On a cold winter evening in a cottage in Lancashire, the extremist stared intensely into my eyes. “At the end of the day, it’s about survival,” he said. “We are fighting for our very survival. We are being ethnically cleansed by force of numbers.” I was interviewing “Steve”, not his real name, one of Britain’s most committed far-right activists. It was part of the research for my PhD, exploring who joins the murky world of the far right and, crucially, why. Like most of my interviewees, Steve was consumed by the idea of “white genocide” — his fervent belief that whites will soon be wiped out as a result of mass immigration and higher birth rates among non-whites.

“People go on about saving the whale,