The GB Freedom Party has published a pointed broadside arguing that parts of the self-described anti-fascist movement now routinely use “the methods of fascism itself” — publishing a checklist of twenty-four behaviours it says prove the point, from statue-toppling and venue intimidation to debanking and cancel culture.

What the party published

The post, titled “The Anti-Fascist… Fascists”, appears on the Kent-based party’s website under a satirical cartoon of a uniformed dictator caricature shouting “You’re a fascist!” Its central argument is that fascism should be judged “by its methods, not its slogans”.

The party’s full checklist, reproduced as published:

  • Hiding behind a peaceful symbol. Take a flag or a word associated with peace and resistance, and fly it over conduct that is anything but.
  • Attacking your own country’s culture. Teaching people to be ashamed of the place they call home.
  • Attacking your own country’s history. Not studying it, not learning from it — erasing it.
  • Pulling down statues. The mob decides, the rope comes out, and centuries of history go in the harbour.
  • Blockading political rivals’ meetings. If you can’t win the argument in the room, stop the room from meeting at all.
  • Intimidating venues. Ringing round every hall and hotel so that opponents cannot even hire a room. Ordinary people never see it happen — they just never hear the other side.
  • Cancel culture. Not disagreement — punishment. Careers, reputations and livelihoods destroyed for holding a lawful opinion.
  • Going after livelihoods. Ringing a person’s employer because of something they said in their own time. That is not activism; it is economic intimidation.
  • Debanking. Weaponising banks and payment services so dissenters can’t hold an account, take a donation, or run a campaign.
  • Doxxing. Publishing home addresses and workplaces so “someone else” will do the intimidating.
  • Masked street mobs. Dressing in black, covering your face, and turning up to “counter-protest” with fists and bike locks — then calling it self-defence.
  • Using the tools of the state to oppress and intimidate. When officialdom investigates opinions instead of crimes, the state has picked a side.
  • Two-tier treatment. One policing standard for their marches, another for everyone else’s.
  • Using front groups to attack political rivals. Keep your own hands clean; let the “spontaneous” mob do the work.
  • Screaming “Nazi” at any other opinion. When every farmer, fisherman, veteran and worried parent is a “fascist”, the word means nothing — except “be quiet”.
  • Eroding free speech and independent thought. Not by argument, but by consequence — until people learn to say nothing, and eventually to think nothing.
  • Turning fact into fiction. Things every generation before us knew to be true are suddenly “contested”, “problematic” — or forbidden. When you must deny the evidence of your own eyes, you are not in a debate; you are in a re-education programme.
  • Arresting journalists. Reporters detained, raided and dragged through the courts for reporting the wrong story — in a country that lectures the world about press freedom.
  • Ignoring crimes against the “wrong” victims. When whole categories of victims are looked away from for years because acknowledging them is politically inconvenient, that is not sensitivity. It is complicity.
  • Policing language itself. Redefining ordinary words until ordinary opinions become unsayable — then punishing the “offence” they just invented.
  • Outsourcing the censorship. Branding dissent “misinformation” or “hate” so that tech platforms and regulators do the silencing at arm’s length.
  • The forced public apology. Not persuasion — recantation. The struggle session, updated for social media.
  • Capturing the institutions. Schools, universities, the arts, the civil service — then enforcing conformity from the inside and calling it neutrality.
  • Accusing rivals of exactly what they are doing. Every one of the tactics above gets projected onto their opponents. The louder the accusation, the better the mirror.

Historical comparisons

The piece draws parallels with 1930s Germany, Soviet Russia, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and communist East Germany, noting that East Berlin’s regime officially named the Berlin Wall the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”. “The label was always virtuous,” the party writes. “The methods were always the same.”

It goes on to describe the tactics as “a playbook” — capture the language, then the institutions, then the past — and urges what it calls lawful, democratic pushback: “Speak plainly. Defend those punished for lawful opinions. Organise. Stand for election. Vote.”

The party signs off on a wry note, telling readers not to lose heart because such movements “always fail in the end” — and that when this one does, “its members will do what they always do: deny they were ever part of it”. It adds: “We are quite sure that once these people read this and realise they are on the wrong side of history, all of this nonsense will stop immediately.”

The wider argument

Supporters of anti-fascist activism reject such comparisons, arguing that protest, boycotts and de-platforming are lawful democratic tools — and point to genuine far-right violence as the threat their movement exists to oppose. The party’s counter-argument is that several of the tactics on its list, including doxxing, venue intimidation and pressure on employers and banks, target lawful political activity rather than violence.

GB Freedom, registered with the Electoral Commission and focused on Kent and Medway, has said it intends to contest the county’s reorganised 2028 elections. The full post is on the party’s website.

Transparency: GB Freedom Party and Kent Local News share a founder. KLN reports on the party under the same editorial policy it applies to all Kent political parties.