out of touch, indeed.

When the question is about the wider ‘Muslim World’, especially the ‘Middle East’, criticising even the Taliban might be met with accusations of ‘Islamophobia’, ‘Orientalism’, or ‘Euro/Western-centrism’, and even ‘blasphemy’. And yet, the rejection of the laws and codes of such regimes as those in Iran and Saudi Arabia (and Turkey) is almost beside the point. It is, at core, the regressive tenets, alongside the static nature, of contemporary Islam itself that harm Muslims the most. Islam is arguably the world’s most dangerous religion, currently, as evinced by the bloodletting it inspires the world over as well as the tyrannies in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.

The mere physical manifestation of modernity, such as the numerous skyscrapers and expansive highways constructed in a ‘Middle Eastern Capital’, remains essentially meaningless without a corresponding intellectual evolution. While immense wealth from oil and gas can readily purchase advanced technology, complex engineering, and raw labour, it is fundamentally incapable of producing the particular type of talented ‘human capital’ necessary for true innovation. To achieve truly meaningful levels of societal advancement, there is an urgent need for a robust, secular education system designed to foster unconstrained thinking and critical inquiry.

The secular ethos is a concept that originated from, and is relevant to, societies where religions share key characteristics: ones where they are centred on historical narratives, hold political power, look to expand their influence, and are in conflict with scientific thought.

Drawing a historical parallel, just as Christianity functions as the prehistory of modern Europe, Islam serves as the prehistory of the Muslim world. The central challenge facing the Islamic world today is its historically regressive failure to fully secularise. For Muslim cultures to adapt to modernity, they must intentionally transition into what can be described as a ‘post-Islamic era’. This shift necessitates a comprehensive commitment to a secular ethos.

Richard Dawkins once made up a psychedelic drug, ‘Gerin Oil’ or ‘Geriniol’, to parody and criticise religion, arguing that high doses of this substance are at the root of violent events such as suicide attacks and witch hunts. Once an official and governmental system in Europe, ‘high-dose’ religion has become ‘diluted’ into a ‘liberal’ or ‘moderate’ mode of ideology thanks to centuries of secular thought, debate, and resistance. In Europe, and the secular West more generally, we no longer regularly see deaths for apostasy, adultery, or even witchcraft; we no longer believe in slavery, genocide, or inequality (even if the practice often falls short of the theory).

This is not because of the sublime ethics of religions but thanks to the secular ethos, refined over centuries. (This does not necessarily mean atheism, by the way.) These modern developments do not derive from religions and have no place in any religious scriptures. The ‘value’—in terms of freedom, prosperity, respect for human rights, etc.—of any modern society is directly correlated to its secularity. When secular principles are violated, this value will almost inevitably be downgraded.

Critically, entering a post-Islamic era does not mandate the erasure or abandonment of personal faith. Instead, it refers to the systematic removal of religious dogma from the machinery of state governance and the analytical laboratory of the mind. This evolution marks the transition from a society strictly governed by religious law to one grounded in human-centric governance. Within this post-religious space, the modern citizen would finally be born: an individual free to define their own identity and purpose outside of ancient, mythological, inherited archetypes.

This secular process acts as an absolute necessity for any civilisation that looks actively to shape its future, rather than merely residing in a future. It represents a gruelling intellectual rite of passage, involving the careful deconstruction of the sacred status once afforded to political, religious, and social institutions. By stripping away divine mandates, a society can begin to construct a more sustainable foundation for itself based on the reliable, though fallible, ground of human reason.

The construction of a secular society is an intensive internal labour that no amount of oil wealth can bypass or replace. For the ‘Muslim World’ to attain true ‘greatness’, its achievements must be measured by the depth of its intellectual freedom. The transition toward a post-Islamic, secular reality serves as the only viable bridge connecting a storied, traditional past to a truly innovative and sustainable future.

Related reading

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

The problem with ‘Islamophobia’, by Mark Lilly

When does a religious ideology become a political one? The case of Islam, by Niko Alm

The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

From the UK to Iran, self-critique is the antidote to global Muslim crises, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Digging for Christian Foundations: Tom Holland on Triggernometry, by Adam Wakeling

‘Do as I say, not as I do’: a review of ‘Dominion’ by Tom Holland, by Nicholas E. Meyer

Did Christianity make the Western mind? (a review of Tom Holland’s Dominion) by Charles Freeman

Convicted for blasphemy in modern Britain: an interview with Hamit Coskun, by Daniel James Sharp

The post A Call to a Post-Islamic World appeared first on The Freethinker.

We may choose to turn the volume down and go about our business, but one recent blunder coming from the ID PR machine may be the greatest error yet made by these apologists. Step forward Dr Casey Luskin, a veteran of the ID/creationist Discovery Institute. A geologist by training, he spends most of his time attacking evolution and genetics. This may strike us as curious, but apologists have never had the slightest problem venturing outside of their fields, partly because their religious congregations are perfectly happy for them to do so. This geologist has published very few peer-reviewed scientific articles but is readily received as an authority in biology by ID adherents and their creationist counterparts. He has, however, exposed the immense cracks in their system by horrendously misreading a recent article.

In April 2025, an article cataloguing the complete sequencing of various ape genomes and comprehensively comparing them with the human genome was published in Nature. The data is immense, as are the references, and it is not easy reading for the layperson.

Modern genomics allows for comprehensive data analysis and is based on bioinformatics, which allows us to curate and analyse data in a specialised manner. Since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, the world of genomics has changed completely. Evolutionary biology has since become a booming science thanks to a massive data revolution; scientists can extract DNA and sequence genomes in the field with a handheld device for less than $1000. NASA astronaut Kate Rubins even sequenced the genomes of microbes on the International Space Station in 2016 with a handheld MinION device developed by Oxford Nanopore Technologies.

Genomics as a science was born in its current incarnation only 30 years ago and is now leading biology into its biggest revolution since the 1950s. This Nature paper, remarkable for its accomplishments in comparative genomics, is typical of the revolutionary atmosphere in current biology.

Those of us in genetics who read it were interested and pleased to have more data on ape genomes. What the paper does not say is anything new or landscape-changing about the relationships between humans and apes. At the very least, it certainly does not overthrow the accepted evolutionary relationship between them. Indeed, some thought this paper might even quieten the creationists for a while. What no one expected (though perhaps we should have) was that Luskin, on behalf of the Discovery Institute, would fallaciously trumpet this paper as undeniable proof that humans and chimpanzees are not as genetically similar as previously claimed. Luskin wrote multiple articles on his blog championing this as a turning point both in genetics and for the evolutionary paradigm itself.

