Why is Harry Cole platforming a far-right extremist?

News UK bosses could be forgiven for wondering why they’d bothered sending ex-Sun political editor Harry Cole to the States to present a YouTube talk show hardly anyone watches. Now they have a new question to ponder: why is he platforming a man who says he would expel all non-white and non-Christian MPs and civil servants in the UK?

At the weekend Cole used an episode of his Harry Cole Saves The West show to give a 30-minute softball interview to Connor Tomlinson, a far right influencer and host of the Tomlinson Talks YouTube series (sample episodes: “Why the UK is on the Brink of Civil War”, “Britain Bans Being Right-Wing. America Intervenes”, “Britain is About to Burn, and the State is to Blame” and “The British State is Treating the Epping Protestors as Terrorists”).

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Tomlinson is also host of Lotus Eaters – the podcast created by Carl Benjamin, the far right commentator and failed Ukip candidate who once told Labour MP Jess Phillips: “I wouldn’t even rape you”.

Earlier this month he said the UK “should ban those without native British ancestry from being MPs”, arguing that “the British people are not represented by the sons and daughters of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh using Parliament to bicker about how best to import millions of their kin from the Subcontinent”.

In his interview, Cole failed to ask Tomlinson any challenging questions, preferring instead to massage his ego with posers such as “are you Britain’s answer to Nick Fuentes?” (a US neo-Nazi interviewed, aggressively, by Piers Morgan last week). He asked whether Tomlinson was shifting the Overton window on remigration and ended their friendly half hour with “We will leave it there for today – but come back and see us soon”.
Cole was sent Stateside by Sun bosses in order to penetrate the US media market with interviews with some of America’s top politicians. Was it really worth the expense to air friendly interviews over Zoom with obscure British extremists?