How Britain took its eye off the far right

LONDON — It was the summer Britain saw some of its worst riots for more than two decades. 
The flashpoint was the murder of three children in July, in a horrific stabbing at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the seaside town of Southport.
Online disinformation suggesting the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker led to mosques and refugee accommodation being targeted by violent mobs in more than a week of unrest.
The disorder and anger seen across the U.K. was targeted at immigrants, legal and illegal — and sometimes even people of color who had lived in the U.K. for generations — and it was stoked by far-right groups of varying degrees of organization.
As the new Labour government seeks ways to prevent a repeat of the violence, officials working in counter-extremism told POLITICO that work monitoring far-right extremism had stalled over the past three years towards the end of the last Conservative government, despite rising tensions over immigration.
In the immediate aftermath of the riots, Prime Minister Keir Starmer last month announced a “standing army” of police officers would target rioters, resulting in more than 1,000 arrests and over 600 charges.
Among those convicted were two 12-year-old boys found to have thrown projectiles at police and brothers who looted their local library.
One possible answer to the question of why the violence flared so suddenly, some experts say, is a failure to recognize the far-right as an immediate threat, rather than a potential danger insignificant compared to that posed by Islamic extremism.
One civil servant working on national security said those in government looking at radicalization and disinformation had been hit by a “lack of spend, low morale, and funding being diverted to priorities like Rwanda [the Conservatives’ flagship migrant scheme]” in recent years. Like others quoted in the article they were granted anonymity in order to discuss matters they were not authorized to share publicly.
A second official who works in counter-extremism monitoring said the previous Tory government had successfully monitored public health disinformation related to the pandemic which served as a “rallying cry for conspiracy theorists” but had overseen a drop-off in focus in other areas of threat from the far-right.
“It was through the lens of public health that they looked at [the far-right] and went to great lengths to look at that threat, but it was only through that lens,” the official said. 
They added that in the past “Conservative and Labour governments alike have kept an eye on the right wing, the Nazis. Most recently there was a huge drop in the amount of time resource dedicated towards that.”
The official said that part of the reason for what they described as a “drop off” in monitoring was ideological. “There are civil servants in the Home Office that care about violence from any source. But it’s fair to say that the last government, particularly by the end, weren’t really as interested in the extreme right wing or far-right.”
Professor Paul Thomas, a counter-extremism expert at the University of Huddersfield, told POLITICO another reason for the lack of focus on the far right was financial, as the government battled the post-Covid cost of living crisis. He said: “For the last two to three years, there hasn’t been a new or revised counter extremism strategy, so that level of preventative activity, a significant amount of which was concerned with far-right extremism in some priority areas, has been discontinued. Some of that, I suspect, is those tightening budget cuts.”
A review by Sara Khan, the government’s social cohesion and resilience adviser until her term ended in May, this year warned that not enough was being done to combat breakdowns in communities, which could be “exploited by extremists” including the far right, and highlighted the impact of budget cuts.
Her review flagged the city of Stoke, which lost funding provided under the government’s anti-terrorism scheme known as Prevent in April 2023 “irrespective of the fact that the city continues to experience significant extremist activity” from both the far-right and Islamist extremists.
“In the absence of a national strategic cohesion and counter-extremism approach, cities like Stoke fall through the gap,” the Khan review added.
Stoke was one of the areas which saw riots this summer, with participants — including some who had previously attended Nazi events — targeting mosques and Muslim men, according to monitoring by HOPE not hate.
London has also seen cuts to its anti-extremism work, with the Guardian reporting earlier this year that the city’s Prevent funding is set to be slashed to around £2 million from 2025, compared to £4.5m last year. The Home Office said now targets funding directly “to local authorities of highest threat.”
Dr Jessica White, acting director of terrorism and conflict studies at the RUSI defense and security think, said far right activity had fueled the July riots. “Obviously not everyone who went out and participated in [the U.K.’s] riots was a violent extremist, but if they have a lowered resilience to the ideas that might form the basis of those violent extremist ideologies, it’s much easier for them to get swept up by far-right motivators,” she said.
“I think that’s where, perhaps over the last couple of years, there has been less willingness to be to look at that sort of dynamic.” 
The last government was repeatedly warned about the lingering threat from the far right, with one report from parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) in 2022 laying out a litany of problems in the system.
The committee said a 2020 decision to transfer responsibility for extreme right-wing terrorism from counter-terrorism policing to MI5 had happened “without commensurate resources” meaning the security services could look at the far right only “at the expense” of other work. 
