952 words 
Harry Shukman
Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right
London, Vintage, 2025
I first met Harold Shukman, the youthful author of this book in May 2023 in Tallinn. However, he was so unremarkable that I don’t even remember this, which is a useful trait for a spy. Apparently, I sat with him at a meal at a medieval-themed restaurant the night before a “far right” conference and made a few jokes, one of which was “obscene.” I’m convinced that he’s got mixed up because, in my recollection, I first met him the following day.
Effeminate and nervous he approached me in the conference hotel courtyard, asked for a selfie and enquired how many people I thought had been killed in the Holocaust. “You’re either an undercover spy or an autistic oddball,” I thought to myself. As he rightly points out in Year of the Rat, these kinds of groups do indeed attract a few oddballs; young men who feel rather lost in life, and in Clown World, and who, therefore, find themselves attracted to the kinds of groups that want to tear Clown World down. I told Shukman that I believed it was the number that both the defence and prosecution agreed upon in the Irving v Lipstadt trial in the year 2000. Covertly filming me, he was obviously hoping I’d say, “Only about 120,000 and they died because they refused the rations of lobster and rare-cooked steak on the basis that they weren’t kosher.”
Calling himself “Chris Morton”, Harry Shukman was posing as a wide-eyed convert to the “far right.” His book charts the year which this privately educated, privileged son of a senior BBC producer, and grandson of a man with connections to MI5 spent infiltrating “far right” groups in the UK. They include a group called the Basket Weavers; young, educated, “based” people who organise get-togethers for the like-minded; the mainly working-class political party Britain First, and a group of researchers on human biodiversity (HBD) with which I was involved.
It is an interesting book, but only because it allows you to get to know a fascinating cast of brave and unusual people who are prepared to risk a great deal by fighting against Clown World; against Shukman-types who are prepared to tear down Western Civilization in pursuit of power for themselves which they pusillanimously achieve by virtue-signalling luxury beliefs while themselves being very wealthy and living – like Shukman, from rural Oxfordshire – in white enclaves: The American couple using eugenic techniques to have numerous highly intelligent children (both of them from difficult backgrounds, as they confessed to the spy), the man born into a working class UK family via a highly intelligent sperm donor who wants to preserve human intelligence, or educated young Brits, including many women, who are creating a based community with numerous well-attended events.
But Shukman is fundamentally dishonest. He doesn’t mention that he convinced these people he was legitimate via a fake passport (he has MI5 connections) or legally changing his name and obtaining a new passport. If only this passport had been checked against the public birth records, a serious anomaly would’ve been revealed (a lesson for the future). He uses only half of the title of one of my books in order to make me seem anti-Islam. He states that someone had said Shukman might be a “fed.” This was me, I put it about that he might be a Hope Not Hate spy and I was, of course, correct.
Shukman claims not to name certain people “for legal reasons” when, in reality, he doesn’t name them because attacking ordinary members of the public might leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. Accordingly, almost none of those involved in the Witan, other than one of its founders, are described using their real names. I met many of them in May at a Traditional Britain Group meeting or at a conference about Jonathan Bowden immediately afterwards. They quite enjoyed working out who was who.
The book is also fascinating because of the insight it gives you into the kind of person who would become a Hope Not Hate spy. The first point of interest was the Puritanism. Though overtly a radical leftist, this shines through in the book. Puritanism about sex: “Tonight [Dutton] seems particularly animated, and obscenely refers to the female fans who watch his speeches as ‘the wet chair contingent.’” Puritanism about alcohol: “The Crosse Keys is a sprawling, raucous pub packed with City boys conducting competitive experiments on the male stomach’s volumetric capacity for alcohol.”
The second is the paranoia. He writes “I’m puzzled. Matt is dominating the conversation about Ed’s own career. Meanwhile, Ed seems to be mentally elsewhere. Why is he so deferential to Matt?” Matt is the sperm-donor-conceived chap referred to earlier. I was a brought on to the call to give my assessment as to whether or not Shukman was a spy, as was my then secretary who Shukman doesn’t mention. That is why I was “elsewhere.” In this call, Shukman asked far too many questions, and seemed extremely nosy and too eager. I decided it was best, therefore, to say as little as possible, in case he was a spy. My secretary’s conclusion was that he was probable a leftist because he had “weak man vibes.” He writes of his fear of being revealed to be a spy, but what would a group of friendly, educated people do other than eject him?
This book is written from a position of fear: We have been pushed so far into Clown World that those well beyond “far right thugs” are becoming “red pilled” and fighting back against anti-freedom campaigners like Shukman. I suspect he is right to be afraid.
14 comments
Looks like rhe book cover provides a photo of Mrs Shuckman.
Nobody buys this commie crap except radical leftist academics who will push it on kids in class, and reviews will feature in liberal media outlets (as if it has anything of value to say, which it doesn’t, except for white people bad).
“Effeminate and nervous he approached me in the conference hotel courtyard, asked for a selfie and enquired how many people I thought had been killed in the Holocaust.”
“In this call, Shukman asked far too many questions, and seemed extremely nosy and too eager.”
That’s not how a competent spy would act. Particularly stupid when dealing with an intelligent person like Dutton.
My first takeaway is that it’s not the smartest, smoothest operators who tend to become spies (at this level at least), but rather those who have a strong intrinsic motivation, regardless of competence. Looking a bit at Wikipedia and geni dot com, it does look like Shukman is of mixed Jewish heritage on both sides. His maternal grandfather (David Pryce-Jones) wrote a book accusing “the French government of being anti-Semitic and pro-Arab”.
