In the last few years, a new kind of far-right activism has emerged. This new activism, comprised largely of online anger and offline protest, crosses borders yet is heavily nationalist. It has figureheads but no formal leadership structure. It asks for little long-term commitment from its participants, yet is able to mobilise large amounts of money and attention, throwing its opponents into fierce disagreement about how to respond. Its icons tend to be entrepreneurial social media personalities, celebrities of a sort, who use their following to exert pressure on mainstream politics. And nobody embodies the dynamics of this new movement more than Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder and former leader of the English Defence League (EDL), who usually goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson.

Since the summer, thousands of people have taken to the streets in support of Yaxley-Lennon, who was imprisoned for several months in May for contempt of court, before being released on bail in August pending a retrial. These rallies, which were organised in part with funding from the US, were addressed by representatives of European far-right parties, as well as a US Republican congressman. A range of extremist groups were present in the crowds, and at one rally, on 9 June, several hundred demonstrators attacked police with bottles, cones and sticks in Trafalgar Square.

But the majority of protesters had no formal political affiliation, and answered to no party hierarchy. They were there because they believed that Yaxley-Lennon is being silenced by the British state. Hundreds of thousands of others supported his cause from afar: more than 630,000 people signed a change.org petition calling for his release, a third of them from outside the UK. Solidarity protests were held in Austria, Hungary, Australia and Canada, while a range of rightwing US activists offered their support: one Philadelphia-based thinktank, the Middle East Forum, helped organise the London rallies. The Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson covered Yaxley-Lennon’s story extensively on his show; Donald Trump Jr, the president’s son, tweeted his support, while the US ambassador for international religious freedom reportedly lobbied the UK on Yaxley-Lennon’s behalf. The UK Independence party is debating offering Yaxley-Lennon membership, while Stephen Bannon, the former Trump adviser and co-founder of Breitbart, has described him as “the fucking backbone” of his country and proposed including him in a new far-right venture, a pan-European network called The Movement.

For Yaxley-Lennon’s supporters, the contradictions of his story merely reinforce his image as an anti-establishment crusader. After his efforts to build an anti-Muslim street movement failed – first with the collapse of the EDL in 2013, then an attempt to launch a UK branch of the German anti-immigrant movement Pegida in 2016 – he reinvented himself as an online propagandist. He claims to be silenced but he receives a huge amount of media attention, including many TV interviews, and has almost a million followers on Facebook. What has distinguished Yaxley-Lennon is his ability to promote his own brand in a way that inspires a broad following and taps into a series of neuroses about class, power and ethnicity in Britain.

His activism includes filming and broadcasting himself making statements outside sexual assault trials involving Muslim defendants. This earned him a suspended sentence for contempt of court in 2017, because he intended to take photographs of the defendants in an ongoing trial in Canterbury crown court and filmed within the court buildings, which is prohibited. In May this year, he was convicted of contempt a second time, including for filming himself and people involved in a trial in Leeds, and given a 13-month prison sentence. He was released on appeal in August, and his case has now been referred to the attorney general. In both Leeds and Canterbury, the judges were concerned that his actions might prejudice ongoing trials, and wanted to ensure that juries could reach a just verdict.

Yaxley-Lennon’s supporters, however, see this as an unacceptable attack on his liberty, and proof he is being persecuted. Their rallying cry is “free speech”, but this is more than an abstract demand: it contains the accusation that ordinary people have been betrayed by a liberal elite that wants to cover up the disastrous consequences of immigration and multiculturalism.

The accusation of betrayal by the elites is central to the way that far-right movements operate. Older European parties with roots in 20th-century fascism have reshaped themselves around this kind of rhetoric, which is also employed by newer movements in Europe and the US. Far-right parties have made electoral gains in a number of countries, but the rhetoric also works at a cultural level, alongside formal politics, allowing loose groups of white nationalists, anti-Muslim demagogues and conservatives to mobilise around single-issue campaigns, often via social media, as they have done around Yaxley-Lennon.