Luskin has been exposed for his fallacious, if not outright dishonest, approach before. YouTuber Dave Farina’s review of his work has been viewed over one million times, and his exposé of this incident also went viral. As Farina and others have pointed out, there are various ways of comparing genomes. This paper did indeed find ‘greater divergence than previously estimated’ by some measures, but this does not negate the old 98-99% similarity found by another measure, i.e. comparing nucleotide sequence identity. Even the other measures, while lower, still find overwhelming overlap.

The article itself never says that we were wrong about our similarity to chimps or that anything has changed in our fundamental understanding of the relationship between them and us. Luskin, however, spent a long time shouting as loudly as he could in articles, interviews, and podcasts that the traditional ~1% difference figure had been disproven, but in doing so, he conflated entirely separate measures of genomic likeness. This is also not how the Nature authors presented their paper. Regardless of the measure used, however, and as noted above, we are still overwhelmingly genomically similar to chimps, not to mention other apes.

Nevertheless, the ID and creationist machine declared victory over common ancestry. Because of uncritical swallowing of this, as well as deep scientific illiteracy, creationist ministries across the world repeated this falsehood wholesale. Whilst the scientists got on with their work, knowing nothing had fundamentally changed, the religious apologists celebrated loudly over the hill and told their crowds that evolution had been dealt a huge blow.

This proves many things. Firstly, the immense scientific illiteracy of the apologists. Secondly, that none of them properly read the scientific literature. Certainly, those who have parroted Luskin have been shown not to have read it themselves to check the findings. Thirdly, it showcases the failures of IDers/creationists when they step outside of their own fields. A serious geneticist would never have made their mistake. Fourthly, it shows how terrible IDers/creationists are at critical thinking. Even if one paper ‘proved’ their point (and in this case it doesn’t anyway), they would trumpet it without a second’s hesitation while failing to balance it against masses of other research. Cherry picking is one of the creationist’s favourite hobbies.

Finally, it reveals that the apologists in the ID and creationist movements have no respect or regard for religious scientists who disagree with them. There are hundreds of religious scientists working in professional research who get on with their work, publishing research and contributing to their field, without giving creationism or other such pseudoscience a moment’s thought. These scientists are immensely more qualified than those in the ID crowd. Their voices should carry great weight among their fellow religionists, yet the latter barely regard them at all.

Luskin’s error was a self-inflicted black eye for the churches, ministries, and individuals that entertained it. As it happens, around the time of this ‘controversy’, I was speaking with a very prominent religious apologist who is also an academic and mentioned ‘a recent science blunder for religious apologetics’. He immediately frowned. ‘Is this the Luskin thing?’ I nodded, and he sighed. There are plenty of religious people, including scientists, out there who are aware that this was indeed a blunder. I waited, with very little hope, to see if the apologists would realise their error and try to save face. Of course, they didn’t: Luskin and the rest continue to parrot pretty much the same old refuted claims. But then what else should one have expected from fundamentalists?

The post A recent ‘intelligent design’ blunder proves that science is still the biggest problem for religious apologetics appeared first on The Freethinker.

Even as Washington and Tehran might be drawing closer to a potential deal, the war has raged on and strikes continue. In Lebanon especially, Israeli strikes are killing dozens every day as Benjamin Netanyahu vows to deal Hezbollah a ‘crushing blow’. By the time the last round is fought in a war that some trace to 7 October 2023, some to 1948, and others to events from millennia ago, thousands of lives will have been lost—up to 10,000 have been killed in the region over the past three months alone since the US-Israeli strikes on Iran began on 28 February. This mounting death toll in a conflict that has engulfed the entire world will mean that, regardless of how the war ends, and whether any deal is imminent, Islamists are likely to use the Iran War as the next reference point for jihad.

Jihad, across centuries, has been founded on the self-serving Islamist paradox of Islamic supremacism and Muslim victimhood. While Islamists naturally cite the Islamic scriptures mandating military conquest over ‘those who do not believe in Allah’ (the Islamist idea of victimhood) or refuse to pay the non-Muslim jizya tax, the Muslim left endorses similar rhetoric and violence in the garb of ‘postcolonial struggle’, preferring to sidestep any self-reflection on centuries of Muslim colonialism. Iran seamlessly fits both ideological camps, which is why the flag of the Islamic Republic, which is responsible for the death and displacement of millions in the Middle East over decades, is so often visible at Islamist and leftist demonstrations alike. And it is increasingly Shia Iran that is propelling jihadism in various parts of the world.

In recent months, pro-Iran jihadists have attacked synagogues and other Jewish sites in Rotterdam, Munich, Michigan, Skopje, Liege, and Kenton—the latter one of at least ten recent antisemitic attacks in London alone. Many of these attacks have been linked to the Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, or The Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Righteous, which appears to work in tandem with Iranian paramilitary groups. Iran’s long-avowed jihad for Israel’s destruction has now been exported to the West, with every Jew on the hit list. Of course, the rampant Judeophobia in Islamic scriptures and genocidal commandments therein, which motivate all shades of jihadists, is also the ideological fodder for the surge in antisemitic violence in the West.

Radical Islamist Judeophobia is common to both the Sunni and Shia sects of Islam. While the former, which constitutes around 80 per cent of the total Muslim population, has dominated jihad in recent decades, the rise in Iran-linked jihadism suggests that the Shia share in jihadism will increase in the coming years. This is owing to both geopolitical and theological factors.

Two major theological components are the glorification of martyrdom, which is critical to both Shia and Sunni beliefs, and Iran’s system of vilayat-e-faqih, or guardianship of the Islamic jurist, which entrusts religious and political power to a leading Islamic jurist. Though not strictly a hereditary system, in practice those who claim leadership tend to also claim descent from Muhammad. This tendency is rooted in the story of the Battle of Karbala (680 CE), when, as per the Shia narrative, Muhammad’s grandson Husayn ibn Ali was denied his divine right to rule and suffered a martyr’s death. This story forms a critical chapter in Shia theology; it is one of the main sources of the Sunni-Shia split.

