Gerry Gable: A Personal Reflection

The sad passing of Gerry Gable at the start of 2026 is a great loss to anyone interested in challenging political extremism. My thoughts go out to the people closest to him, including his wife Sonya, his children, and Andy Bell and Cathy Pound at Searchlight. Gerry was a pioneering activist, and central to the anti-fascist Searchlight magazine that campaigned against the National Front in the 1970s, the British National Party from the 1980s and took on newer groups such as the English Defence League in the 2000s and beyond.

Searchlight magazine continues online, and Gerry will be long remembered as a leading figure of British anti-fascism. For me, he was also someone who was instrumental to developing my own career as a researcher. Indeed, without his kind and generous support my life would have been somewhat different.

I first met Gerry at a conference I co-ran at the University of Northampton in 2010, where I was then working as a temporary researcher for something called the Radicalism and New Media Research group. (This was when things like Facebook were still ‘new’). We got on very well and chatted about ways anti-fascist activists and academics interested in studying far right politics could find some common ground. We were both deeply concerned with the growth of groups such as the British National Party, at that time at the height of its appeal, and the emergence of new street-based groups, especially as the English Defence League.

By 2011, Gerry was talking about housing Searchlight’s archival holdings at the university to turn this into a resource for researchers. My then boss, Dr Matthew Feldman, and the university’s Vice Chancellor, Prof. Nick Petford, both liked the idea, and by the time I secured a permanent job at Northampton later that year the archive move had been agreed. I was given the task of overseeing the creation of the resource.

We opened in 2013, and our archivist, Daniel Jones, has welcomed hundreds of visitors to the collection. These are people who have researched undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations, PhD theses, academic books and articles, and we have been visited by many policymakers, filmmakers and journalists too. It is now a central part of our Extreme Right Research Network. In 2014 Daniel and I organised a 50th anniversary conference for Searchlight with Gerry, where we were pictured together.

Gerry supported people personally too. Before I gained a well-paying job, he helped me by commissioning me to write some chapters for a report Lone Wolves: Myth or Reality? Searchlight had been funded to develop. This focused on the fact that those often dubbed ‘lone wolves’ by the media were in fact the product of a wider culture of political extremism. We also edited a short book together, an early analysis of online activism Far-Right.Com: Nationalist Extremism on the Internet.

As I became a more established academic, Gerry and I would often have long conversations, either when he came to Northampton to visit the archive or on the telephone. He regularly talked about Colin Jordan, and how he has found him a particularly important figure. I went on to write a book about Jordan, and without Gerry’s advice I would not have been able to do this either.

Before his health declined, Gerry was a regular visitor to Northampton, attending conferences, meeting with students and other staff members, and generally being an inspirational, cantankerous presence. His long phone calls, his stories about all manner of scrapes and encounters, and above all his generosity will be missed by me, and everyone who encountered him at the university. We will continue to host the Searchlight Archive collection and promote research into far-right politics.

Professor Paul Jackson

Professor Paul Jackson is a Professor in the History of Radicalism and Extremism at the University of Northampton. He specializes in the history and contemporary dynamics of fascism and the extreme right, and his most recent book is Pride in Prejudice: Understanding Britain’s Extreme Right (2022). He has engaged widely with the media, including national and international press, as well as for BBC radio and television, and he has written articles for the Guardian and the Huffington Post. He has worked with policymakers, professionals and activists, including creating bespoke training packages related to risks posed by the extreme right.