The successful spread of anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric has encouraged some conservative politicians to borrow the tropes of the far right, leading to a blurring in the traditional distinction between the far right and the mainstream. For many years, there was an understanding – not always universally accepted, but with widespread support – that far-right views were outside the acceptable bounds of debate and should be denied a platform. But the breaking down of these boundaries presents a dilemma: what does the anti-fascist principle of “no platform” mean when a far-right activist has their own independent platform anyway? How can journalists scrutinise and interrogate the claims of someone who will use your work as evidence of a conspiracy against them? How can politicians and the media avoid a panicked response that accepts the far-right’s framing of a subject and reinforces their claims?

The growth of this new, international far-right activism has taken many by surprise. Many people see it as the result of technological change, which can be fixed by regulating social media companies. Others regard Yaxley-Lennon and similar far-right celebrities as the embodiment of a legitimate anger that should be given a fair hearing, so that the best arguments win out in the marketplace of ideas. And some see this as the same old far right – encouraging people to gang up on an ethnic minority group – which should be confronted in the streets. There is a degree of truth, perhaps, in all of these positions. But they don’t tell the whole story: how the far right itself has transformed in recent years, and how it has taken advantage of wider political failures to shift mainstream debate in its favour.

‘Far right” is a slippery term, and one that people would rarely, if ever, apply to their own politics. Scholars use a range of alternatives – radical right, nativism, national populism – while political opponents might opt for “fascist” or “Nazi”. But in everyday use it describes a range of extreme nationalist activity, from contesting elections to street protests or violent attacks on minorities and the left. Some of the work of the far right takes place within the boundaries of liberal democratic political systems, and some aims to disrupt and destroy them. It’s not a cohesive movement; different currents within the far right do not always get on and may also see one another as enemies. But their various aims would be are profoundly undemocratic: a majoritarianism defined by race, ethnicity or religion, and the violent exclusion of internal and external enemies.

Today’s far-right campaigning is often carried out by figures who can gather international support across social media, or use stories of social conflict or moral panic in one country to boost a political claim in another. In 2017, for example, activists in Europe and Canada crowdfunded tens of thousands of dollars to charter a ship that aimed to disrupt sea rescues in the Mediterranean under the banner “Defend Europe”. This year, claims that farmers in South Africa are victims of “white genocide” have been relayed by a major US TV channel, and then repeated by the US president. After the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack in London in March 2017, a photograph of a Muslim woman walking close to one of the victims was taken up by far-right social media activists across the world and used, falsely, to suggest she was indifferent to the suffering. In all these cases and more, the underlying message is the same: white majority countries are under threat; Europe is overrun by Muslim immigrants; liberal elites have allowed this to happen.

For many people, the former US presidential adviser Bannon symbolises this new far-right international. A white nationalist who has said the west is at the start of a civilisational war with Islam, he made Breitbart one of the key institutions responsible for mobilising far-right activism and reshaping mainstream political debate. But people sometimes make the mistake of treating him like an evil genius who is running the show. The new far right is defined by its loose networks, through which grassroots support can be gathered around particular causes without any commitment to wider political action. And they allow people to engage in far-right activity with very little cost to their personal or professional lives: unlike attending a public rally or going canvassing, your friends and colleagues don’t necessarily need to see what you’re sharing, or who you donate to.

The new activism has been building a following for several years, but 2017 is the year in which it really accelerated, thanks to the series of terrorist attacks in the UK and Europe, and a US president willing to amplify racist memes and marginal far-right activists – such as the tiny UK group Britain First – from around the world. Britain is not only the inspiration for much of this activity, but a key exporter of content. A recent report by the anti-fascist campaign group Hope Not Hate describes how a range of leading far-right social media accounts, many of which belong to people based in the UK, received huge spikes in new followers after each terrorist attack in Britain last year. (The report also suggested that Russia-linked social media accounts were involved in spreading anti-Muslim propaganda, but played only a marginal role.)

