Nick Lowles

Nick Lowles (Nicholas Lloyd Lowles, born in June 1968 (Companies House record)) is a British anti-fascist campaigner and writer. He was co-editor and then editor of Searchlight Magazine between 1999 and 2011, founded HOPE not hate in 2004 and has been its chief executive.¹²³ He wrote White Riot: The Violent Story of Combat 18 (2001) and a number of other books, and was appointed MBE in the New Year Honours of 2017.⁴⁵

Early Life and Searchlight

Lowles grew up in Hounslow and moved to Shrewsbury at the age of ten, became involved in the anti-fascist movement as a student volunteer at the University of Sheffield, worked as a freelance investigative journalist in television, with credits on BBC Panorama, World in Action, Channel Four Dispatches and MacIntyre Undercover, and was co-editor and then editor of Searchlight between 1999 and 2011 (HarperCollins author biography).¹ The Sheila McKechnie Foundation gives the mid-1980s as the start of his campaigning at school and 2004 as the founding of HOPE not hate, in response to the rise of the British National Party.²

The Companies House record of Searchlight Information Services Limited, later renamed Hope Not Hate (1986) Limited, lists Lowles as a director appointed on 25 June 2005, with Gerry Gable as director since before 1991 and Sonia Gable as secretary.⁶

Books

The Open Library catalogue lists the following titles with Lowles as author or editor: White Noise, with Steve Silver (Searchlight, 1998); White Riot: The Violent Story of Combat 18 (Milo Books, 2001); Mr. Evil, with Graeme McLagen (John Blake, 2002), catalogued under the subjects terrorists, bombings and neo-Nazism; Hooligans, with Andy Nicholls (Milo Books, 2005); A-L of British Football Gangs and M-Z of Britain's Football Hooligan Gangs, with Nicholls (2007); From Cable Street to Oldham, edited by Lowles (Searchlight, 2007); and How to Defeat the Far Right (HarperCollins, 2025).⁴ The charity's annual report for 2021 records that he "wrote Codename Arthur, the true story of the anti-fascist spy who spent 10 years infiltrating the BNP and identified the London nail bomber", released to coincide with a Netflix documentary on the nail bombing.⁷

Combat 18 and the Wells Informant

Larry O'Hara of Notes From The Borderland wrote in an introduction to his 1995 notes on Combat 18 and MI5 that the C18 booklet was written by Wilf Browning "with significant input from Darren Wells (aka McKenzie) who later 'came out' as a Searchlight/Special Branch informant in 2002", and that his site would at some point "dissect the tendentious disinformation peddled by Searchlight editor Nick Lowles in his 'White Riot' book on C18". O'Hara described Searchlight as "presenting themselves as squeaky clean 'Community-oriented' anti-fascists via their 'Hope Not Hate' front." O'Hara also wrote that he had never thought Browning or Steve Sargent were state assets.⁸ Searchlight's obituary of Gable, written by the magazine, describes its use of agents or "moles" within far-right groups as its "true hallmark" and says that "some of these were inserted, some had a change of heart and resolved to make amends, some simply wanted money".⁹

Company Records

Companies House lists Lowles as a director of the following: Searchlight Information Services Limited (from 25 June 2005; the company was renamed Hope Not Hate (1986) Limited in October 2012 and dissolved on 14 July 2015); Hope Not Hate (Services) Limited (from 25 September 2012; dissolved 10 September 2013); and Hope Not Hate Limited (22 August 2012 to 18 February 2020, and again from 1 September 2026).³⁶¹⁰ He was secretary of Hope Not Hate Limited from 31 August 2023 to 1 September 2026 and of the charity then named Hope Not Hate Charitable Trust from 31 August 2023 to 30 June 2025.³¹¹ The charity's annual reports for 2021 to 2024 list him under "Key management personnel", with Jemma Levene also listed in the report for 2021.¹²

