Britain First London Mayoral candidate Nick Scanlon caught on camera making vile racist remarks

Britain First’s London Mayoral candidate has been recorded saying he has a “hatred for c**ns” – a for black people.

In undercover footage recorded in a bar by the anti-fascist group HOPE not Hate, Nick Scanlon, who stood against in May, claims that he and a former date shared racial hatred. The member said: “I’m not going to sit with a girl and take her out on a date who's slept with a n***** or whatever, I’m just not gonna do it."

“Funnily enough, we went out and a date once and she turned round – we were in Shoreditch and there’s a lot of n*****s in Shoreditch – and she said to me, out of nowhere like, ‘f***ing black people’, she went, ‘I can’t stand black people’. So, like, you could say we share a hatred for c**ns.”

READ MORE:

Scanlon stormed across the stage during London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s election victory speech in May shouting “Khan killed London,” after the candidate polled over one million votes, and he came 12th. He is currently the South-East Regional organiser for Britain First. Paul Golding, leader of Britain First, is also recorded in a pub garden as wanting the UK to become “a sh*thole”.

“Over the next 15 years this country is going to be more violent, and a horrific place to live,” he says, in footage recorded in the build-up to this summer’s UK riots, which were triggered by racist conspiracy theories. “The moment we are waiting for is fast approaching. I want this country to be a sh*thole. I want this country to descend into a f***ing nightmare because that’s the only thing that’s going to get people off their backsides.”

On another occasion, Far Right activists giving out Britain First’s ‘Essex Patriot’ magazine are confronted by a local woman who asks them to stop spreading hate in her community. A Britain First activist is recorded as saying: “If she loves them so much, let her have a f***ing bit of them.

“Probably why she wants them here. She probably wants 1,800 boyfriends. Yeah, when they’re f***ing pinning her down and raping her, let her say then about ‘racists’.”

HOPE not Hate infiltrated Britain First over several months in 2023-24, in an investigation followed by the award-winning film-maker Havana Marking, for a new film ‘Undercover: Exposing the Far Right’. Essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand the violent disorder that scarred Britain’s communities this summer, this could be the origin story for the UK riots.

Researcher Harry Shukman became ‘Chris, from Cambridgeshire’, regularly attending Britain First demos and action days across Kent and Essex, and travelling with the group to Warsaw in Poland, where they attended an ‘Independence Day’ march. Banners at the march included, ‘Defend White Europe’, as the crowd chanted ‘Ultranationalists! Now, Now, Now!’

“We need to let Britain First’s voters, donors and members know what the organisation is really like,” Shukman told the . “Some people think they are mainstream, but just to the right. When you break down [Britain First’s] policies you find they are deeply racist, aggressive organisers posing as a legitimate political party.”

Patrik Hermansson – HOPE not Hate’s senior researcher, who acted as a handler for Shukman explained: “A lot of these organisations present one thing to the , but what they say in private can be quite different. So, we need to be in the room when they think no one is listening.”

Unconnected to the infiltration of Britain First, ‘Chris’ also went undercover inside the “intellectual” Far Right via the Scandza Forum, an international conference in Tallinn, Estonia, where he posed as an investor. Contacts he made at the conference led him to organisations including the Human Diversity Foundation, Far Right eugenics movement, the US-based Pioneer Fund – which developed ties to Nazi Germany – and anti-immigration party, the AFD (Alternative for Deutschland) in Germany, and even to Silicon Valley.

The documentary – to be screened on on October 21 – also charts Tommy Robinson’s rising notoriety since he was allowed back on to X/ – and reveals how Hope Not Hate evidence contributed to the current contempt of court legal case against him, which returns to court next week. It also shows Robinson – real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon – confronting HOPE not Hate’s chief executive Nick Lowles.

Speaking exclusively to the Mirror, Shukman and Hermansson reveal the potential danger that comes with infiltrating the Far Right. “Gathering information on Britain First, I was in the backyard at Paul Golding’s house surrounded by barbed wire fences and locked gates,” Shukman says. “We were sitting very close on garden chairs. I was wearing a hidden camera, and Golding was just staring at this point on my chest where the camera was.

