WE KNOW that it is possible for people to change — even after they have trapped themselves into adopting the most right-wing positions available to them.

Ray Hill was in the 1960s a member of a neonazi party, the British Movement. Leaving Britain for South Africa, he became disenchanted and on his return in 1979 he gathered intelligence for the anti-fascist magazine, Searchlight. He leaked plans to the press about an intended bomb attack on the Notting Hill Carnival. Ever since then, Searchlight and its successor Hope Not Hate have gathered information from far-right moles, many of whom have gone on to abandon fascism.

Matthew Collins, the one-time South London organiser for the National Front, became an anti-fascist informer in the mid-2000s. By 2017, he had spent more than a decade working for Hope Not Hate. Among the moles handled by Collins was Robbie Mullen, a member of the neonazi group National Action. Collins passed the information gathered by Mullen to the police, helping to foil National Action’s plans to murder a Labour MP, Rosie Cooper.

Playing the role of informer obliged Mullen to break all contact with his friends, and put him at fear of reprisals. “I had empathy for Robbie Mullen,” Collins says, “before I’d even met him … com[ing] over to the ‘other’ side can feel like being ripped from the womb.”

At his first meeting with Collins, Mullen spoke in monosyllables. He’d never been on holiday, had no desire to. He had no friends outside National Action.

It was the group’s taste for violence which frightened him. Later, he came to depend on Collins; sometimes Mullen would message Collins 50 times a day. Mullen needed to find a new job, but as soon as he’d made contact with the police, his admitted involvement in far-right violence made him unemployable.

Hope Not Hate said that any money they gave Mullen would come before the court when National Action were on trial, and the defendants would use it to portray Mullen’s evidence as tainted. Mullen was depressed, Collins too — he recalls feeling “exhausted, terrified” — their mood only lifted with the prosecution of the members of National Action, including the lead defendant, Jack Renshaw, who was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Collins is a former fascist, but that past doesn’t lead him to trust his sources. “I can smell out bullshit quicker than other people. I have to put people in the right box; is this person an adventurer, a shark, a shyster? If they’re just in it to make money, that’s fine.”

He won’t accept information from a source who is breaking the law. “Even if it’s just shoplifting, you’re not doing it on our time.” I ask him about potential moles who admit that they’ve carried out violence or done something seriously wrong. “The rule we have is that you’ll have to atone for what you’ve done. Whether you go to a church or a solicitor, I don’t know, but you’re going to have to do some serious work.” If someone isn’t willing to make peace or give closure to their victims Hope not Hate won’t work with them.

Collins is also involved in Hope not Hate’s broader campaigns which target such non-fascist but far-right parties as Reform. “The way you defeat Farage and you defeat Trump is ideologically. Your ideas have to be better than theirs. You have to show his followers how damaging his government will be. You have to show them their lives will be better under us.”

What, then, should people do if friends, lovers, family members start sharing far-right material which they’ve read online? It is a healthy instinct, Collins accepts, to feel some responsibility for the people around you. Our moment in history is far from unique in the volume of narcissists it produces; all that’s different from the recent past is how many of our parties are led by opportunists or liars, how many people vote for them.

In challenging your friends, you need to know what they have done. If they’ve done little than share a social media post without thinking, or voting a particular way, that’s a small act. At the moment that your friend has done something much more serious, if they’ve been violent or encouraged violence in the people around them — that’s a whole different level of wrongdoing. It’s not your duty to downplay the harm your friend has done, any more than it would be the task of anti-fascist handlers to cover up the crimes of someone offering them intel.

Changing people’s minds is often a thankless task. Don’t underestimate the costs to those who try to challenge bigotry. Collins has a deep fund of anecdotes about the time he gave to trying to save one or another extremist, and he failed, the effort he made to save a fascist who then lashed out at the very people who’d offered him a way out. Yes, it’s worth making the argument, he advises, but be patient, press only when you can.

The story of Collins’s work with Robbie Mullen was dramatised in an ITV series, The Walk-In. In one scene, the actor Stephen Graham playing the part of Collins talks to a lecture theatre full of university students. He shows them an old photograph of a neonazi on a march. He tells the students that he is the man they can see in the photograph, “We have to believe that people filled with hate can change; I changed.”

I ask Collins if those are his words or if the authors of the drama wrote them. They’re his, he insists. Far-right groups have a high membership turnover. People get bored, start to detest the movements they’re part of. Maybe they didn’t want to join a hard-line party. You can win them back. And if even they are susceptible to persuasion, so is everyone else. “I don’t believe people are inherently evil,” Collins says.

DK Renton is writing a book about Revolutionary Forgiveness, which is due to be published by Haymarket Books in May 2026.