Rightwing groups protest in support of Yaxley-Lennon during his detention. Photograph: Penelope Barritt/Rex/Shutterstock

Nobody has capitalised on this more than Yaxley-Lennon. In early 2017 he was hired as a “correspondent” for the Rebel Media, a far-right website based in Canada. With their resources (his former assistant told the Sunday Times he was being paid as much as £8,000 a month) Yaxley-Lennon produced a series of inflammatory videos that drew a growing audience. In March 2017, he attracted tens of thousands of new Twitter followers when he arrived at the Houses of Parliament a few hours after the Westminster Bridge attack to declare that Britain was at “war”. In late May, shortly after the Manchester Arena bombing, he stood in the street of a Manchester suburb and told the camera: “When you see these communities and you see these houses, you think this is a British community, or you might have British Muslims – they are enemy combatants in these houses. In these houses are enemy combatants who want to kill you, maim you and destroy you.” The video has been viewed almost a million times on YouTube.

In June 2017, a white British man from Cardiff hired a van and drove it into a crowd of people outside a Muslim community centre near the Finsbury Park mosque in north London. Investigators found that the perpetrator had been reading far-right material online in the weeks prior to the attack. This included two email newsletters from Tommy Robinson, one of which claimed “there is a nation within a nation forming just beneath the surface of the UK. It is a nation built on hatred, on violence, and on Islam.” The revelation did little to dent Yaxley-Lennon’s popularity; by the end of 2017 he had quit the Rebel Media and – according to his former assistant – was bringing in enough money from individual donations to work independently.

Yaxley-Lennon’s online activism has dovetailed with an emerging new street-protest movement. In October 2017, around 50,000 people, drawn mainly from football supporters’ networks, attended a demonstration in London against Islamist extremism. Although the group that organised it, the Football Lads Alliance (FLA), was at pains to stress that its demonstration was non-racist, an investigation by the Observer a few months later revealed that a closed FLA Facebook group featured posts containing violent, racist and misogynistic material – often targeting the Labour politicians Sadiq Khan and Diane Abbott – as well as praise for Tommy Robinson. Many of the FLA’s initial supporters have drifted away, but a splinter group, the Democratic Football Lads’ Alliance, has become more overtly racist, while established far-right activists have tried to capitalise on the backlash to the 2017 terrorist attacks.

Since spring this year, rightwing activists have regularly staged anti-Islam demonstrations in London and elsewhere: a walk from Speakers’ Corner to Downing Street on 24 March; a demo in Birmingham the day after; another London rally in May. Increasingly, Yaxley-Lennon became a figurehead for the protesters.

At Speakers’ Corner in March, he read out a speech on behalf of the Austrian leader of Generation Identity, a pan-European youth movement that advocates racial separatism in order to preserve “ethno-cultural identity”. Many thousands of people watched a livestream of the speech, which was promoted by Alex Jones of the US conspiracy site Infowars. The London rally in May was compered by Raheem Kassam, a former editor of Breitbart’s London branch; speakers included the Ukip leader Gerard Batten, the Vice founder-turned-right-wing-activist Gavin McInnes, and the Canadian blogger Lauren Southern, who had been a prominent organiser of the “Defend Europe” boat campaign.

The significance of these protests was that they represented far-right and conservative activists putting their internal ideological differences aside to unite around a new demand that they hoped had popular appeal: free speech. Since late 2017, Twitter had begun to remove prominent far-right accounts from its service, such as the leaders of Britain First. In March it had deleted the Tommy Robinson account – which by that point had over 400,000 followers – for violating its “hateful conduct” policy, prompting some of his supporters to protest outside Twitter’s London headquarters. A narrative was already being established, of truth-tellers silenced by the repressive liberal elite. Yaxley-Lennon’s imprisonment on 25 May was the spark that lit the fuse.

How dangerous is this emerging new movement? Often, street protests fizzle out. Supporters get bored, or put off by the more extreme elements, and stop turning up. Anti-fascist activists organise counter-demonstrations or undermine key figures by exposing the full extent of their views. But in recent years, pushed by the election of Donald Trump in the US, and political changes in Europe, we have seen the breaking down of the taboo that kept far-right political ideas largely outside mainstream culture – and the campaign around Yaxley-Lennon represents a further step in this process. It’s a result not only of recent political shifts, but of longer-term changes in the way the far right operates.

In the last week of August 2018, the Tommy Robinson Facebook page posted around two dozen links. These included several stories about the “migrant invasion” of Europe and crimes committed in “Sadiq Khan’s London”; status updates praising far-right demonstrations in Chemnitz, Germany; a piece by the Spectator writer Brendan O’Neill attacking the Guardian journalist Owen Jones; and a Russian television news report on “no-go zones” in Sweden.