My second takeaway is that spycraft is not easy, as you’re working under constraints (here: having to produce a result by a certain date to publish a book) and so have to probe and find weaknesses, and everyone wants to make work as easy for himself as possible. Presumably, someone who’s paranoid about “the Far Right” will not want to interact with its apparent members too long, due to being uncomfortable and simply out of irrational fear.
One last note: I don’t think Shukman has a “puritanical” attitude about sex or alcohol. Rather, he included these things because they made his targets look bad in the eyes of the intended audience, and he probably didn’t have much else so say about someone like Dutton anyway.
You think Shukman’s Jewish? “…it does look like Shukman is of mixed Jewish heritage on both sides”? Are you kidding? The name alone signifies is genetic status – but his photo? He’s a walking bagel.
The funny thing is that Shukman’s “infiltration into the Far Right” recalls that stupid Daniel Radcliffe movie “Imperium” aka “Harry Potter and the Fourth Reich”. Any WN that would peg Radcliffe as a Hebrew on first sight isn’t worth the lightning bolt insignia on their jacket. The HnH idiots probably thought Shukman could pass as White.
I’m going to go out on a limb here…. (((Shukman)))
Oh, what a brave little anti-Fascist he is. Such valor.
Physiognomy is real, and the author should have noticed all his red lights flashing as soon as he encountered this jew.
“Clown World,” I call it the “Freak Show,” great article. I would never make a good spy, because I take pride in the fact that I have gone for days without saying one word to anyone. 🙃
I haven’t read this book, but I watched the documentary Hope Not Hate released on this last year. One thing that stuck in my mind as to how unserious these people are was a grainy clip that Shukman captured from his button camera at the Scandza Forum in 2023. It was a clip from a segment of Mark Weber’s speech where he quotes Abraham Lincoln saying Whites and Blacks cannot coexist in the same society on the basis of mutual respect.
This is presented in the documentary as an example of what those evil nationalists really talk about behind closed doors, as opposed to how they present their ideas in public. That’s why Shukman had to sneak in with a button camera to record the speeches and expose them!
The only problem is this speech, and thus that specific quote contained in the speech, is posted online (with much higher quality than Shukman’s hidden camera) by the organizer of Scandza. You can watch it here: https://odysee.com/@gtk:4/SpringConferenceWeber:b.
Our ideas are so common sense and unimpeachable that all our opponents can do is try to stigmatize them, even pretending that we won’t state our real views openly. But it’s just a lie.
I wonder to which degree these people are actually aware they’re making false claims. Maybe last year’s events, with the collective Liberal Left pretending Biden’s mental state was good when it obviously wasn’t, is a good indicator – I would estimate that they’re one quarter lying to themselves (rationalization), one quarter deluded (ideologically-distorted perception), one quarter catering to their peers’ expectations and one quarter simply being sloppy.
Fine article. I think the trouble with this kind of story is that it exposes how normal and unassuming the members really are. They’re intelligent and welcoming yet with an eye for the interloper. Does the author not realize how the ideas of nationalism and realism are so easy to understand and accept that giving free publicity helps the cause?
I’ve wondered what kind of person would go to such lengths to infiltrate an alleged far right organization, only to find so little to hold against them? Wouldn’t it be better to approach the group wanting to produce an even handed depiction of the group and their ideas? Clearly they want to control the context of everything, but they end up with a low value product. The entire concept of a spy is terrible in my eyes. Even Hollywood hasn’t found a way to make it work for me.
With the exception of high-functioning liberals (a rare breed these days), leftists think they’re right and everyone else is wrong. Not only is their goodness beyond question – and our evilness, of course – it’s so self-evident that they needn’t bother explain to the rubes why they have a monopoly on truth and justice. Other than that, I imagine that the author is a yiddler who thinks he’s doing the Lord’s work by writing his crummy little book.
Wouldn’t it be better to approach the group wanting to produce an even handed depiction of the group and their ideas? Ideally yes, in a sane world unclowned. Now, they’ve just devolved into the cringiest ‘gotcha’ tact to ‘own the schnazis’ and only help make our side look cooler and more legitimate. Or they remain forever insufferables like that Canadian anti-White bitch rachel gilmore who endlessly harps on about Diagolon cause she wants to mate with them.
This is one of the main demagogic methods of woke and anti-white activism. The liberal journalist plays the disingenuous game that the “far right” is a criminal group whose evil intentions need to be exposed by quasi-police methods. Over the years I have read or seen dozens of such reports or “documentaries” by “investigative journalists” or pseudo-academic “researchers” that “revealed” absolutely nothing. But that’s not even the point. The purpose is to create an atmosphere of illegitimacy and social deviancy around the “far right”. At the same time, it is suggested to the reader or viewer that the woke left is an official social doctrine that is normal, and that its representatives are supposed to judge their ideological opponents from above from a position of power (instead of arguing with them on equal terms). The effect is supposed to be that the viewer or reader uncritically identifies with the woke/liberal/ anti-white left as the normative, normal, symptomless, official position, and does not see it as the aggressive ideology of a particular political group. Again, there is no lack of logic in this – on the contrary, it is the advantage of woke ideology that attracts conformists while at the same time granting them the status of rebels and heroes on the right side of history.
The planned irony of harry aw shuksman hoping to get the ‘far right’ talking with a rodent to draw eyes to his dumb book. A contrived self-own perhaps, so the only group that matters (proWhites) might mention it. Nice touch, ratface. ‘Tonight [Dutton] seems particularly animated, and obscenely refers to the female fans who watch his speeches as ‘the wet chair contingent’. Dutton’s muttons always appreciating the brainpower of our Jolly Heretic.
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