“This situation is untenable,” the committee said, adding: “MI5 must be given additional funding to enable it to conduct these cases without other areas of work suffering as a consequence.” 
The committee added that MI5 was not taking steps to involve its Behavioral Science Unit in its case work, despite this being “vital” to informing the threat from the extreme far right. 
The ISC also found that the armed forces did not as a rule prohibit service personnel from joining extremist organizations, an omission it described as “somewhat risky.”
Though joining proscribed terrorist groups is banned, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has not since brought in a ban for membership of extremist groups.
Tobias Ellwood, an-ex defense minister and former soldier, told POLITICO there was “absolutely limited effort” to raise questions over far-right leanings in the army “until it’s too late, until somebody is seen marching with a banner and they’re called out in front of their commanding officer.”
At least one former soldier was among those jailed for his part in the recent riots.
A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said leaders in the army are “vigilant” and that “procedures are in place to report and rehabilitate those who are at risk of being drawn into extremism.”
Alex Carlile, a former Liberal Democrat MP who led a review of U.K. terrorism legislation, said the previous view of the far-right was that supporters were “not terrorists, they’re just idiotic political activists who really don’t have much power to cause disruption — but that has changed.” 
“I suspect that what has happened is that they may have been very slightly behind the curve, but everybody has been taken by surprise by the riots,” he added.
Carlile, who in 2019 began a review of Prevent — the U.K.’s flagship reporting system for potential terrorists — before being replaced, defended its later finding that U.K.’s counter-extremism approach placed too much emphasis on the far-right.
“There was very little evidence at that time to indicate that there would be an upsurge of right-wing extremism that could be regarded as terrorism,” he told POLITICO. 
However, this view was not shared by everyone working in counter-extremism at the time. 
The second official who works in counter-extremism monitoring, who was quoted above, said: “The Prevent review that made clear that Islamic terror was the focus — a lot of people on the inside felt that was the wrong conclusion.” 
A third official, who also contributed to the ISC report, said: “On the one hand, you’ve got a situation where you’ve had people like Mark Rowley and Neil Basu [former counter-terrorism chiefs of the Metropolitan Police] warning about the extreme right being the fastest growing threat, and that completely runs against the independent review which suggests the need to recalibrate and prioritize Islamist extremism, and that the extreme right isn’t a threat.”
Last year, Suella Braverman, at the time serving as home secretary, suggested that the U.K. had shied away from tackling Islamist extremism due to “political correctness.”
James Cleverly, the current shadow home secretary who succeeded Braverman and led the Home Office until the general election in July, told POLITICO the review found “serious deficiencies” with Prevent, with Islamist extremism comprising around 80 per cent of live counter-terror police investigations, but only 20 per cent of referrals to the scheme. 
“Training materials covering the extreme right were found to include references to mainstream politicians and broadsheet newspaper columnists,” he said. But Cleverly, now running to lead the Conservative Party, did not respond to suggestions that Prevent’s change in focus was a political choice.
The third official quoted above said, however, that ministers who accused Prevent of over-reacting to the threat from the far-right by singling out “so-called respectful Conservative commentators like Douglas Murray” were potentially guilty of over-correcting.
“There was some quite cynical mobilizing around this where [the government] cherry-picked certain pieces of guidance,” they added.
“It was quite clear to any of us who saw that it was a politically directed strategy.” Braverman did not respond to request for comment, while Cleverly did not address the official’s specific allegations.
During a visit to Germany this week, Britain’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that the U.K. needs to deal with the “the snake oil of populism and nationalism” seen during the riots.
A Downing Street official said the prime minister wants to avoid repeating the errors made by the country’s center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Germany has seen support plummet for green policies, which are also a key pillar of Starmer’s agenda, while the far right soared in the polls.
Starmer said that “delivery is the only way forward” in dealing with the root causes of the U.K.’s unrest and “disaffection in politics.”
Earlier this month, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, announced that the new Labour government would review its counter-extremism strategy in response to the riots.
She said the fast-track review, expected to conclude by October, was necessary given it had been almost a decade since it the government’s countering extremism strategy was introduced, and that an assessment of new and emerging threats was overdue.
It is set to look at both Islamist and far-right extremism, as well as extreme misogyny.
Cooper, said: “Action against extremism has been badly hollowed out in recent years, just when it should have been needed most.”
The Home Office was contacted for comment but did not respond to suggestions that the government had taken its eye off the far right.