Far right trying to infiltrate UK’s low-traffic protests, campaigners warn

Far-right activists and other extremists are attempting to hijack local issues such as low-traffic schemes by linking them to conspiracy theories, campaigners have warned.

It comes after Covid-19 protesters joined thousands demonstrating against Oxford’s Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) scheme, one of the most ambitious in the country and the source of long-running local debate.

But the anti-racism charity Hope Not Hate (HnH) warns the issue is one that extremists are attempting to portray as the work of an elite cabal, or “New World Order” (NWO), pulling the strings of world events.

Recent polling shared with the Guardian by HnH underlines the potential traction for such conspiracy theories among the public. As many as 34% of people claim to definitely or probably believe that “there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together”.

Young people were more susceptible. More than a fifth (22%) of 18- to 24-year-olds thought it was “definitely” or “probably true” the official account of the Holocaust was a lie, while only 3% of those aged over 65 thought the same, according to a 20,000-person poll by FocalData.

On a rainy lunchtime in Oxford this week, the Guardian witnessed the local tensions around LTNs, which have long been a daily occurrence, as a group of residents took turns to physically prevent motorists driving through a street officially off-limits to traffic.

While businesses and residents have made compelling arguments against LTNs, other opponents have systematically vandalised and removed the scheme’s bollards.

At the Oxford LTN, voices were raised and drivers sometimes got out of their cars to remonstrate with locals, including Elise Benjamin, a former lord mayor and Green party councillor, who said: “Our big fear is that eventually a child is going to get knocked down by a car just ignoring the signs and trying to enter a street.”

She added: “I am also now genuinely scared by the way in which the far right and others have got involved. On Saturday’s march some people were literally chanting saying things including ‘refugees are rapists’ and ‘jews will not replace us’.”

Benjamin, who is Jewish, said she recognised antisemitic tropes being deployed against LTNs by extremists seeking to portray the plans as part of a global conspiracy to lock people into carless, surveilled communities.

While many residents legitimately opposed to LTNs were present during last Saturday’s march, it also included a cohort from the far-right group Patriotic Alternative, as well as conspiracy-theorist activists and vaccine-sceptic celebrities such as the 1990s pop group Right Said Fred.

Conspiracy theorists have sought to link LTNs with the urban planning notion of “15-minute cities” – which holds that amenities and workplaces should ideally be within a 15-minute walk. They attempt to portray such zones as enforcing a Hunger Games-style dystopian lifestyle under constant surveillance.

Others who have seized on the issue include presenters of the rightwing news channel GB News and Conservative backbenchers including the Tory MP Nick Fletcher, who claimed 15-minute cities were an “international socialist concept” that will “cost our personal freedom”. Elsewhere, the schemes have been backed by Tory councillors.

Supporters of LTNs in other cities including Bath, Canterbury and Winchester have been in touch with Oxford counterparts to ask how to cope with what may be coming their way.

Andrew Gant, a Liberal Democrat councillor and Oxfordshire county council’s cabinet member for highway management, said authorities had been “taken aback” by the level of vandalism of LTN structures but that elected representatives had also been on the receiving end of some “very nasty stuff”.

“There’s always opposition to our transport policies and occasionally it has got heated in the past but in the last six months it has gained a new momentum. Some people who are engaged in Oxford have started to use extreme language. They have also attracted a wider community of opposition,” said Gant, who received an apology last week from a local hotelier and opponent of LTNs who compared him to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

HnH’s chief executive, Nick Lowles, said: “The majority of people campaigning against traffic measure don’t step into harmful territory. However, the far right and their conspiracy theorist fellow travellers in this space base their arguments on fundamentally antisemitic ideas of shadowy global elites controlling things from afar.”

The debate comes ahead of what some regard as a mini-referendum in Oxford on 2 March, when voters go to the polls in two city and county council byelections in the Rose Hill and Littlemore area, regarded by some as a hotbed of anti-LTN sentiment.