The 2011 Separation

Martin Bright wrote in the Jewish Chronicle in August 2012 that Lowles was "Mr Gable's heir apparent", that he had "effectively spun off Hope Not Hate as a separate organisation", and that Gable had retained control of the magazine; Bright took neither side.¹³ The Borderland timeline, whose author is hostile to both sides, states that on 28 March 2011 Lowles and Cormac Hollingsworth met the Gables to ask for the Searchlight magazine shares and for Gable's resignation from the Searchlight companies by the end of June 2011, that Lowles resigned as editor on 23 September 2011, and that Lowles stated around the summer of 2010 that Gable had told him he would "step aside" in 2011, which the timeline records that Gable "vehemently denies".¹⁴ Searchlight's 2026 obituary of Gable states that Gable offered Lowles "the hand of friendship" at an anti-fascist anniversary event in 2023.⁹

Informants

Ed Caesar reported in The New Yorker in 2019 that Lowles, then HOPE not hate's chief executive, "runs several moles", that one source was an anti-fascist campaigner who went undercover nearly twenty-five years earlier, and that Lowles received a briefing after Robbie Mullen e-mailed the organisation in April 2017. According to Lowles, the police then believed that National Action had been all but dismantled after its ban. Mullen later worked for HOPE not hate as a researcher after Lowles found him the position.¹⁵

Disputes

Nigel Farage said on the radio station LBC in December 2016 that HOPE not hate pursued "violent and undemocratic means". HOPE not hate began a crowdfunded libel action, and on 14 November 2017 announced that Farage had filed a statement in the High Court acknowledging that it "does not tolerate or pursue violent or undemocratic behaviour".¹⁶

On the night of Saturday 3 August 2024, during rioting in Middlesbrough, Lowles wrote on X: "Reports are coming in of acid being thrown out of a car window at a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough. Absolutely horrendous." The post was seen by more than 100,000 people. Cleveland Police stated that it had not received any formal complaint from any victim. On 4 August Lowles wrote that police had denied knowledge of the attack, "though some in the local Muslim community insist it happened", and "Hold my hands up if my initial tweet was wrong". The Conservative member of Parliament Neil O'Brien described the original post as "Incredibly irresponsible".¹⁷

In 2025 and 2026 complaints to the Charity Commission by Jack Rankin and Farage concerned the relationship between the charity and Hope Not Hate Limited, of which Lowles was a director until 2020 and secretary from 2023; the Commission closed its compliance case in January 2026 and took no further action on the second complaint. Its press release of 22 January 2026 refers to the charity's changes to its secretary and trustees and does not name Lowles.¹⁸¹⁹

Funding Records of the Organisation

The Electoral Commission register records donations to HOPE not hate Ltd, a permitted third party, in the years in which Lowles was an editor or chief executive, among them 80,000 pounds from UNISON on 14 May 2009, 65,000 pounds from Unite the Union on 14 December 2009, 60,000 pounds from the National Union of Teachers on 17 February 2010, 200,000 pounds from an individual recorded as David Sainsbury on 4 November 2019, 100,000 pounds from Mr Greg Nasmyth on 12 December 2019 and 75,000 pounds from Open Britain Ltd in two payments in November and December 2019.²⁰ The Borderland timeline states that in September 2010 "Labour-supporting financier Richard Brindle moves into HNH orbit, entrancing Lowles"; the timeline's author is hostile to both sides, and the Electoral Commission search for HOPE not hate Ltd returns no donation from a person of that name.¹⁴²⁰ The charity's accounts record an unrestricted grant of 46,000 pounds from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust in each of 2019 and 2020 and grants from the charity to Hope Not Hate Limited of 625,000 pounds in 2022, 650,000 pounds in 2023 and 787,858 pounds in 2024.^21222324 The Sigrid Rausing Trust lists HOPE Not Hate as a grantee since 2013 with 1,615,000 pounds of previous grants.²⁵

Honours

The Cabinet Office list of the New Year Honours 2017 contains the entry "Mr Nicholas LOWLES, Founder, Hope Not Hate. For services to Community Cohesion and Combating Extremism", London, under Members of the Order of the British Empire. The Cabinet Office list for the 2016 New Year Honours contains no entry for the name. The publisher's biography gives 2016 as the year of the award, and the 2017 list is the one that carries the entry.¹⁵