“I knew I was very far from being safe. This was a locked door inside a locked door. There was nowhere to run to. Golding has previously had to pay damages for assault and battery and trespassing, and been jailed for hate crimes. After a while, I realised he was just zoning out, looking at me.”

In Warsaw, Scanlon patted Shukman on the chest where his hidden camera was recording. “He’s patting me on the chest, on the camera, on top of that big hunk of plastic,” Shukman says. “He touched the camera, I’m sure.”

Infiltrating the ‘intellectual’ Far Right was in some ways even more disturbing, he adds. “They don’t have pasts in the BNP, EDL, or skinheads – they have suits and PhDs,” Shukman says. “They have money, power and influence and access to the most important people in the land. They have a really pernicious agenda around race science and eugenics.

“It’s the intellectual end of the Far Right. They want to affect society through ideas rather than street protest. But both parts of the Far Right want to stop ‘alien’ cultures. There are basic interests they all share.”

Hermansson used his own experience undercover inside the Far Right to act as Shukman’s handler. In 2016 he spent a year infiltrating the Alt-Right in the UK, Europe and the United States, in an investigation unconnected to Britain First. His role led him to the gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville where a car drove down a side street and ploughed through counter-protesters. Anti-racist campaigner Heather Hayer, 32, was killed.

“I was four or five metres away,” he says. “A woman died. Dozens were injured. Before that I thought how influential are the Far Right really? Charlottesville clarified that question. It showed the real-world effects of extremist online ideology.”

Hermansson says Charlottesville meant he took Shukman’s safety extremely seriously. “The attack itself, it wasn’t against me. But it was hard to witness, and I was very isolated,” he says. “One of the hard parts of our work is that when things are very difficult, I can’t talk about them. So, you get isolated. I was very aware of that working with Harry.”

While Shukman was in Warsaw, he visited the Jewish Cemetery. “Part of my family left Poland just before WW1,” Shukman says. “We are not culturally or practising Jews, but their history looms large in my family.

“The part of my family that didn’t leave Poland are believed to have been deported to the Majdanek concentration camp and gassed there. So many people I have met in the last year do have Jews in their sights. This stuff never goes away. It doesn’t even change that much. The symbols and the flags might change somewhat but the meaning behind them doesn’t.”

For ‘Undercover’, Marking set out to follow HOPE not Hate as the organisation celebrated 100 years of the British anti-fascist movement. The activist group says its use of informants led to foiling the murder plot against Labour MP Rosie Cooper in 2017 and to exposing the Soho nail bomber as David Copeland in 1999.

But it’s the first time a documentary team has been allowed to follow their work. The result is a stunningly brave, forensic and unflinching investigation into the shadowy networks of the modern Far Right, from street thugs to Silicon Valley, that could not be more urgent.

“This is the first time we’ve allowed a documentary crew to follow our work,” Nick Lowles, CEO of HOPE not hate says. “This is the story of not just our investigations, but the story of the people of HOPE not hate - the story of us.

“We are excited to share our work with a wider audience, and expose some of the far right tactics and elements that have managed to foster in our society. Often these groups are shrouded in secrecy but increasingly their ideas are finding their way into the mainstream.

"Our hope is that the film inspires people to take action in their communities. Together we can stop the normalisation and rise of far-right politics, and build stronger communities where diversity is valued as a strength.”

Shukman and Hermansson say they hope the film “shows the breadth” of HOPE not Hate’s work. “But it also shows very small pieces of a bigger picture,” Hermansson says. “The UK riots this summer followed years of agitation. Anger plus conspiracy theories, online actions plus the state of our politics.

“The way politicians speak about immigration plays a role. Key figures in our mainstream parties are talking about invasions and alien cultures. It’s an escalation.” We contacted Britain First, Nick Scanlon and Paul Golding for comment.

• Undercover: Exposing the Far Right airs on Channel 4 on 21 October.