The Khamenei family is believed to be directly descended from Muhammad, and the succession of Mojtaba Khameini to supreme leadership of Iran followed the same ‘divine’ course. Add in the emphasis on the ‘martyrdom’ of Mojtaba’s father, Ali Khamenei, along with other of his family members in US and Israeli strikes, and Mojtaba’s ascension can be seen as directly linked to Islamic martyrdom folklore, with a quasi-divine right attributed to his rule. Sunni Muslims hold different ideas about Islamic authority and, especially, succession from the Prophet.  

In addition to linking the Iranian clerical hierarchy to Islam’s prophet, the Islamic Republic has also reinforced the Sunni-Shia split by merging the theological with the geopolitical. The targeting of water desalination plants in recent months, both by Iran and Israel, has provided more reasons to invoke Karbala. There, as per Islamic traditions, water was weaponised to torture the family of Husayn. Furthermore, strikes on sites of significance in Shia Islam also provide credence to victimhood narratives. Today, such symbolism is being deployed by Iran, its proxies, and the affiliated jihadist networks to paint Sunni Gulf states as legitimate targets of jihad. These states are touted as facilitators of the US and Israel, and thus they are equally the ‘enemies of Islam’.

Gulf states like Kuwait have unearthed Shia militant plots to kill state leaders. Many Shia are being arrested or deported in the UAE and Bahrain over allegations of supporting Iranian warfare against these states. While many innocent Shia are likely to suffer owing to such policies, it seems that a significant number of Shia Muslims are now prioritising the interests of Iran over the well-being of the states that they live in, whether in the West or the Middle East. This allegiance to foreign Islamic countries and Islamist causes, at the expense of one’s country of residence or citizenship, has long formed the bedrock of international jihad. Today, pro-Iran militants are threatening attacks the world over, from Texas to Jordan.

While the West has long seen Iranian clergy as a menace, even the Gulf states are invested in the demise of the Islamic Republic. The Abraham Accords, which were on the verge of being extended to Saudi Arabia and beyond before the Iran-backed Hamas massacre of Israelis on 7 October 2023 engulfed the region in this unrelenting war, were designed to signal cooperation between several Gulf states, Israel, and the US, at the expense of Iran. The Iranian regime, however, thrives on this Sunni opposition, which vindicates its theological victimhood narratives. More pertinently, this has allowed Iran to attract support not just from the Shia but also the Sunni sections of the Muslim world, using Israel as the decoy to lure manpower into its jihadist project.

The Sunni jihadist Hamas has long worked in tandem with Iran, citing the elimination of Israel as a common goal. Likewise, many Sunni clerics and public figures have publicly avowed support for Iran amid the ongoing war, even as Tehran has been attacking Sunni states. Even the Sunni Al-Qaeda linked Cyber Jihad Movement has vowed to back ‘pro-Iranian hacker movements and groups in their fight against the United States and Israel’, underlining that the digital jihad landscape is currently dominated by the Iranian anti-Israel narrative. This is all the more remarkable given that jihad has traditionally been associated with Sunni militant movements and that such movements, including Al-Qaeda, have often been hostile to Shia Iran.

With most of the jihadist recruitment taking place online, this means that jihadist attacks in the coming years will likely have an Iranian alignment. Of course, the dizzyingly high death tolls in Gaza and Lebanon, which are the responsibility of Israel, and anti-Muslim attacks, such as last week’s San Diego mosque shooting, will only solidify the jihadist narrative and motivate more anti-Israel and anti-West recruitment.

This is likely to transpire regardless of the outcome of the Iran War. Should the Abraham Accords be expanded to other Muslim states and a weakened Iran emerge in the region, the jihadist narrative—especially among the Shia—will place the blame on Jews, the West, and any Sunni Muslims who don’t toe the genocidal line and will include calls for vengeance against all these groups. More states having diplomatic relations with Israel would make the country even easier to target because that will make it easier for jihadists to travel there. If the Iranian clergy holds on to power, and the status quo remains, the regime would naturally bask in its triumph, and with the Sunni Gulf states modernising and pulling out of the jihad game, Tehran would be able to monopolise the jihad market.

Thus, whether or not the Islamic Republic survives, and whether it is weakened or strengthened or neither, it is most likely going to be the propellant for the next wave of global jihad.

The post The Iran War, Shia militancy, and the next wave of global jihad appeared first on The Freethinker.

Some months before Thatcher strode to power on a ticket of self-interest, individualism, and racism, Blair Peach, a teacher at an east London school, travelled to Southall—where I was born and raised—to join thousands of local people for a huge protest against the National Front (NF). It was 23 April 1979, and the NF had intentionally selected Southall for their meeting as the area had become a well-known safe haven for immigrants. As they hurled racist abuse and demanded that local people ‘go home’, they clearly intended to make minorities feel that there is no safe place for them in the UK.

The NF were protected by the local police and their notoriously brutal division, the Special Patrol Group (SPG), who were brought in to ‘disperse’ those peaceful anti-fascist protestors. The inquiry into Blair Peach’s murder found that he was ‘almost certainly’ killed by members of the SPG who bludgeoned him with a baton as they viciously chased protestors off Southall Broadway. Moreover, they arrested over 700 protestors and charged 342 with various violent offences. Some were maliciously carted off in police vans and dropped off in remote areas outside London. Some of those charged were later acquitted because of a brilliantly coordinated campaign for justice.

A range of progressive projects and inspirational figures emerged from that moment and came to shape local and national politics by standing up for the right of immigrants to build lives in the UK, for workers’ rights, race equity, and the right of women and girls to live free from violence. I was so incredibly fortunate to have grown up in the shadow of this rainbow coalition. And I’m indebted to those local community groups that keep our history alive by teaching about the way that the people of Southall stood up to racism, in all its forms. I am also certain that it is this continuous activism and new waves of immigration (from Somalia, Eritrea, South India, and Afghanistan) that have protected the Southall constituencies from any Conservative or Reform gains.

Fast forward 47 years, on 23 April 2026, I picked up an electoral campaigning leaflet for recent local council elections in the neighbouring borough of Hounslow, the first set to be distributed there. Sadly, it was for Reform and proposed three Asian candidates—two Sikh men and a Hindu woman. All three were long-standing Labour Party members and claimed they were forced to exit the party because of the lack of local accountability and branch transparency. However, they were almost certainly denied a seat by Labour and enticed by the local Sikh parliamentary candidate for Reform, Prabhdeep Singh. One of them, Bandna Chopra, defected to Reform after she was deselected from a Labour Party seat that she had held for eight years. Local Labour denounced her Reform candidacy, stating:

It’s a match made in heaven, the deselected Labour councillor and the party which has become a dumping ground for those who have failed to be successful in the mainstream parties. She has found the only party with an entry bar low enough to have her as a candidate.

