South Africa and the far right

In 1969 the Springbok rugby team toured Britain and was met at every ground by demonstrators who occupied pitches, blocked coaches and disrupted play. The South African cricket tour due the following summer was abandoned before a ball was bowled. Hain was 19 and running the Stop The Seventy Tour committee. In 1972 a letter bomb arrived at the family home in Putney and failed to detonate. In 1976 he stood trial for a bank robbery in the same suburb for which he had been framed, and was acquitted.

He returned to the subject as a minister. At the Foreign Office from 1999, with responsibility for Africa, he negotiated the Kimberley Process on conflict diamonds, opposite a South African government whose predecessor had sought his prosecution.

Teaching at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2017, where his father had studied architecture, he began to see the scale of what was going on under Jacob Zuma. From 2017 he used parliamentary privilege in the Lords to name the institutions involved: HSBC, Standard Chartered and Bank of Baroda for moving Gupta money through Dubai, Hong Kong and Caribbean territories, and KPMG, McKinsey, SAP, Hogan Lovells and Bain for the professional services around it. He gave evidence to the state capture commission in Johannesburg in 2019.

In 2022 he proposed barring Bain from United Kingdom public contracts. The exclusion was imposed for three years and lifted after later lifted. He has since argued for an international anti-corruption court, on the grounds that the money crosses borders faster than any national prosecutor can follow it.

In Liberation and Corruption, published in 2025, he takes the argument beyond South Africa. The apartheid state ran secret funds, sanctions-busting operations and covert newspapers of its own. That machinery survived into the new republic largely unbroken.

The campaigning against apartheid ran alongside campaigning against the far right at home, and it drew on the same people and the same tactics. The Anti-Nazi League was founded in 1977, when the National Front was polling well enough in parts of London and the Midlands to worry both main parties, and Hain was among its organisers. He had come to it from the sports boycott and the street confrontations that went with it.

In 2013 he spoke against a National Front candidate standing in Swansea and backed the counter demonstration when a white pride march was called there. The following year he objected to the BBC giving airtime to candidates from parties he regarded as racist, and told an interviewer that Labour had no adequate strategy against UKIP.