Show caption Thomas Mair, who murdered Jo Cox MP in 2016, was not known as a far-right sympathiser. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images Opinion The collapse of the BNP and EDL has made the far right deadlier Matthew Collins The Metropolitan police is right to warn of the dangers posed by far-right terrorists



• Matthew Collins is head of research for Hope not Hate Fri 2 Mar 2018 06.00 GMT Share on Facebook

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Last August Hope not Hate revealed that the proscribed neo-Nazi organisation National Action (banned by the home secretary in December 2016) was not only still recruiting, but was operating from and training in a converted warehouse in Warrington, Cheshire.

Our decision to publish this information and other facts therein was not taken lightly. Publishing it was as much a risk to our researchers as it was an act of justifiable self-preservation. The ins and outs and the necessities of such an act will become all the more apparent later this year.

National Action remains a very grave concern. But it is not the sole terror threat to emanate from the far right in this country. The three most notable and recent cases of far-right-inspired terrorism appear to have come from people who had no known, overly obvious or hardened link to Nazi organisations.

Thomas Mair, who murdered the MP Jo Cox in 2016, had been an infrequent correspondent with obscure Nazi groups in both the UK and the USA. He was not known or regarded as a far-right sympathiser or as someone who harboured murderous desires against his local MP. For his daily update of hate, he simply went to his local library and used the internet there.

Darren Osborne, the man who drove into a group of worshippers outside a mosque in Finsbury Park, north London, in June last year, killing father-of-six Makram Ali, had always been an unpleasant individual, often in trouble with the law. His decision to attempt to kill random Muslims was apparently fomented over drink and three long weeks trawling the internet, visiting sites frequented by the likes of English Defence League (EDL) founder Stephen Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) and anti-Muslim organisation Britain First, paying heed to the dire outpourings of hate-mongers who appeared to double up as cause celebres of interest to the gutter press.

The most recent case of far-right terror involved a young man called Ethan Stables, from Barrow in Furness, who was planning to commit a massacre at a gay bar in June last year, but was arrested after a young woman rang 999 (not for the first time) to report his disturbing rantings. We know that he had tried (and failed) to join National Action, but its members felt he lived too far away from the centre of their cells and activists.

So why is this threat suddenly so imminent, so more profound than ever before? In his retirement speech earlier this week, Mark Rowley, an assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan police who was the UK’s most senior counter-terror police officer, specifically noted that the public should be “gravely concerned” about banned neo-Nazi terror group National Action. He also compared the actions of “Tommy Robinson” to that of hate preacher Anjem Choudary.

Since 2011, Hope not Hate has published an annual State of Hate report. Since at least 2015 we have seen that the demise of the electoral far right in the UK has been giving way to something far more sinister, which is evolving from the embers of the two better-known far-right groups operating in the UK, the electorally dead and insignificant British National party (BNP) and the moribund EDL (which this week has been shaken by a paedophile scandal involving one of its leading members). Although both spawned cheaper imitations upon their demise, they also spawned a million angry voices on social media.

One of the groups the BNP and EDL morphed into was National Action. It took a different trajectory entirely – so much so that it and the other groups on the British far right are almost violently opposed to each other.

There’s no knowing or guessing from where the next far-right terror attack will come. It could come from a peripheral member of any number of groups that are active in the UK. It could come from another Darren Osborne. We do not even know which particular or pre-eminent ideology it is that will inspire or encourage it. Will it be anti-Muslim; antisemitic; or against “snowflakes”? Or will it be killing for the sake of hate killing? You could hazard a guess by just looking at the outpourings of hate and extremism offered up every day on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – there is plenty to choose from.

Nor can we judge when or what the next “tipping point” will be. A look at the thousands of angry white men on British social media gives a fair indication that the temperature of fear, hatred and misunderstanding driven by social media and far-right fake news and unchecked paranoia is palpable and increasing.

And then, of course, there are the very real issues these same people believe, for whatever reason, are not being addressed (or certainly not to their satisfaction).

National Action is indeed, as Rowley points out, a grave concern. It is potentially a very sophisticated and ongoing grave concern.

But it could be the organised symptom of a thoroughly malevolent tumour of racism and violence, growing and emanating from the cancer that is the British far right, which has retreated from the streets and ballot box into cyber space.