Hate groupsThe “right-wing terrorist threat” in U.K. more significant, challenging than the public realizes: U.K.'s counterterrorism chief

Published 27 February 2018

The right-wing terrorist threat is more significant and more challenging than perhaps the public debate gives it credit for,” the U.K.’s counterterrorism chief has said. “There are many Western countries that have extreme right-wing challenges and in quite a number of those the groups we are worried about here are making connections with them and networking,” he said, declining to give further details. Last year the British authorities foiled ten Islamist and four far-right terrorist plots.

Mark Rowley, the outgoing head of counterterrorism policing in the United Kingdom, said Monday that the British police had “foiled four extreme right-wing terror plots” in the country in the last year.

Countries around the world face similar challenges from Islamist and right-wing extremism and terrorism,” Rowley said. “But I know of no other country better able to confront this threat than the U.K.”

Reuters reports that since the lead-up to the Brexit vote in June 2016, the United Kingdom has witnessed an increase in right-wing attacks. Days before the referendum, a 52-year-old right-wing extremist shot and killed British lawmaker Jo Cox.

In June last year, a 48-year-old man drove a vehicle into Muslim worshipers after finding inspiration in far-right ideologies.

The right-wing terrorist threat is more significant and more challenging than perhaps the public debate gives it credit for,” Rowley said.

“There are many Western countries that have extreme right-wing challenges and in quite a number of those the groups we are worried about here are making connections with them and networking,” he said, declining to give further details because it was a new, live intelligence phenomenon.

Rowley did say, however, that the MI5 domestic spy agency are now involved in tracking and investigating the far-right and he warned that British groups were seeking links with international extremists.

Last year, Britain has banned National Action and two other spin-off groups, the first extremist right-wing organizations to be outlawed since the 1940s.

“For the best part of 18 months in the UK we have a homegrown, white supremacist, neo-Nazi terrorist organization that is pursuing all the ambitions of any other terrorist organization committed to violence,” Rowley said.

“That should be a matter of great concern for all of us.”

Reuters says that to show the overall scale of the threat Britain faced, Rowley said there were 600 terrorism investigations currently ongoing involving more than 3,000 suspects.

Over the last three years, terrorism arrests had doubled while in the same period some 2,000 people have been referred to the government’s counter-radicalization Prevent program, with a third of these over far-right concerns, he said.

In 2017, in addition to foiling four far-right terrorist plots, the British authorities foiled ten Islamist terror conspiracies.

The London-based think tank Counterpoint has said that as “Islamic terrorism is decreasing, extreme right terrorism is on its way up,” citing a 2012 parliamentary report on violence and radicalization.

Since the 2015 migration crisis, Europe has witnessed growing right-wing extremism. In Germany, a Bundeswehr soldier was charged in December for planning to carry out attacks targeting high-profile politicians and framing refugees for the crimes.

In 2016, an alleged member of the far-right Reichsbürger movement murdered a police officer during a raid of his home. Police were seeking to confiscate his cache of roughly thirty weapons.

For some, the threat posed by right-wing extremism goes beyond violent crimes and instead challenges the very foundations of Western European countries.

Populist extremist parties present one of the most pressing challenges to European democracies,” said a report published by the London-based Chatham House think tank last year.

These parties share two core features: they fiercely oppose immigration and rising ethnic and cultural diversity; and they pursue a populist ‘anti-establishment’ strategy that attacks mainstream parties and is ambivalent if not hostile towards liberal representative democracy.”

— Read more in Matthew Goodwin, Right Response: Understanding and Countering Populist Extremism in Europe (Chatham House, 2017); and Roots of Violent Radicalization (Home Affairs Committee - Nineteenth Report, 31 January 2012)