In turn, the three Heston East candidates for Reform claimed that Labour has failed the borough; they regurgitate a narrative of decay and disgust—rising crime, fly tipping, uncollected rubbish, and rising numbers of assaults. These seemingly innocuous civic concerns strike at the heart of people’s feelings of insecurity, but more importantly, they conceal significant structural problems which were set in motion by the Conservative Party in 1979 and exacerbated through austerity measures, again by the Conservative Party, from 2010. None of these issues can be resolved by Reform UK’s political agenda.

In fact, some of the claims don’t hold up against the facts: both Hounslow and Ealing are among the top 20 safest areas across London. In fact, Hounslow is the 26^th safest area across England and Wales. Crime has declined year on year and is lower in Hounslow and Ealing than across London. Weapons-based offences have also fallen significantly in Hounslow since 2018, and anti-social behaviour appears to be particularly high for just one or two months a year.

If anything, it is ‘violence and sexual offences’ that have increased. This is a vague category but likely includes domestic and sexual violence against women, something that certainly could not be tackled by patriarchal men, let alone a party run by misogynistic Farage and funded by unaccountable millionaires, such as Charles Harbonne, whose personal economic interests are fast manifesting as Reform’s public policies. Where Farage and his elite cohort of rich men continue to evade their legal duty to declare and be transparent about donations and donors, they claim victimhood and use dog whistle politics on immigration to avoid all personal responsibility.

Moreover, Reform have actively folded civic concerns into a larger narrative about immigration, re-presenting them as direct consequences of ‘weak border controls’ and ‘bogus’ migrants. Here, Sara Ahmed’s work is incisive. She shows how the continuous use of key words in close proximity to others—immigration, crime, illegal, bogus, asylum, rubbish, dirt, chaos—enables the far right and mass media to embed psychological associations between them that short-circuit all rational argument and research evidence. In this way, a reference to one thing, like fly tipping, conjures up another, like immigrant, and becomes stuck to non-white bodies, while socio-economic explanations are elided.

As many have noted, sexual exploitation and abuse have become an even more obvious part of these lazy associations. Sexual abuse has been re-presented by the far right as a reflection of the incompatibility of Muslims and immigrants with the ‘British’ way of life. Yet, there is no Reform attention to over 109 white English activists within far-right groups who are convicted sexual offenders, nor recognition that many of the non-white offenders are British-born and bred.

A lot of far-right concerns have been mainstreamed. Just think how rare it is for friends and family to say anything positive about immigration, about the value of immigration in social terms, if not the net economic value. How often do you hear about the vital contribution of migrants to the health service, to the arts, to the development of your civil and political rights, to community spirit or community care, to the food on your table, and the cheapest deliveries to your door? The association of immigration with decay and disgust has seeped into our minds, social relations, and communities. It has supplanted all the counterweights to our insecurities and all the value that decades of immigration and the defence of human dignity have brought to our lives.

Right wing populism across Europe has moulded all these complaints—flytipping, crime, immigration—into a language that claims moral superiority and the status of  ‘common sense’, a phrase that is a staple of the language of Reform’s electoral campaigns. One of their Sikh candidates, Pritpal Singh Mann, appealed to voters to follow Reform’s commitment to ‘common sense’ governance. Again, Stuart Hall can help us here. He explained that particular racialised, class-based projections of ‘common sense’ are central to the neoliberal project, and that after fifty years of rhetoric against benefits claimants, our sense of ‘fairness’ has become pinned to so-called ‘common sense’ demands for reductions rather than increases in state provisions and to demands to close our borders. ‘Fairness’ is for British nationals only, not for refugees fleeing conflict or economic migrants working hard to avoid poverty in other parts of the world.

But we need to ask ourselves how voting for hate can make any sense at all. Since the recent elections, six elected Reform councillors have had to resign, four of them because of social media posts which celebrated the rape of a Sikh woman and likened Muslims to rats; Holocaust denial; quips about how Nigerians should be melted down and used to fill pot holes; and calls for the destruction of mosques. At the very least, we should expect the Asian candidates for Reform to ask themselves why this party attracts so many overt and violent racists.

But this is not the first time that ethnic minority voting patterns have reproduced the groundswell of hate politics. As I found in my PhD research, longstanding Labour Party branches across west London boroughs started to leak ethnic minority supporters at the turn of the century, particularly around 2007. Whereas Muslims in several east London boroughs exited Labour to join Respect as a protest vote against New Labour’s War on Terror and assault on Iraq, in west London, the Conservative Party became a viable vehicle for right wing factions of existing ethnic minority vote banks for the first time in decades.

When the longstanding Labour Sikh Punjabi (albeit secular) MP for Ealing Southall, Piara Khabra, died in 2007, two Sikh councillors jumped from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party out of dissatisfaction that a Hindu (albeit secular) candidate had been selected from the Indian Workers Party base to replace Khabra. One of them had supported Sikh fundamentalists and even threatened violence in the council chamber. Yet, the Sikh candidates claimed that they had experienced religious discrimination as turban-wearing Sikhs. This all exposed a hotchpotch of business, religious, class, and gender interests that had underscored the Sikh Punjabi involvement in the Ealing Southall Labour Party. Also, the crumbling homogeneity of a Sikh Punjabi ‘community’ that had stood together in the face of racist violence and tightening immigration controls since the 1950s. And, an easy alignment between Sikh histories and the Conservative harking back to the glory days of empire, something I have discussed elsewhere as ‘symbiotic sovereignty’.  

Soon after this, the ascent of UKIP and then the Brexit vote surfaced yet more fissures within traditional ethnic minority vote banks. Even though the ethnic minority vote leaned more towards Remain and they could see a clear connection between their position as racialised minorities and the racist tropes of the Leave campaigns, there were a significant number of British Black and Asian Brexiteers. Neema Begum’s analysis of their motivations is important. She found that these racialised minorities felt little affinity with the European Union because of the sense that migration into the UK from (white) EU countries occupied a privileged place over migration from the Global South. Also, they felt a strong sense that countries within the EU were more racist than Britain. So Asian Brexiteers saw themselves opposing a white supranational entity. It is important to see how racism can play out in these different ways, and that Asians might have voted Leave alongside Eurosceptics for entirely different reasons.

