JAMES GLENDAY, EUROPE CORRESPONDENT: I'm in North London on my way to a bland office block to meet a man whose life has been defined by white supremism.

Kevin Wilshaw spent 40 years working with far-right groups but now claims he's put it all behind him.

KEVIN WILSHAW, FORMER NEO-NAZI: I got involved in right-wing extremism, neo-Nazism at the age of about 14 or 15.

JAMES GLENDAY: You were involved in varying degrees. What are the sort of things you did as a neo-Nazi?

KEVIN WILSHAW: Meetings, travelling up and down the country going on marches and demonstrations and occasionally get involved in political violence with political opponents.

JAMES GLENDAY: Most of the groups he spent time with could be violent and fearsome.

But they could also be pretty farcical. The movement is small and dominated by infighting.

PROTESTER: Outrageous political discrimination...

JAMES GLENDAY: Earlier this year, Kevin Wilshaw was still speaking at public events, but after being arrested over online comments, and being abused by colleagues, he decided to quit.

For decades he had hidden two big secrets.

How did you carry out all this and believe all these things when you knew that you were gay and you also knew that your mother was Jewish?

KEVIN WILSHAW: Well, I tended to compartmentalise things. I put my political life in one section, my normal life in the other but with regards my Jewish ancestry, my mother wasn't Jewish but we have a line of descent.

JAMES GLENDAY: You have Jewish blood though.

KEVIN WILSHAW: Yes.

JAMES GLENDAY: That is the unacceptable for most Nazis.

KEVIN WILSHAW: Yes, yes, definitely. Yes, I'm proud of it as well as it is unusual to have that lineage.

JAMES GLENDAY: After deciding to leave, he reached out to a man who was once also a Mein Kampf-reading racist.

Matthew Collins, who fled to Australia for his own safety in 1993 after rejecting Nazi ideology, now works for anti-fascist campaign group Hope Not Hate.

MATTHEW COLLINS, HOPE NOT HATE: People find it very hard to believe but the extreme far-right in this country is sort of, I would have said last year it was as low as it had been for 20 years previously and those who remain, you know, what underpins all of these groups, their politics, their policies, the ideology is violence, is that they can achieve their aims through violence and they are now recruiting people who only ever know them and have only ever known them on the basis of their ability to commit acts of violence.

So they are recruiting people not for electoral gain but for violent conflict.

JAMES GLENDAY: The murder of Labour MP Jo Cox just days before the Brexit referendum put the spotlight on the UK far-right and since then, two members of banned extremist group, National Action, have been charged over a plot to kill another politician.

Right-wing extremism only makes up about 10 per cent of cases dealt with by the UK Government's main deradicalisation program, but many claim the movement is becoming more desperate as it declines.

Do you worry that there is going to be more people murdered ...

MATTHEW COLLINS: Yes.

JAMES GLENDAY: ... more people attacked or assassinated?

MATTHEW COLLINS: We are very concerned by the number of arrests and the nature of the arrests and also the associations that the people arrested have, we are very concerned.

We warned about it, the growing criminality of these groups. We are not dealing with people who are concerned about immigration, but what we are looking at are groups and organisations that look like terrorists, talk like terrorists, dress like terrorists and act like terrorists and our belief has been for the last 18 months to two years, is that they will eventually become terrorists and our belief is that we are now seeing that play out.

JAMES GLENDAY: After wasting a large part of his life spreading hatred, Kevin Wilshaw says he now wants to apologise to everyone he targeted.

KEVIN WILSHAW: A lot of people, a lot of Israeli citizens won't see that as adequate, but that's all I can offer. They will have to trust me.

JAMES GLENDAY: Do you worry about your safety now?

KEVIN WILSHAW: Yes.

JAMES GLENDAY: Because you haven't just annoyed your own far-right groups, you have annoyed them right across the spectrum?

KEVIN WILSHAW: I have annoyed everybody. Yeah, I've had threats from people on the far-left who think I'm insincere but especially people on the far-right who think I'm a traitor, so I can't win.

JAMES GLENDAY: He claims he wants to try to make amends by encouraging others to quit the movement and damaging the racists he called friends for so long.