You might have found a similar mix of stories in any far-right publication since at least the 1960s: news items, distorted accounts of deviant behaviour by minority groups and commentary that reinforce a simple set of messages about an alien threat, and the elites allowing it to happen. But the circulation of such material in print was far more limited, because of constraints on resources and distribution. Today, the Tommy Robinson Facebook page has more than 950,000 followers.

Technology is one reason for this shift. But it is also the result of longer-term changes in the way far-right activists organise themselves, and think about their role in politics. Until the 2000s, the bulk of far-right activism in Europe was through formal political parties that had direct links to interwar fascism. (The British National party – BNP– for instance, was founded and led by people who admired Hitler and wanted to recreate aspects of the Third Reich in postwar Britain.) These parties often combined conventional political campaigning with street violence, or with clandestine, paramilitary-type activities. As a result, they were generally incredibly unpopular: the memory of the second world war was often enough to put voters off.

To build their movement, these traditional far-right parties would find likely recruits by exploiting their racism or their specific political grievances, then gradually try to indoctrinate them into a core set of beliefs, which were handed down from the leadership. This process was slow, often unsuccessful, and open to exposure by journalists and anti-fascist activists.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon stands beside a man in a Donald Trump mask as he addresses supporters outside the Old Bailey in London, England. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

From the 1970s onwards, a circle of far-right French intellectuals, known as the Nouvelle Droite, argued that in order to win political power it would first be necessary to push for wider cultural acceptance of the ideas that underpinned their movements. In this, they were borrowing from the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci who, in his analysis of why leftwing political movements had largely failed in the early 20th century, argued that the dominant political order doesn’t only wield economic and military power, it makes its ideas seem like common sense through language, culture and social institutions. In order to overturn this, challengers to the dominant system would have to create their own institutions, their own way of seeing the world, and use these to build support for their ideas.

On the far right, this approach was employed to greatest effect by France’s Front National (recently renamed the Rassemblement National), which built up support through party-linked cultural organisations from the 1980s onwards. Its public messages focused on popular fears about identity and economic security, while its leader Jean-Marie Le Pen made charismatic and provocative interventions in the French media, a strategy that led him to the second round of the French presidential election in 2002. The BNP, under Nick Griffin, tried a similar strategy in the UK – with less success, but still enough to win an unprecedented number of seats in local government and the European parliament during the 2000s.

A second change occurred around the turn of the century, when 9/11 and the “war on terror” helped bring the idea of a “clash of civilisations” between Islam and the west to the forefront of political debate. Many old-style far-right groups began to focus on Muslim immigrants and their descendants, in the hope of attracting wider support – but the 2000s also saw the rise of anti-Muslim activists who were not tied to any party, and focused their efforts on building an international network of campaign groups, thinktanks and media outlets known as the “counter-jihad” movement. The political outlook of people in this movement ranged from conservative to libertarian to fascist, but what united them was the idea of an Islamic threat to western civilisation. The network is now largely dormant, but several key figures, such as the bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, the thinktank presidents Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz, and the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, continue to play influential roles in political debate. (Geller, Pipes and Wilders have all been prominent supporters of Yaxley-Lennon.) Just as important is the new, international approach to organising that they inspired. Traditionally, far-right activists claimed to be pursuing international links after their domestic projects failed. Today, the international dynamic shapes national movements.

But for this to be more than a closed network of people talking only to one another, there needs to be a way to push ideas into wider society, through the media or into mainstream politics. The most adept at this are individuals who build their own followings; they promote far-right ideas but are sufficiently distant from formal political organisations to avoid being held accountable, or to set out their politics fully. And they construct public personas to give their ideas weight, whether that’s as cartoonish conspiracy theorists, embattled crusaders, or the authentic expression of popular anger. Yaxley-Lennon has been doing this longer than most – and the Tommy Robinson myth he has constructed is an effective vehicle for the new far-right activism.