And yet they did vote for Brexit in the context of a high-profile racist campaign led by Nigel Farage, who foregrounded images of Muslim/Arab migrants pushing into the EU and fuelled anxieties about Turkey joining the EU. Moreover, his tag line ‘Take Back Control’ appealed to archaic conceptions of the authentic English man whose land is overrun by non-English people. This fits well with Farage’s desperate 1994 bid to get Enoch Powell to support and even stand for his UKIP party (Farage was the dominant figure in UKIP for much of its existence; he left it in 2018 to form the Brexit Party, which became Reform in 2021).

One would have to be living in complete seclusion not to see the nativist ethnocentric messages at the heart of Farage’s campaign to leave the EU. But then, how do Asians come to support Reform and even stand as Reform candidates? Missing from the existing analysis of support for Brexit and UKIP, and now Reform, is specific attention to Asian (particularly Sikh and Hindu) complicity in new waves of biocultural racism. The fact that Farage’s team offered positions to Hindus who praise Narendra Modi’s violent anti-Muslim Indian government tells us that he is well aware of the turn to the right within Asian communities, and particularly the virulent anti-Muslim hostility, moralistic conservatism, and business self-interest that aligns with his own ideological project. This is where ideology, and the tools of ideological reproduction, really count and can override race and class solidarities.

I have written elsewhere about the rise and rise of Sikh fundamentalism within Sikh dominated areas in the UK, but I reiterate here that, since at least 9/11, Sikh fundamentalist groups have been pushing for the state and its institutions to stop using the term ‘Asian’ and to distinguish between Sikhs and Muslims. The exposé on Asian offenders of child sexual exploitation spurred them on, with three main Sikh fundamentalist groups gaining considerable airtime to argue that it is Muslims, not Sikhs, who are perpetrators of child sexual exploitation, and that Sikhs have long since been victims of the same Muslim barbarity.

One of them, the Sikh Awareness Society, led by Mohan Singh, gained the public support of notorious racists Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson, and he encouraged gurdwaras up and down the country to host them. Tommy Robinson’s claim that there is an inherent problem with Muslims aligns with and is increasingly being voiced by Sikhs, whose cheek-by-jowl histories and daily lives with Muslim neighbours and work colleagues are drowned out by the amplification, across all media platforms, of Sikh fundamentalist messaging, as well as the fact that a large number of gurdwara spaces have been sequestered for Sikh fundamentalist activists. In the meantime, Sikh women’s groups are threatened and abused when they speak out about Sikh men perpetrating gender-based violence.

The fact that there is an ideological alignment between the religious supremacy of Sikh fundamentalist groups and the racial supremacy of the Reform party has not yet been addressed. Fortunately, though media platforms are amplifying the power of Reform, the party is not doing as well as it claims. At least 79 Reform UK councillors have been forced to resign from their seats since May 2025, including six that were elected on 7 May 2026. They have not won the lion’s share of council seats. This is a distinct misrepresentation by the press; in fact, their share of the votes was at least 10 percentage points lower than they had predicted and lower than in previous elections. Many Reform councillors do not have the experience that is required to understand and manage local council budgets, and they do not have any idea of how to address the global events that are driving up the cost of living.

However, their ideological venom can have a lasting impact, most acutely seen in the research evidence based on Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’, which drove a wedge through local communities, exacerbating fear that led migrants to commit suicide. And more recently, far-right rhetoric has stoked the resurgence of colour racism. The Sikh woman who was raped in Birmingham last year was subjected to racist abuse by a man who pursued her because he assumed she was Muslim. And the people who were attacked on the streets during the summer riots of 2024—the Indian man dragged from his taxi, the Caribbean woman who was forced to kneel and then punched in the face—were neither Muslim nor migrants.

Colour racism is coming for all of us, including the Sikhs who voted for Reform, and it is incumbent on all racialised minorities to do their part to change the narrative on Muslims and migration, to reconstitute our collective anti-racist histories, and to push the far right back to the margins where it belongs.

The far right and ex-Muslims: ‘The enemy of my enemy is not my friend’, by Sara Al-Ruqaishi

The Rise of the British Radical Right: First Reform, then Restore? by Zwan Mahmod

The post When two worlds align: some reflections on the Asians that betrayed our collective histories by supporting a racist party appeared first on The Freethinker.

Too often, freethought history has been left to academics who regard it as an intellectual curiosity and write up their theses in near-impenetrable language. Their purpose may be to impress fellow academics, but they do little to enlighten the general public. The public square has been left largely clear for those who wish to denigrate, or rather elide, freethinkers’ achievements and legacy. Their strongest weapon has been used to great effect and with inadequate pushback: they simply ignore us. No organisation is guiltier than the BBC, whose policy of presenting balanced political views has never extended to religious belief (or lack thereof).

Those who rightly draw attention to the decline in religious belief amongst the population too often fail to notice the enduring and sometimes increasing influence of religion within our political, cultural, and educational institutions. This is best shown by the inability of many to take the resurgence of an aggressive, conservative Christianity seriously. So far, I have mostly spoken about the UK, but the point pertains even more strongly to the USA, whose freethought legacy is under direct assault by an authoritarian, Christian nationalist administration.

It has always been the mission of the Freethinker to write about freethought issues in accessible terms, so I consider it appropriate to recognise and celebrate the four-part, nearly four-hour American Freethought film series, largely the work of Rod Bradford, editor of The Truth Seeker and author of D.M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker. The series was originally published in 2013 as a DVD and is a serious and polished attempt to tell the story of freethought in the USA and examine its important influence on the way that nation has developed.

The approach is chronological, although with frequent explanatory references back and forth. Thomas Paine and the American Revolution are taken as the starting point, as they surely must be, and the series finishes with Clarence Darrow and the Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial and the decline of the freethought movement between the wars. The story is told through a series of interviews with leading authorities, including Jack Fruchtman, David Contosta, Helen Horowitz, Chris Finan, Carol Faulkner, Lawrence Goodheart, and Tom Flynn. Each was interviewed at length, and the footage was divided into easily digestible, ‘bite-sized’ chunks. Of the contributors, Tom Flynn plays a leading, anchor role, spelling out the significance of events and personalities. 

