The Current State of Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism

Threat Analyst – Lucy Hagger 

On the fifth of June, 2022, a fifteen year old steals his dad’s car and heads towards a mosque in Keighley, West Yorkshire. He plans to conduct hostile reconnaissance and adds the details to a written plan for a terror attack.

Joe Metcalfe, who lived with his parents in Haworth, Bradford, had previously been referred to the UK’s PREVENT programme after his school had raised concerns about his behaviour. From the confines of his bedroom, Joe had been consuming and sharing Extreme Right-Wing material online, idolising infamous terrorists such as Brenton Tarrant, reading white supremacist material, and exposing himself to racist, homophobic and antisemitic belief systems.

Whilst online, Joe contacted a gun seller outside of the UK, planning to use the weapon in an attack motivated by an Extreme Right-Wing ideology and a hatred for Muslims. Joe believed that Muslims were a threat to white Europeans and that violence was justified in countering this threat.

A few months short of Joe’s 16th birthday, he was arrested after crashing his dad’s car on the way back from the Keighly Muhammadi Mosque. Once the car was found by police, Joe told an officer that he wanted to kill Muslims. In November 2023, Joe was sentenced to 10 years in prison for plotting a terrorist attack. On the day of his sentencing, Joe “remained…stuck in a racist and extremist mindset”; a mindset bred from the confines of his bedroom. 

Hello and welcome to Totally Terrorism, a Pool Re Podcast. My name is Lucy Hagger, a Threat Analyst at Pool Re. Today, we’re exploring a new report published by the Threat Analysis team at Pool Re on the current state of Extreme Right-Wing terrorism in the UK. 

I’ll be speaking to Ollie Hair, a Threat Analyst in the team, about the key findings of the report, as well as future areas of research that his report uncovered. 

Hi, Ollie. To begin with, I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about the purpose of this report, and perhaps why you chose to write it?

Threat Analyst – Oliver Hair

Yeah. Thanks, Lucy. So as you'll know, one of the main objectives we have within the threat team here at Pool Re is to provide our members with a credible understanding of the terrorism threat. And while researching and writing reports in previous months, we began to notice a higher number of individuals, and particularly younger people, being arrested, convicted and sentenced for terrorism offences related to Extreme Right-Wing ideology. We'd obviously known that Extreme Right-Wing ideology was a significant terrorism threat, but thought an updated deep dive into the current state of Extreme Right-Wing terrorism would be helpful. 

Then on the 29th of July, we had the awful incident in Southport where an individual conducted a mass stabbing against children at a dance studio, and, as I'm sure our listeners will remember, the misinformation that spread in the wake of that attack and the riots that followed just made the paper seem even more important. Much of the media's focus at the time was on the supposed attendance of Extreme Right-Wing individuals, or at least individuals with Extreme Right-Wing beliefs and tendencies, at those riots. So the report made a lot of sense to write at that time. It was in the news. It was being spoken about daily and we wanted, or thought it was important, to share our own assessments and research on what Extreme Right-Wing terrorism is, what it isn't, and the threat it poses.

Threat Analyst – Lucy Hagger

That's great. Thank you, Ollie. So to begin with, it would be great if you could outline for our listeners exactly what Extreme Right-Wing terrorism is, and perhaps what is meant by that term and how you found defining it for this report.

Threat Analyst – Oliver Hair 

Yeah, it's a great question and something we really wanted to make sure we got right within the report and something we thought was incredibly important to get right. One of the key issues that the paper sought to outline was the difference between Extreme Right-Wing terrorism on the one hand, and the violent disorder we were seeing on the streets of the UK on the other. At that time, much of what was being seen on the street, many were suggesting could have been considered terrorism. So throughout the report we intentionally used the term Extreme Right-Wing terrorism and this followed a 2021 review by the intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament that examined whether the term “Right-Wing terrorism” was the correct term to use. This all came about as a result of concerns that by just saying “Right-Wing” we were maybe, or the public in general, were risking stigmatising mainstream right wing political views. The term Extreme Right-Wing terrorism helped us delineate between violent terrorist actors and nonviolent individuals who adhere to extreme, or let's say far right, beliefs systems. 

To make that a bit clearer, the riots were a really good case in point, and very coincidentally so. So our report found that whilst it's highly likely that some of those taking part in the riots across the UK may have shared certain tenets of Extreme Right-Wing ideology, their actions did not meet the threshold for terrorism. It's highly unlikely that your average rioter was as ideologically radicalised, for example, as the Christchurch attacker in New Zealand, and that rather, these individuals likely had some form of personal grievance and perhaps turned up with a legitimate concern to riot alongside their community spontaneously; not to conduct a planned act of terrorism. I think it comes down to, kind of the crux of the matter being, that for us, you can't do terrorism by accident. It requires planning and also an extremely high level of radicalization, and making a clear distinction between radicalised terrorists and right-leaning members of the general population was, and remains I think, extremely important.