The Tommy Robinson myth runs something like this: he is an ordinary man who has been trying to alert people to the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism, the true extent of which is denied by the liberal establishment. For this, he has been persecuted by the state, which keeps trying to imprison him in order to stop him speaking out. This is the image that Yaxley-Lennon and his supporters propagate – but, in fact, he is a seasoned far-right activist with political ideas that are more than a simple angry reaction to terrorism or fundamentalism, and he has been given ample space to express them in public life.

In his self-published 2015 autobiography, Enemy of the State, Yaxley-Lennon stresses that he is apolitical. But even by his own account, he has a long history of anti-Muslim activism. Born in a working-class neighbourhood of Luton in 1982, in adulthood he ran a plumbing business and was a leader of the local football hooligan firm. He says he was drawn into conflict with rival gangs as some of the town’s Asian residents began to develop a more assertive Muslim identity, around the turn of the century. In 2004, he joined the BNP – because, he says, he was angry at the behaviour of Muslim fundamentalists who praised the 9/11 attacks. He claims he left the BNP shortly after joining because he hadn’t realised it was a racist party: he writes that two black friends of his were made to wait at the door when they accompanied him to a meeting.

In 2009, Yaxley-Lennon founded the English Defence League after Muslim fundamentalists disrupted a homecoming parade in Luton by the Royal Anglian Regiment’s 2nd Battalion, which had recently been deployed to Iraq. Drawing on his contacts among football supporters, he organised a demonstration in Luton that turned violent, then used video footage of it to recruit for a nationwide movement on social media, which held protests in a string of English and Welsh towns and cities.

Yaxley-Lennon while leader of the English Defence League in 2013. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

From the outset, the EDL attracted the support of influential counter-jihad activists. Alan Lake, a British businessman who ran an anti-Muslim web forum, was involved in early discussions about organisation and funding. Pamela Geller was an admirer, and invited Yaxley-Lennon to speak at an anti-Muslim conference in New York in 2012; he later received a prison sentence for having entered the US on a false passport, in defiance of a travel ban. The EDL, which received a huge amount of national and international media coverage, also quickly became a gathering place for neo-Nazis, who Yaxley-Lennon claims to have opposed. He remained leader until 2013, when it had largely disintegrated, making his exit with the help of the Quilliam Foundation, a “counter-extremism” thinktank that announced Yaxley-Lennon’s departure with great fanfare. The following year, he was imprisoned again, this time for mortgage fraud.

Yaxley-Lennon frequently complains he is being smeared as a racist and a Nazi; he insists that he doesn’t care about skin colour and that his objection is to Islamist political ideology rather than people. What this misses is that far-right politics almost always involves singling out particular groups on the grounds of their alleged culture and behaviour, as with the way far-right groups have in the past used the “black muggers” panic of the 1970s, or Jewish ritual slaughter. And the way Yaxley-Lennon characterises Muslims is to present them as an alien presence in British society working to harm the majority. In Enemy of the State, previously majority-white areas of Luton are described as having suffered “ethnic cleansing” via Muslim immigration. “We are sleepwalking our way towards a Muslim takeover of the country,” he writes elsewhere, and describes the niqab as “an up-yours that shows exactly how the hardline, majority Muslim community regards the rest of us”. He is also sceptical of Muslims in public life. “You cannot buy loyalty,” he writes. “You buy a measure of allegiance for a while.”

One problem is that Yaxley-Lennon does not invent these tropes; he mostly takes them from the mainstream and tries to push them to further extremes. In the UK, the main source of distorted and inaccurate stories about Muslims remains the press, which in turn sets the agenda of broadcasters. This long-term media narrative of Muslim extremism and disloyalty is what makes it easy for a far-right activist to step in and link everything to a civilisational conflict with Islam. It’s what makes Islamist terrorism seem like the responsibility of “the Muslim community”, but far-right terrorism the acts of lone “extremists”; it’s what makes sex crimes committed by men of Asian or Muslim background primarily about “culture” and religion, but those by white men merely about individual sick perverts. Giving the far right a say in any of the complex debates these issues raise is a dead end: their propaganda aims only to incite visceral fears about sex, death and foreigners.

