I met Tommy Robinson once. It was 10 years ago exactly, during one of his many failed attempts to mainstream Islamophobia in British politics with a new “movement” called Pegida UK – a copycat of Germany’s far-right Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West.
There was little memorable about this “launch”, which as a social affairs editor for Sky News I was sent to cover, only to discover a pitiful gathering of a few blokes at a pub near Luton. The thing that does stand out in my memory is what Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, said to me. “It’s the Muslims that are a problem,” he said. “But you’re all right. You speak English. You’re like us.”
Never has something intended as a compliment been so utterly offensive.
Pegida UK died quickly. But the sentiment stayed with me – the idea that rightwing men are the arbiters of whether black and brown British people are an acceptable presence in our own country. That is a notion that has only gained strength in the decade since, culminating this weekend when Robinson and his followers gathered to launch an attack of unprecedented viciousness against British Muslims, calling for “re-migration” – an idea otherwise known as ethnic cleansing.
Meanwhile, a more rarefied, superficially respectable group is launching a gentrified version of a similar sort of assault. Unlikely to be found fraternising with union-jack clad Robinson fans, their weapon of choice is the rightwing media – and their current target is Misan Harriman.
Harriman is a popular figure on social media and in British cultural life. Oscar-nominated for his film The After, he became the first black man to shoot the cover of British Vogue, and his images of the Black Lives Matter protests went viral and then global, becoming the starting point for a documentary film Shoot the People.
Some of his most moving images are his photographs of Jewish people, including Holocaust survivors. Many of them interpret their trauma, including the ongoing trauma of a rise in antisemitism, as an imperative to stand together with all those who denounce hate – including towards Palestinians in Gaza and Muslims in Britain, as well as members of their own British Jewish community. If you were to seek a visual reference for what rejecting division and seeking unity looks like in 2026, Harriman’s photographs would be it.
Since 2021, Harriman has been chair of the Southbank Centre, one of Europe’s largest cultural centres, a role that is by definition focused on protecting inclusive spaces for creativity and free expression. Given his high profile, his own enjoyment of free expression is deployed with incredible care.
A small group of rightwing white men would like to see Harriman removed from this role and have issued an astonishing range of attacks across the establishment media in a concerted campaign to achieve this. Like Robinson, they seem interested not so much in his track record, but whether he is the right sort of ethnic minority to be permitted in their milieu.
He is being assailed from many directions, in many and varied ways. Despite being “educated at English private schools”, he “seems to have developed little interest or expertise in classical music or any other performing art form – something of a hindrance, one may think, for a man chairing an organisation with three concert halls and six resident orchestras,” writes the Times chief culture writer, Richard Morrison, for example. Apparently being an Oscar-nominated director pales in comparison to his failure to play the cello. He also “has a well-documented friendship with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex”, laments the Telegraph arts correspondent Craig Simpson – surely a disqualifying feature in itself. He is, Telegraph readers are told by way of description, a “Nigerian born British photographer”, the “pro Palestinian arts boss”.
Harriman is also the son of a billionaire, these commentators frequently remind us. So I was particularly tickled to see none other than Lord Roberts of Belgravia – the historian and notoriously underprivileged grandee of rightwing life – endorse Morrison’s piece as one of the signatories of a letter to the Times saying that Morrison was right to voice “growing concerns for the Southbank Centre”.
Roberts’ intervention hints, perhaps, to a darker agenda – the broader campaign to discipline cultural institutions that give expression to different perspectives and values in British public life. Roberts has been a vocal opponent of efforts by the National Trust to recognise the scars of slavery and colonialism across its historical properties – a measure he called “foul”. He is a defender of empire in general – “a noble endeavour that for the vast majority of time brought great benefits for most of its native inhabitants” – and, hilariously in this regard, a great critic of cancel culture.
Harriman no doubt presents the uncomfortable spectre of those “native inhabitants” stepping into the great and high profile institutions of British life.
And then there is the fact that Harriman’s detractors dislike his critique of Israel and have consistently attempted to confuse this with antisemitism – and this is the focus of the concerted move against him. Some have alleged that comments by Harriman compared Reform UK’s electoral success to the Holocaust. But what Harriman actually did was quote the philosopher Susan Sontag, using the context of pre-war Germany to describe how the majority of people are persuadable, and can be swayed towards or away from extremism. The campaign against Harriman also perpetuates another cynical allegation, that he shared a “conspiracy theory” about last month’s Golders Green attacks.
In fact, Harriman’s first response to the attack was an unambiguous post expressing “solidarity to the Jewish community”. When Harriman correctly discovered that there had been a third, Muslim victim of the same attacker on the same day, he – like many of us – asked why many news headlines, in news organisations including HuffPost and Sky, and why the Metropolitan police itself, did not immediately give this victim the same status and prominence. This seems to speak to an unwritten rule in the British media – that a zero-sum game exists between recognising Jewish victims and Muslim victims, between recognising antisemitism and equally recognising Islamophobia.
It’s a toxic idea, one correctly identified by Amnesty, which also posted denouncing these smear-like attempts against Harriman: “when we allow one community’s trauma to be played off against another’s, we weaken the foundation of safety for everyone.” A campaign supporting a complaint to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) about the Telegraph’s coverage has now garnered over 100,000 signatures.
As anyone concerned by the Tommy Robinson march will discover, for the British establishment – our political leaders, police forces and rightwing media – violent Islamophobia is not a priority. All black British people are expected to take note, for fear of equally stepping out of line. As Britain’s oldest black newspaper, The Voice, noted with concern, “this is not accountability culture, it’s more reputational warfare”. The effect of the message could not be more clear: the experiment with “allowing” black figures into positions like Harriman’s could all be over in a heartbeat, if we dare to step out of line.
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Afua Hirsch is a writer and film-maker
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