Threat Analyst – Lucy Hagger

That's great. Thank you for that, Ollie. Definitions are really important to get right in this context, so thank you very much for that clear explanation. Your report mentions the online nature of Extreme Right-Wing terrorism. So if you could, could you expand on this a bit and perhaps give an example of how the online Extreme Right-Wing world kind of works?

Threat Analyst – Oliver Hair 

Yeah, absolutely. So to take an example, listeners likely remember the Extreme Right-Wing terrorist group, National Action. For those that don't, National Action was a neo-Nazi group established in 2013. It was thought to have had at least 100 members in the UK at its peak, and this was a group that met up in person, rallied openly and publicly throughout the UK, and had somewhat of a chain of command; so a pretty organised, in person, and very dangerous group. Most notably, in 2017, a member of National Action, Jack Renshaw, was sentenced to life imprisonment for plotting to murder MP Rosie Cooper with a machete. So we're talking a very yeah, organised, in person, well known at the time, and dangerous group. 

National action was then proscribed in 2016 and many of its members were sent to prison or went underground, shall we say. And as that counterterrorism pressure increased on such groups, we've seen the Extreme Right-Wing terrorism space move away from those structured, in person groups, to a more disparate and online threat. I think it's probably fair to say that the majority of communication and networking between individuals adhering to an Extreme Right-Wing ideology now; that all currently takes place majority times online. That may be in order to conceal the true identity of users, and we explored the use of platforms like Telegram in the report a bit more deeply. I think it's also important to mention that this isn't just a UK thing, not at all. The Extreme Right-Wing online environment and community can be defined as completely transnational. Now, perhaps more than ever, individuals are using these online spaces to connect and facilitate information sharing across borders and in the worst case, the online space has actually facilitated the inspiration of attacks across the globe. So an example we picked up in the report was, in January 2023, Daniel Harris, a 19 year old from the UK, was sentenced to 11 and a half years in prison for encouraging terrorism after posting a number of incredibly racist and extreme videos online. Those same videos were later viewed and shared by Payton Gendron, the perpetrator of the 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooting in New York State, which led to the death of 10 people, and it's believed that Harris's content also inspired other attacks in the US, too. 

So, from that example alone, I think you can see the online nature of Extreme Right-Wing terrorism, how those ideologies and belief systems have increasingly spanned borders and become, as I said, transnational, and perhaps some of the reasons as to why this ideology is finding hold with a younger generation online.

Threat Analyst – Lucy Hagger

That's perfect. Thank you, Ollie. As a final question, I was wondering, could you tell us what you found most interesting or perhaps the most surprising when researching this report?

Threat Analyst – Oliver Hair 

Yeah, thanks very much. So I think just coming back to the last point, that uptick in younger Extreme Right-Wing offenders was really, really interesting, if not very, very shocking. So counterterrorism policing, as you'll know in the UK, have routinely mentioned the increase in young terrorism offenders. But it's certainly a trend that seems particularly prevalent in the Extreme Right-Wing space, I would say, and this is probably largely driven by the increased time spent online by young adults here in the UK, and we looked into this a bit more. So in terms of stats, in the year ending March 2023, those aged 14 years and under accounted for the largest proportion of PREVENT referrals for Extreme Right-Wing terrorism, which is crazy. And more recently, the Director General of MI5, Ken McCallum, revealed that 13% of all those being investigated by MI5 for involvement in UK terrorism are now under 18. 

Now there obviously remains a question as to the intent of these offenders, and I think that's really important. So, whether they have the intent or capability to conduct real world violence is a completely different question. As far as I'm aware, we haven't seen an attack conducted by an Extreme Right-Wing youngster or anyone under the age of 18, and there isn't really any open source evidence to suggest why this is. Perhaps they're less capable operationally, perhaps less determined, more easily dissuaded. That's not yet clear. So the question remains as to the threat younger individuals actually pose in the real world. But it was certainly interesting and incredibly worrying to see that trend of younger people getting wrapped up in this malicious ideology, and it's something we'll certainly need to keep an eye out on going forward.

Threat Analyst – Lucy Hagger 

Thanks very much, Ollie. 

During the writing of this report, our partners at Royal United Services Institute, better known as RUSI, offered their advice and expertise on this complicated issue. We caught up with Dr. Jessica White, Acting Director of Terrorism and Conflict Studies, following the publication of this paper, to get her thoughts. 

Jess, thank you very much for your contribution to the paper. It was fantastic to work alongside RUSI in its production and to lean on your own expertise. Could you give us a quick summary of your own thoughts on the Extreme Right-Wing terrorism threat at this time?