Tom was an American author, journalist, novelist, and executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism and editor of its journal Free Inquiry (both under the aegis of the Center for Inquiry, the leading American freethought organisation) until his death in 2021. He was also director of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum and the Freethought Trail. His concluding comment in the series is very telling: that you cannot understand America today unless you understand the contribution of freethinkers.

To supplement and highlight points within the narrative, a wealth of illustrations is used. The main sources are the Library of Congress and the Library at the Center for Inquiry, which probably has the world’s largest collection of freethought publications. The illustrations include several cartoons by the extraordinary Heston Watson, which originally appeared in the late nineteenth-century Truth Seeker. Watson’s cartoons do what we often fail to do today: they spell out the freethinker’s cause in a way all those with an open mind can relate to. There is also use of photo animations created by Alper Nakri, whose work can also be seen in History Channel programmes in the US, and some archival film footage, including from the Scopes Trial and of the bizarre, conservative, evangelist ‘Billy Sunday’, who was to find this occupation rather more financially rewarding than his former career as a baseball player. Sound familiar? Accompanying original background music was composed by Frank D. Fagnano.

An aspect which repeatedly struck me is the parallels between British and American freethought history. Here are just a few. Both take Thomas Paine and his Age of Reason, in which he eviscerated revealed religion, as seminal. Both reached their peak towards the end of the nineteenth century (Americans refer to the ‘Golden Age of Freethought’) when both benefited from the services of outstanding orators: Charles Bradlaugh in Britain and Robert G. Ingersoll in the USA. In both countries there was the emergence of a journal of record: in Britain, the Freethinker, and in the USA, The Truth Seeker. Both journals have made it their business to champion the memory and works of Thomas Paine, and both survive to this day.

Referring specifically to The Truth Seeker, Tom Flynn goes as far as to suggest that without its efforts, Paine’s memory and work would have fallen even further into obscurity. Further, the first editors of both journals, G.W. Foote (Freethinker) and D.M. Bennett (Truth Seeker), served terms of imprisonment of similar lengths (12 and 11 months) as a reward for their endeavours. These editors exchanged information and each frequently reprinted articles that appeared in the other’s newspaper. Freethinkers in both countries were important in disseminating knowledge of birth control techniques and campaigning for free expression. Most importantly, in both countries there were honest individuals of extraordinary courage prepared to face the opprobrium of their fellow citizens and fight for what they thought was right. There are many other parallels that could be noted.

If the series has a weakness, it is its density: it contains a great deal of detail and analysis. At times, this makes it challenging to follow, and I had to watch it twice to feel I had fully absorbed it. Yet depth is essential if the subject is to be treated seriously, and I would hesitate to suggest cutting anything. What is needed instead is the energy, commitment, and funding to produce separate episodes on the many major events and issues it raises. In the meantime, Rod Bradford has made effective use of the footage by creating two- or three-minute clips that highlight specific themes, some released to coincide with issues as they become topical. As Mark Twain, himself a Truth Seeker subscriber, once observed, ‘History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.’

In any case, it is hard for a Briton to be critical. In the UK, we have yet to produce anything to rival American Freethought. Like the American story, our own is compelling and significant, and well worth telling. After all, the American freethought movement drew heavily on the work of two of the greatest Britons in history—Charles Darwin and Thomas Paine. For now, we can only watch American Freethought—and admire it.

Those wishing to follow my recommendation should use the following link to find the four episodes, plus a range of other film material of interest to Brits. I am very grateful to Rod Bradford for organising this feast: https://vimeo.com/roderickbradford.

Those who desire something more permanent can purchase the series on DVD from the Center for Inquiry store: https://centerforinquiry.org/store/product/american-freethought-blu-ray-and-dvd/.

Related reading

Books from Bob’s Library #8: our friend ‘The Truth Seeker’, by Bob Forder

Image of the week: The Freethought Road, by Bob Forder

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

The post Review of ‘American Freethought’, a four-part film series by Roderick Bradford and the Council for Secular Humanism (USA) appeared first on The Freethinker.

The webinars will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel. (This post will be updated and the video of the webinar—on which more in a moment—will appear below once the recording is available. All posts about these webinars will be accessible here, and all such posts will also be updated in due course when the webinar recordings are available, thus forming a complete catalogue of the series).

Register for Freethought History Webinar #12: The Atheistic Radicalism of America’s Founding and Refounding. With Matthew Stewart.

The webinar will take place on 30 June 2026 at 7 pm UK time (2 pm ET/1 pm CT/12 pm MDT/11 am MST/11 am PT) via Zoom.

About the webinar: With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming up, the meaning of America is more hotly contested than ever before. Under the Trump administration, Christian nationalism has taken the reins, imposing its vision of America as a nation founded on ‘Judeo-Christian principles’ and in dire need of a restoration of religion—that is, the Christian religion.

In this webinar, Matthew Stewart will discuss the still under-appreciated role of the philosophy of the radical Enlightenment in the founding and the refounding of the American Republic. The talk will sketch the historical and philosophical narrative presented in his works, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (2014) and An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America (2024).

About the speaker: Matthew Stewart is an American philosopher and writer. He is the author of the forthcoming Everything You Need to Know: How Philosophy Can Set You Free (November 2026), and, previously, The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy (1997), Monturiol’s Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World (2004), The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (2006), The Management Myth: Debunking the Modern Philosophy of Business (2009), and The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture (2021). You can find out more about him and his books on his website, here.

You must register to secure your place at the webinar. To do so, click here or on the image below.

With thanks to Bob Forder for suggesting these seminars and helping to organise them.

The post Freethought History Webinar #12: The Atheistic Radicalism of America’s Founding and Refounding. With Matthew Stewart (30 June 2026). appeared first on The Freethinker.

Reform gained 1,453 councillors across England in the most recent local elections. This massive gain is to be tallied alongside their eight MPs and 270,000 members. Their MPs include two prominent defectors from the Tories, Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick. Both had previously either fought to become the leader of the Tory party or positioned themselves against their Prime Minister in a bid for power. After these failures, they found themselves without a place in their own party and abandoned it for the insurgent right-wing party.

