Trends of Radicalisation

UK/D3.2 Country Report July 2021

Abstract

This report identifies the crucial “hotspots” of radicalisation that are central to the history of radicalisation in the UK and are emblematic of its contemporary environment with links to the historical legacies of radicalisation in the country. The report provides an in-depth and multilevel analysis of the most important force of radicalisation in the UK at the moment, which the report identifies as the far-right political organisation and mobilisation in the UK. We chose to focus primarily on right-wing extremism instead of other radicalised movements such as contemporary jihadist extremism due to the existing attention that the latter has from policy-makers, prevention organisation and its over-representation in media. The threat of far-right movements is often overlooked, underestimated and sometimes normalised within the United Kingdom as demonstrated by the country’s history with marginalising various groups, for example through colonisation and the narrative behind the Brexit referendum, which we discussed in the D.Rad 3.1 report (Ozduzen, Ferenczi, Holmes, Rosun et al., 2021). We draw our justification for this focus on far-right hotspots from repeated calls from Britain’s counter-terrorism chief, Neil Basu, and the counter-terrorism police unit that the most underestimated and yet fastest growing terrorism threat to the UK is from the far-right (Dodd & Gierson, 2019).