Guest Expert – Dr. Jessica White (RUSI)

Yeah, I think it's a great question and thank you for having me be a part of your process. It is really interesting to see the research that you've been working on. And I think the answer to the question is probably quite complex. I think that the threat of the Extreme Right-Wing is constantly evolving. I think it responds to sort of current political social dynamics that probably present opportunities for it to expand and contract potentially. I think certainly the conversation around the Extreme Right-Wing in the context of the UK has changed quite a bit over the last few years. There's been certainly more attention to it over the last few years and the way in which it is being considered now I think is evolving. 

If you look back sort of to the last couple decades of counterterrorism, I think the framework that was established probably wasn't as well equipped as we hoped to respond to the threat of Extreme Right-Wing, and I think what we see today is quite a nebulous threat in that ideology. It’s quite easy to mix together. It's quite easy to pull from different strands that perhaps don't seem logical to you or I, but make sense to somebody who wants to adopt an extremist attitude. I think there's a lot of influence that comes into, you know, the Extreme Right-Wing that exists in the UK from a transnational conversation that exists around these ideologies. Certainly we've seen in the research that we've done that there is a lot of spread of narrative, of sort of sharing of narratives, or sharing of ideas in a way that allows the ideology to go with the narrative from different contexts, from different locations, from different geographical, I guess, points of concern where there's a very local issue, a very local grievance, there are local grievances that are specific to the UK context, where I mean there's, you know, conversations happening around socioeconomic class and immigration and availability of jobs and and all these challenges. And these are our public conversations. These are, you know, they're completely legitimate, you know, grievances held around some of these challenges that exist in society. And certainly that's not to say that everybody who holds these grievances are far right extremist by any means of the imagination, but when these conversations have become a normalised part of the conversation, of the sort of the social discourse, of the political discourse, that it then becomes easier, I think, for the sort of Extreme Right-Wing ideologies to get a foothold and for people who might be, who might be themselves far-right extremists to then motivate a wider audience to take some action to take, you know, or to participate in some violence because they hold a set of grievances that are easily taken advantage of in a way, or exploited to encourage action in a way, I guess. 

And I think it's, you know, it's difficult to grapple with. It's difficult to really, I think, understand the breadth and the depth of what is the Extreme Right-Wing today because we talk about often some specific ideologies, especially in the Western European, North American context, that are often discussed like white supremacy and even sort of xenophobia and these common ideological parts of what I would call the Extreme Right-Wing. But I think that all of these things fade off of and feed into wider conversations around commonly held, you know, social belief systems that include some level of discrimination. You know, some level of hate based discrimination. And I think that's where we see a lot of the challenge around sizing up the threat that the Extreme Right-Wing presents and really formulating a response, and I certainly, I understand the challenges around sort of, translating what is an immense threat in language and narrative in the online space. You know, we see tonnes of conversation and, sort of passing around, of these ideas and how to translate that then into a solid assessment of what that violence could look like offline is very challenging. 

It's challenging for policing, it's challenging for your industry, it's challenging in many ways to really, I think, assess what will be translated into violence because these ideas are often, you know, commonly held in certain doses. It is a, it is a difficult one to predict I think. But I think, you know, there is an opportunity at this moment in time to really understand where some of these influences have really taken hold, to address the sources of these ideological influences, and to think about what we can do, you know, as a society, as, you know, the policymakers sort of at the political level to think about what we can do to encourage a conversation to address those grievances before they turn into an opportunity for a far right motivator or an Extreme Right-Wing motivator to come in and encourage somebody to commit an act of violence.

Threat Analyst – Lucy Hagger 

Perfect, thank you. A point you raised during your review that we found very interesting was the prevalence of misogyny and hypermasculinity in Extreme Right-Wing ideology. Could you tell us a bit more about how these themes manifest themselves and why you think they're so important?

Guest Expert – Dr. Jessica White (RUSI)

Yeah. So I think it's important to think about misogyny, to think about hypermasculinity, and of course, I'm going to say this because I'm a person who studied the importance of gender in these dynamics. But I think it offers a window almost into the ideology and it offers a window definitely into how people who hold Extreme Right-Wing ideologies communicate with each other. What we've seen in the research that we've done is that misogyny is a commonly spoken language is I think how I would describe it. It doesn't matter, sort of, where a local context might be different, where there might be a different local grievance that's at the forefront of a local context, a local sort of understanding of Extreme Right-Wing terrorism. So, in some cases it might be immigration, in some cases it might be anti-vax sentiments, you know certain political sentiments; whatever it might be that even though they're talking about different threat groups, even though they see the threat as a different thing, that they speak about it in a gendered way. So, they gender that group and, when I say that, I mean that they would talk about the threat of immigration as being a threat to their future generations of children, their, you know, sort of a threat to their women, a threat to the notion of who we are as a race, and that is very gendered in a sense. Whereas if you're talking about anti-vax sentiment, then it becomes the vaccination is a threat to your future. And I think that gendered language, which is very misogynist, becomes a common point of communication. Becomes a way that they can talk to each other without having to talk about the same threat at the same level of belief or same level of passion. But that they can talk to each other in a way that they can understand each other and that then allows that sense of grievance, and whether it's the same ideology or not, that sense of grievance, to pass from one location to another. 