Reform’s primary appeal stems from its opposition to mass immigration. For context, net immigration by June 2023 reached 906,000, while for June 2024 it was 730,000. While these figures have significantly dropped since then, it remains in the hundreds of thousands. It is worth remembering that the Conservative government of David Cameron promised to drop these figures to the tens of thousands, as existed in the 1980s and 1990s, as per ONS figures.

Immigration, however, is a complicated question, often misunderstood. The people coming in are not, for the most part, masses of asylum seekers, refugees, or foreign criminals, as portrayed across much of the media. Most of those who have come to the UK are legal immigrants, consisting of asylum seekers and refugees (Ukrainian refugees since Russia’s invasion and Syrian refugees from the civil war, for instance), students, NHS workers, and other skilled and semi-skilled workers, plus other groups. The government permits this sort of immigration. (And, not incidentally, asylum seekers and refugees are a minority of this type of immigration.)

In this sense, the argument that immigration is ‘out of control’ or ‘unmanaged’ is a distortion. It is not particularly easy for masses of people to come here illegally without being stopped or monitored. The only exceptions are those coming on the so-called ‘small boats’, who form a minority of those coming to the UK. Therefore, the argument needs to rest on how much immigration we want, what its benefits and costs are, and what we think the appropriate scale and timeframe for immigration and assimilation are. None of this is seriously engaged with in our public discourse. The arguments are mostly truncated, emotionally charged, and misleading.

In this political environment, fostered over several decades, Reform emerged and presented a simple and emotive case: immigration is a net drain on resources, and it is tearing apart the fabric of society. Many people are unsettled by contemporary Britain, with high levels of immigration, petty crimes left unprosecuted, and the demographic make-up of the country changing. These are the people who declare, ‘I want my country back’. Such feelings are a response both to demographic insecurity in the literal sense of there being fewer white Britons as a percentage of the population, and to the feeling of generalised helplessness and loss of control. This is a crucial part of why the Brexit campaign’s ‘Take Back Control’ slogan resonated.

One of Reform’s policies to address this explosion of anxiety was announced in early May: the construction of detention centres for illegal immigrants, to be built in areas with Green-controlled councils and constituencies, while Reform-controlled councils and constituencies would be free of them. It is unlikely that this policy could be practically enforced, and it is unclear if it would even be legal. More importantly, however, it represents another fatal degradation of our politics: the public is invited to vote for a policy and, in doing so, can be exempted from having to accept the consequences of it.

If these detention centres are cruel in their treatment of people, badly run, or otherwise ineffective, no voter who had cast their support for them will know, as the centres will not be in their constituency. Moreover, how are we to know that Reform will not award contracts for the construction of these detention centres, which would likely be lucrative, to business partners, allies, and donors? The very policy invites corruption and cruelty (and Farage’s own allegedly dodgy dealings do not inspire confidence, not to mention the confirmed corruption of other Reform figures). If Reform is willing to cheapen the democratic process, there is no reason to think they won’t further degrade and corrupt other, less visible processes as well.

Currently, Reform represents the most popular version of the British radical right, emerging specifically as a result of the failures of the Conservative Party in its fourteen years in power, both in its inability to manage immigration and in its impoverishment of the country. However, as noted, another fracture has now formed. The Restore Party is seeking to outflank Reform from the right, presenting itself as the true, anti-establishment right-wing party, the one which will carry out the radical actions of which Reform is incapable.

Restore Britain was launched as a political party in February 2026, eight months after its founding as a movement and pressure group in the summer of 2025. The primary aim of the Restore party, as declared by party leader Rupert Lowe, is ‘Net negative immigration – vastly more people must leave than arrive, for many years.’ Responding sarcastically online to ‘blatant misinformation’ that Restore would deport a million people over five years, Lowe subsequently wrote: ‘We’ll deport far more than that’. This policy, also known as remigration by groups such as the Homeland Party (which emerged from the explicitly neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative), or simply mass deportations, asserts that mass immigration has made the country poorer, weakened the social bonds between people, strained the country’s social services, and led to the mass rape and trafficking of English girls and women. Lowe is also one of the members of the committee which has launched an inquiry into the grooming gangs.

Restore, much like Reform, is not a conservative party, but a radical right-wing one. While it seeks to gain power by traditional democratic means, it does not speak in the conservative language of preservation or conservation. Lowe states on the Restore website: ‘I do not believe in conserving or reforming the status quo. I do not believe in the status quo at all, and nor do the majority of the British public. We do not need more of the same – we need a democratic revolution.’ At Restore’s launch event, the party’s communications director, Charlie Downes, said much the same: ‘I think that this system itself is illegitimate. Therefore, what I think we need is a revolution.’

Historically, this sort of language was only invoked by the right when there was a deep sense of crisis and existential struggle. It echoes fascist rhetoric from the time of Franco, who used such language when talking about the dangers posed by Spanish liberals, socialists, and communists to European and Christian civilisation. As Gustac Jönsson writes: ‘Franco’s inner circle believed they had to save Spain… Franco’s terror was also characterized by an especially vicious, paranoid style. Its victims were pathologized, as though they were cancerous cells on the body politic’. Restore has a similar pathological view of foreigners, who are variously characterised as ‘invaders’, ‘third worlders’, and ‘orcs’. Designating people as orcs and invaders necessarily defines them as harmful to British society and therefore justifies mass deportations of foreigners. A sampling of Lowe’s comments reveals this chauvinistic state of mind:

• ‘Restore Britain will, without apology or fear, deport the third world orcs who break into our country, rape young women and then expect the British to tolerate their presence. There is finally a political party that will defend our home, our people, our shires.’
• ‘The time for “the truth” mate was when you were importing third world savages by the thousands and thousands. How many migrant hotels opened on your watch?’ Lowe’s question to Robert Jenrick online.
• ‘Between 2010 and 2024, the Conservative Party failed our country in some of the most damaging ways imaginable. Britain doesn’t need to be conserved or reformed, it needs to be restored.’
• ‘I absolutely detest what mass immigration has done to our town centres.’
• ‘Ed Davey has just said that I am “aiding and abetting” the destruction of his country. He’s right. Restore Britain is going to destroy his version of our country. And we will replace it with one that works for British men and women, and them only. It will be glorious.’ (Emphasis added)

Describing the majority of the world’s population as ‘orcs’ signifying evil, while the English (or British—officially the ideology includes all Britons, but the language is usually Anglo-centric) are simple ‘hobbits’ living peaceful lives, is racist. There is no other term for it. Downes also believes that Britishness comes down to ‘ancestry and Christian faith’; in other words, he desires an ethnically and religiously homogenous society.