For example, Yaxley-Lennon has frequently campaigned on the issue of “grooming gangs”. This refers to a particular pattern of child abuse, in which teenage girls are sexually exploited by groups of men. The cases that have received most attention involve perpetrators of largely Asian Muslim heritage, and victims who are largely white, in former industrial towns of England where there is a legacy of racism and resentment between white and Asian communities. Groups of white men convicted of similar crimes, and victims who aren’t white, have received far less coverage.

At root, these are stories of power – the power of men to commit violence against women – and class. The victims have often been troubled and vulnerable girls, sometimes living in care homes, who were ignored or not believed when these crimes were first brought to the attention of police and local authorities. But mainstream media coverage has often framed grooming as an issue of ethnicity or religion, and suggested that political correctness has impeded investigations, even though the wider picture is that white men commit the vast majority of child abuse in the UK, and that the state has a generally poor record in tackling sexual violence.

Various far-right groups, who have been trying to inflame tensions on this issue for over a decade, going back to the BNP in the mid-2000s, take the argument one step further and depict ethnicity and religion as the only factor in these crimes – linking them to unconnected stories about migrants and Muslims in other parts of the world. This, in turn, becomes a defiant challenge to mainstream media and politicians: if you don’t discuss this on our terms, you’re cowards. Some enthusiastically pick up the gauntlet.

Far from being excluded, Yaxley-Lennon has been frequently indulged in the media. He has been interviewed on Newsnight and the Today programme, allowed a Channel 4 documentary crew extensive access to his daily life, appeared as a guest on the BBC debate programmes The Big Questions and Free Speech, and presented his views at length to the Oxford Union. Much of the media coverage has been critical of Yaxley-Lennon, but not all of it: a few mainstream rightwing commentators have sought to use him as an alibi for their own apocalyptic views of Muslims and ethnic change. One newspaper, the Daily Star, gave apparently sympathetic coverage to the EDL for a period in 2011.

Even when mainstream figures criticise the far right, they rarely interrogate the connection between their own policies and rhetoric and its development. David Cameron once gave a major speech in which he declared multiculturalism had “failed”, which – unfortunately for him – coincided with a large EDL demonstration. At home, state anti-terror policy has frequently been criticised for conflating Islamic religious conservatism with violent extremism. And it’s often overlooked that the EDL emerged at a time when there was a particularly febrile atmosphere over Britain’s prolonged occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the small but constant return of dead and injured soldiers.

Yaxley-Lennon, meanwhile, is frequently treated as “authentic” by parts of the British media that do not know how to deal with class. A public conversation that often treats being working-class as a kind of ethnic identity only shared by reactionary white people in forgotten suburbs – when, in fact, working-class Britain is the most diverse and numerous section of society – undermines efforts to credibly challenge him. And a journalism profession that contains few people of working-class backgrounds makes it all the more difficult. Take Yaxley-Lennon’s appearance in front of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in 2011: Paxman’s patrician contempt only bolstered Yaxley-Lennon’s projected image of the little guy versus the liberal elite. By contrast, one of the rare occasions he was convincingly challenged on television was in a debate in 2013 on BBC3 with the rapper, author and activist Akala, who was able to paint a very different picture of working-class Britain. It’s telling that Yaxley-Lennon only gives this 2013 encounter half a sentence in his autobiography, while dwelling at length on his other media appearances.

Why are these changes happening now? One reason is that political ideologies that were once dominant are struggling to make their worldview seem like the obvious one. Put crudely, this is the fallout from several decades when neoliberal globalisation was seen, to varying degrees, as the only game in town. The financial crash and its aftermath rendered that view untenable, but so far no alternative vision has won out.

A significant minority of the subsequent discontent – not necessarily anger at economic hardship, but feeling shut out of the system, and feeling like one’s status is being undermined – has been co-opted by xenophobic parties who link it up with longer-term anxieties about identity. In white-majority countries, this xenophobia is largely directed at people who, within recent history, were colonised or enslaved and regarded as racially inferior.

