When Mark Rowley, the retiring head of counterterrorism policing, said earlier this week that the threat of far-right terrorism was growing, he was correct. As the annual State of Hate report reveals, in the past 12 months at least 28 far-right activists and sympathisers have been arrested and/or convicted of carrying out, or attempting to carry out, acts of terror.

While Assistant Commissioner Rowley is right in describing the sustained threat of far-right terrorism as “new”, it is a phenomenon that should, frankly, have been picked up earlier by the authorities. This rising threat is the consequence of the increasingly confrontational tone of far-right rhetoric; the almost universal extreme-right belief that a civil war between Islam and the West is coming; the collapse of the