Lowe’s bigotry also shows in an interview with Carl Benjamin. After discussing his appeal to the US far-right agitator Tucker Carlson for Americans to help the British right, he says, ‘We need some proper logical thought from people who care about the Anglo-Saxon alliance and who want to see the libertarian fringe of the world unite and protect freedom and the way of life that [we all arguably] take for granted’. Both Britain and America are defined as Anglo-Saxon countries and are linked to freedom. The slip in language is telling; Lowe usually refrains from explicit appeals to Anglo-Saxondom—in public, anyway. Associating a particular ethnic heritage (one which does not in fact apply to the US anymore) with ‘freedom’ reveals a lot about the way Lowe thinks.

By emphasising ethnicity and religion in these ways, by calling for a defence of an essentialised British/Christian heritage against outsiders, Restore is playing a very dangerous game. This language is all too familiar and owes much to twentieth-century fascism, whether or not the people using it are aware of the ventriloquist.

Lowe has also spoken favourably of the US administration, stating that Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio are ‘great people’ who are moving things in the right direction, and that Britain could do with their help. Yet examining the record of Trump’s second term shows a trail of criminality and destruction: the bombing of ships in the Caribbean, the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, and the war on Iran, which has left thousands of civilians dead.

Lowe’s praise of Trump matters for another reason. In 2023 Trump was found to be civilly liable for sexual assault and defamation. His vulgar, predatory language about women is likewise well known. Lowe’s support for and admiration of Trump despite these facts undermines his purported concern for victims of sexual assault and rape.

Furthermore, an independent investigation by Jacqueline Perry KC has found that there was ‘credible evidence’ that Lowe himself, alongside two of his staff, had harassed two women. (This was during his time with Reform and was one of the reasons for his ousting from the party; he rejects the report and claims that he was hounded out for criticising Farage. It was after his ousting that he formed Restore. More on this below.) Lowe’s rhetoric, behaviour, and the types of people he admires and makes excuses for reveal the type of politician and man he is.

Like Reform, Restore has also gained recently. It claims to have 100,000 members and gained councillors in the local elections, all within a few months of being founded as a political party. What differentiates Restore from Reform, though, is that the former believes the latter is too soft in matters of culture, race, nationality, and immigration. While Lowe is more than happy to describe foreigners as ‘orcs’ and Downes ties Englishness/Britishness strictly to ethnicity, Farage says, ‘I’m not going to start drawing ethnic lines on what being English is’. Not that Farage is absolved of racism, which is amply demonstrated by his racial abuse of his fellow students while at school and his infamous ‘Breaking Point’ billboard during the Brexit campaign. Lowe is only more brazen in his language.

There exists a coterie of online right-wing figures who support Lowe and urge their followers to move from Reform to Restore. Such figures, including one-time UKIP candidate Carl Benjamin, whom we have already encountered, and Connor Tomlinson, despise Farage and Reform, seeing them as traitors to the cause of reclaiming the country. This contempt has two main sources. The first is personal. Farage kicked Lowe out of Reform last summer amid accusations of harassment (see above) and accusations that Lowe had physically threatened Reform Chairman Zia Yusuf. Lowe and his supporters believe these accusations were concocted after Lowe had publicly criticised Farage and drawn the admiration of Elon Musk. In any case, Farage’s decision to expel Lowe led to this fracturing of the radical right and the founding of Restore.

The second source of contempt is political. Reform’s inclusion of non-English minorities upsets these figures, who think foreigners should not hold public office, are prone to crime and disorder, and are demographically replacing them. They form a key part of what is called the online right. A key cog in this media ecosystem is the platform launched by Benjamin in 2020, called the Lotus Eaters, which helps to churn out more right-wing media figures, including contributors like Dan Tubb. According to Benjamin, ‘There’s different levels of online right. We’re…a sort of…intellectual elite of the online right. We’re academic scholars, we read a lot of books’. These figures are now members of Restore; they have interviewed Restore figures, and they urge their followers to vote for the new party. A few other stray figures support Restore explicitly for its racism: individuals like Hugh Anthony, an online bigot known for his emulation of Oswald Mosley, and Steve Laws, a former member of the Homeland Party who is visceral in his hatred of anyone not English. It is worth remembering that the Homeland Party was one of the first parties to popularise the idea of ‘remigration’.

Much of the steam behind parties like Restore and the growth of the online right comes from the ‘grooming gang scandal’. While Lowe seeks to draw moral force from his inquiry, he is also prone to exaggerations and lies on the subject. In an interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lowe claimed that the rape gangs were in ‘virtually every town and city in the UK’. This is simply not true, with most incidents occurring in the Midlands and parts of Northern England such as Oldham, Rochdale, and Rotherham. This is not to downplay the extent and depth of the depravity inflicted on the women and girls victimised by these gangs, but it is to say that Lowe’s purpose is clearly to institute a mass panic and give the impression that such crimes will recur if a Restore government is not elected. Lowe also claimed to Rees-Mogg that ‘the rape gang issue has been going on for probably 50 years’. This is once again not true; it is another claim pulled out of thin air.

Moreover, when pressed on Tommy Robinson, Lowe claimed not to understand ‘what he has and hasn’t done wrong’. This equivocation, despite the fact that Robinson’s record of physical assault, fraud, contempt of court, and anti-Muslim bigotry is well known. It is highly unlikely Lowe is unaware of all this. A simpler explanation suffices—Lowe does not care. Criminality by someone English who is a prospective ally does not trouble him. Criminality by individuals from other ethnic or religious groups, however, is ripe for political exploitation in the service of his agenda of mass deportations.

Reform and Restore both believe that policies of racist mass deportations will fix the country. The primary differences between them are the personal animosity between the two party leaders, Restore’s belief that Reform is not really up to the hard task of saving Britain, and Restore’s more explicit ethnic focus and outright, undisguised racism. Current projections have Reform winning a parliamentary majority in 2029. If this occurs and Britain is not still ‘fixed’, what fatal moment awaits us as Restore prepares to take over and presents itself as the true right-wing party willing to overturn the status quo and do what is necessary?

The post The Rise of the British Radical Right—First Reform, then Restore? appeared first on The Freethinker.