So we've seen in studies that we've done of different transnational, different geographical contexts, expressions of Extreme Right-Wing terrorism, and in the UK where there are really not very many points of similarity between the local grievances, between even the ideological perspectives being held, but that the one point or the one of, you know, a couple points of commonality was this element of misogyny. And that it really, I think, highlights how we can then use as counterterrorism people and practitioners, people who are working in the counterterrorism space, how we could use that to better reinforce our understandings of risk assessment to use it as an identifier; as a marker. When we're thinking about, you know, what risk does this present? To have it help us understand what we might need to think about, where we might need to think about, you know, radicalization concerns coming from; where we might need to think about where an actor might be recruiting people; you know, where they might take action. All of these things are gendered in a way, and all of them are linked back to a very often, a very misogynist ideology. 

And I think another interesting point about misogyny, and probably a couple more interesting points about misogyny are that there's a lot of conversation happening now in the UK with the review of the extremism strategy, the extremism definition, thinking about how to add misogyny to that, and I think there is a tendency to alight upon it as an ideology of its own. And we're talking about involuntary celibate people, incels, sort of people who commit highly gendered attacks or highly, you know, highly gendered acts of terrorism. But I think it's also important to recognise that misogyny is this linking element between different ideologies. Because if you think about it, you know, Extreme Right-Wing, Islamist ideology, many other terrorist ideologies, have a very misogynist approach to gender roles within their groups, within gender roles within participation. So if we can better understand those similarities, we can better understand them as different sides of the similar coin, right? 

And then we can think about how to utilise the tools that we have at hand to better address these different types of ideology. These different challenges that we might meet. So I think it would help us think about how to utilise the counterterrorism apparatus that exists today in a way that can be adaptable to the threats that we see from the Extreme Right-Wing which we know needs to be updated in some ways to better address those threats, but I think we can use misogyny, use a better understanding of misogyny and the gendered nature of these ideologies, the gender role expectations that exist in these groups, the gendered way that they might identify and attack their threats; use that to help us better utilise the tools that we have and I think we can see in many of the cases of violence that have taken place in the context of the UK, where there has been this element of misogyny. It's been present in the cases that have occurred, certainly been present in the, you know, the arrests that have been made for people who are looking at or sharing terrorist content. And in all the manifestos of these Extreme Right-Wing attackers are laced with misogyny and sort of laced with that hypermasculine assessment of their worldview. The threat group that they see, how they want to address that threat group. 

So I think it really would help us to utilise a gendered understanding of this challenge to better sort of understand how we can meet the challenge. And I think that this is a challenge that is across the board with the Extreme Right-Wing. How do we address it? You know, it presents a challenge in the way that it is complex. It is coming from many different places. It's online, it's, you know, in our political conversation. It's all of these places. How do we address something that is so prevalent in society today? And I think that, you know, it's an element of reckoning with this conversation around, I think, coming to terms with the fact that we have to address these wider normalizations of hate based discrimination in society. Sexism is very prevalent in society today. We do not live in a gender equal society, and the allowance of that kind of median layer of discrimination allows, you know, more of the extreme to creep in. So I think addressing that would help us then better prevent attacks happening in the future. And I know that that's probably a very hypothetical answer to a question about what to do about the Extreme Right-Wing, but I think that it's a useful tool in the sense of even when we're talking about very concrete risk assessment, it helps us to understand where, you know, the locations we need to be concerned about; the types of infrastructure we need to be concerned about; where people are being recruited from? You know, how people are gaining access to this content that is extreme and is part of their radicalization process? I think it can help on all of those fronts, which would probably help all of us to better assess and address the threat of the Extreme Right-Wing.

Threat Analyst – Lucy Hagger 

Thanks very much to both Jess and Ollie for sharing their thoughts on this thought provoking report. To access the full report, visit our website at poolre.co.uk. 

Thank you for listening to the latest episode of Totally Terrorism, a Pool Re podcast. We hope that you have found this discussion useful for supporting or building your knowledge and understanding of terrorism threat. We hope that you'll join us next month for another conversation between a new guest expert and one of our Pool Re terrorism threat analysts. 

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