Yaxley-Lennon is a potential asset to the new, international far-right activism. He has a brand name and a powerful myth that is menacing enough to keep him in the news, and has mobilised support in a number of countries. Conservatives in the US can use his story to boost the “Europe has fallen” narrative promoted in order to justify Trump’s own anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies, while Bannon has already acknowledged his potential to catalyse campaigns across Europe. In the UK, he could become part of a broad rightwing coalition that seeks to mobilise popular anger as Brexit unfolds. The Ukip leader, Batten, has publicly supported Yaxley-Lennon. On 24 October, after Yaxley-Lennon’s most recent court hearing, Batten accompanied him to the House of Lords for a lunch with the Ukip peer Lord Pearson – and is now proposing he be allowed to join the party, in defiance of a long-standing ban on former BNP members. A recent long-term study by Hope Not Hate suggests the places most susceptible to far-right narratives are white-majority communities away from big cities, which have been hit particularly hard by austerity policies and longer-term industrial decline. Another danger is that smaller, violent neo-Nazi groups still exist – as does antisemitic conspiracy theory – and this increased activity in general gives them more space in which to operate.

Ukip leader Gerard Batten speaking at a rally of Yaxley-Lennon’s supporters outside the Old Bailey. Photograph: RMV/REX/Shutterstock

In truth, Yaxley-Lennon would probably be a liability to any electoral project that sought mainstream acceptance. He is most effective when unaffiliated and unaccountable, disavowed by politicians and commentators who echo his views but wish to look respectable. But the greater danger is in the cumulative effect of the various types of far-right activism – political parties, websites, social media personalities, funding and coordination from wealthy US thinktanks and entrepreneurs – on the political mainstream.

Nowhere in western Europe is a far-right movement currently likely to win power through a majority, or even a plurality, of votes. But where they have emerged, they have proved effective at dragging others rightwards: look, for instance, at how Matteo Salvini – a junior partner in Italy’s coalition government – has imposed his profoundly racist agenda on his allies. The risk is that, unless challenged, this broad international effort will join lots of specific local grievances into a single, compelling populist narrative: the globalist elite has failed the native populations of white-majority countries and is destroying them with immigration and multiculturalism.

But this is not inevitable, and it can be stopped if we recognise that keeping the far right out of power is only one part of the problem. First, although social media has played a crucial role in the new far-right activism, the power to shape public opinion rests largely in the hands of a few large media corporations. As for the social media companies, although their content is generated by users, the editorial decisions – because what to include and what to exclude is fundamentally an editorial decision – are made with little transparency and even less accountability than in traditional media. Public pressure has resulted in belated decisions to remove some sources of hate speech, but there is still no public control or oversight of what we should regard as our platforms.

Second, we need a better understanding of what “free speech” is and is not. Too often, conversations about the far right and the media treat “debate” as an abstract ideal, and a head-to-head debate involving an elite media personality as the purest form. This mainly serves to flatter the egos of the people in the upper echelons of media and politics.

The phrase “the marketplace of ideas” is telling: our media is indeed a marketplace, one that to a great extent follows the rules and patterns of markets for other commodities. Editorial choices are driven by the search for audience numbers as well as high-minded public service ideals; the emphasis on newness and exclusivity means that far-right activists are often given space to repeat their views when there may be sufficient information already on record.

This is not to say that the claims being made by activists and the views of people who might support them should be ignored – either in political debate or in everyday life. But the question is how these issues are presented, and how they are challenged: who is speaking, and why, matters as much as whether or not an issue is in the news. A simple impulse to “fact check” demagogic politicians and activists often falls short. It’s not that facts don’t matter – indeed, one important reason to oppose the far right is to fight for politics based in reality and not destructive fantasies. But simply pointing out their factual mistakes is insufficient if people have lost trust in you, or if you unwittingly adopt the far right’s framing while quibbling with the tone or the details.

The real challenge posed by the far right is its success at spreading anti-Muslim and xenophobic attitudes in society at large. The best defence is a political movement that has anti-racism at its core and seeks to give people greater democratic control over the way their society is organised and run. But this is about more than politics as a professional occupation: it involves all of us, and it is a matter of culture and institutions as much as elections or parliamentary debates. The leading far-right activists understand this, and the campaign around Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is just one symptom of a bigger problem – which must be challenged, locally and internationally, before it starts to do serious damage.

• This article was amended on 29 October 2018. An earlier version said that Yaxley-Lennon delivered a speech on behalf of the German leader of Generation Identity at Downing Street; in fact it was at Speakers’ Corner, and that leader is Austrian.

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.