Counter-terror police have vowed to thwart the rise of far-right extremism, which they say is the fastest-growing terrorist threat in the UK. Britain's top counter-terrorism officer, Met assistant commissioner Neil Basu, said the most likely attempts would come from 'lone actors' and that authorities could not guarantee to foil every plot.
Police revealed that a quarter of all terrorism arrests in the past year were linked to far-right violence. The far-right caseload of counter-terrorism police jumped from 6% to 10% in the last two years, and referrals to the Prevent anti-radicalisation programme almost doubled from 10% to 18% between 2016 and 2018. Since 2017, seven out of 22 terror plots to kill in Britain were driven by extreme-right causes.
Police said they and MI5 were carrying out 80 investigations to stop violence fuelled by ideologies such as white supremacism and Islamophobia. Most plotting took place online, with links to extreme-right followers in Europe, the US and South America. Some plotters acquired manuals on killing drawn up by Islamic State.
The ideologies that could trigger violence included cultural nationalism and white supremacism. Some on the violent extreme right were followers of satanism, police said, and some suspects were as young as 14. Basu acknowledged that criticism that authorities were slow to recognise rightwing extremism as terrorism was 'probably justified'. He added that nearly a third of foiled plots relate to rightwing ideology, underscoring the seriousness of the threat.
The remainder of plots were jihadist, which remains the biggest terrorist threat to the UK, stabilising at a high level. Some terrorists were incited by extreme-right propaganda, such as Thomas Mair, who murdered MP Jo Cox in 2016. Others, like Darren Osborne, who attacked Muslim worshippers in north London in 2017, acted after consuming lawful material from groups like the English Defence League.
