The tendency for jihadis and the far-right to reinforce each other’s narratives, sometimes referred to as “reciprocal radicalization,” was identified as early as 2006 in a paper by Roger Eatwell, who called the process “cumulative extremism,” noting how “different forms of extremism are constructed in discourse by other extremists.” In Luton’s case, al-Muhajiroun helped construct the EDL, who helped strengthen al-Muhajiroun, who then helped to radicalize the EDL further until its members resorted to violence.

It should be noted, however, that the provocations by al-Muhajiroun always produced far greater reactions than those of the EDL and Britain First. In the 24 hours following the murder of Lee Rigby by jihadis, the EDL tripled its number of Facebook followers. And shortly after the 2017 London Bridge attacks, police registered a 500% rise in hate crimes against Muslims. Provocations by the far-right were not nearly as effective at driving people to Islamism.

One reason al-Muhajiroun was better at provocation than far-right groups was that it was willing to go much further to provoke, often committing actual terrorism in the attempt. The EDL and Britain First, meanwhile, were relatively law-abiding, generally confining their activities to marches and picketing, with only the occasional bout of assault or vandalism.

What this meant was that Islamists radicalized right-wingers more than the other way round. And through this asymmetry, the jihadis intensified the hatred of groups like the EDL and Britain First until they birthed a new opposition that, to the jihadis’ delight, was just as vicious as they were: neo-Nazi accelerationists.

Watching the EDL’s war with Islamists had been a Norwegian man named Anders Breivik. He wrote, “it is highly advisable to structure any street protest organization after the English Defence League (EDL) model.” However, for Breivik the EDL was too soft to match groups like al-Muhajiroun: “The EDL, although having noble intentions are in fact dangerously naïve.” Breivik believed that the counter-jihad movement should draw from the tactics of their most ruthless enemy – al-Qaeda – as well as from neo-Nazism. And so, in July 2011, he detonated a van-bomb, killing eight people, before shooting another 69 dead.

In the UK, a young man named Benjamin Raymond called Breivik “the hero Norway deserves”. Together with disenchanted EDL member Ashley Bell, Raymond set to work on the manifesto of a new group, National Action, which, unlike the EDL and Britain First, would embrace violence, oppose democracy, equality, and multiracialism, and employ a new strategy – accelerationism – the attempt to achieve revolution by hastening the decay of the liberal order.

The group was quick to show how serious it was; in 2015 National Action member Zack Davies attacked a Sikh man in a grocery store with a machete to “avenge” the killing of Lee Rigby. When the pro-immigration politician Jo Cox was murdered by ultranationalist Thomas Mair, the official National Action Twitter account celebrated the killing, stating: “Don’t let this man’s sacrifice go in vain,” and “Only 649 MPs to go #WhiteJihad.”

After National Action was found to be behind a slew of terrorist plots, the UK government proscribed the group, making it the first white supremacist organization to be banned in the UK since the Second World War. But, as with al-Muhajiroun’s ban, this didn’t end its activities and simply led it to operate under different names. To make matters worse, by 2016 National Action’s ideology of neo-Nazi accelerationism had already caught on across the world, spawning dozens of new terror groups, the most notorious being the US-based Atomwaffen Division.