Nick Lowles
When we think about people holding extremely hateful views it is easy to focus on the outcome. A young person reading or watching extremist material, joining a group or an online community, getting involved in violence or – in a very few cases – terrorist activity. This is only natural, as it’s this behaviour which brings the young person to our attention. We often overlook how these people got there in the first place.
Having been involved in antifascism now for 35 years and having directly interacted with almost 200 far right extremists in one capacity or another during this time, I’ve seen many similarities and patterns emerge as to why people take their first steps to getting involved. Addressing these issues should be central to any anti-extremism or anti-violence strategy.
James’ story
Let’s take the example of James Crow, a young man now in his mid-20s, who for several years was active in the far right group Britain First. James is quietly spoken and clearly sensitive. It seems hard to imagine him active in a group surrounded by aggressive racism, but when you hear his story it is easy to understand.
James has cerebral palsy and, largely as a consequence of this, was badly bullied at school. Day in, day out, for several years, he was picked on by a gang at school. He reported what was going on to teachers but nothing changed.
He became more and more isolated, playing hours of video games alone, until he eventually built a replica of his secondary school on the popular computer game Minecraft, using it to plan a knife attack on his bullies and on the teachers he felt had ignored him.
He went to school one day with the intention of carrying out his planned attack, but fortunately he was too scared to go through with it. He took the kitchen knife back home and quietly put it back in the drawer. However, the bullying and his unhappiness continued.
At about the time he was leaving school, James became friends with someone who displayed clearly racist views. James began to copy the behaviour of his new-found friend.
Within a short space of time, James ended up contacting Britain First, a far-right group which was attracting headlines with its aggressive strategy of members filming themselves entering Mosques and walking through areas with large Muslim communities in order to intimidate.
For the next three years, James was a Britain First activist. He travelled around the country attending meetings and leafleting sessions. After the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, in 2016, at the hands of a far-right sympathiser who shouted ‘Britain First’ as he launched his attack, he was tasked by the group with finding out the surgery details of another female Labour MP in Sheffield who had called for Britain First to be banned.
Fortunately, his time in Britain First came to an end before he got himself into serious trouble. The trigger for his decision to leave came when he travelled to Calais, in France, and saw first-hand the appalling conditions many migrants were experiencing and listening to their stories about the life they had left behind to risk their lives trying to cross the English Channel.
Suddenly James’ hate was replaced by empathy. He turned his back on Britain First and approached antifascists with his story.
It is terrifying to think that James was planning to kill some of the students who had made his life a misery and the teachers who had – in his mind – failed to intervene. And while what he was contemplating doing was extreme, his story was all too familiar.
Time and again far right activists have told me about incidents in their childhood that helped put them on the path to extremism. I’ve heard repeated stories of the bullied becoming the bully. As we have graphically seen with James, the far right offer a chance to reverse his own situation, to finally feel superior to others, to feel better than others, to assert power over – and fear in – others.
Robbie’s story
Social isolation is another key driver to extremism.
In the summer of 2017, Robbie Mullen’s life turned upside down when he reported to HOPE not hate that one of his friends was planning to kill Labour MP Rosie Cooper.
Robbie was a key activist in the Nazi group National Action, which had been proscribed as a terrorist group by the Home Secretary a few months before. It was the first far-right group banned by the Government since the Second World War.
Of course, the group never really disbanded. Every week Mullen and his fellow National Action members would meet up at a unit on an industrial estate, which they had turned into a gym, to plot and plan. The ban had driven them underground and, if anything, made them more dangerous. They communicated on secure and encrypted messaging platforms, used codes and devised plans for the day they would strike back.
For the then 22-year-old from Runcorn, who had left school at 14 shortly after the death of his father, National Action quickly became a family to him. In truth, a family that he was missing. He first met with the group only two days after initially reaching out. He would go on to meet with the group once or twice a week for the next two and a half years. Quickly, National Action became his life.
Being involved in National Action was exciting and gave him a sense of belonging that he was longing for. They were a group on a mission. They marched in formation, all dressed in black. They stood in shopping centres and told bemused passers-by that the day of reckoning – when Jews and black people would be expelled from the country – was close.
They revelled in the lurid stories written about them.
The banning of National Action changed things for Robbie. As the talk turned to violence and terrorism, he became scared. Fearing his future was jail or death, he reached out to HOPE not hate as a way to get out.
It was a few weeks later that he reported that Jack Renshaw, a former BNP youth activist who had emerged as a significant figure within National Action, was planning to kill his local MP with a large knife he had bought at a market in Oldham. Renshaw’s plan was to take his MP hostage and demand that a female police officer who had led the investigation into him for a racist speech he gave 15 months before, present herself to him. He then intended to kill them both, before – he hoped – being killed himself by police.
Robbie instantly knew that he had to tell us about Renshaw’s plan, not least because it was only days away from happening. He also knew that his life was never going to be same again. Renshaw was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to attempting to murder the MP and the police officer.
What Robbie did not know at the time he passed on details of the plot was that Renshaw was facing additional charges of grooming minors. It appears that the fear of going to prison for this, and being known throughout the movement as a sex offender, propelled Renshaw to kill his local MP and the police officer who had arrested him for the grooming, and then himself be killed by the police.
Drivers of violence
While Robbie’s story is exceptional in many ways, the sense of social isolation and boredom that drove him into the far right in the first place is, sadly, all too common.
Likewise, while Jack Renshaw’s murder plot was highly extreme and unusual, there are several features about his story which we have found increasingly commonplace in recent years. His hatred of MPs – women MPs especially – is commonplace amongst the violent far right. National Action revelled in the murder of Jo Cox and Renshaw himself commented immediately after the attack that others should be killed too.
Violent misogyny has also emerged as a common feature within far right propaganda over the last few years, especially amongst young people. Thirty years ago the far right viewed women as being homemakers and rearing children. Today, they are often despised and the target of sexual violence. The threat of rape has increasingly been used as a political weapon in extreme far right propaganda.
Accompanying violent misogyny has been possession and even promotion of child pornography. Over the last 20 years, 29 teenagers have been convicted of terror-related offences. 25 of whom have been convicted in the last three years. Several of these people were also found caught in possession of images or even videos of children and extreme sexual violence.
There was Harry Vaughan, convicted of 14 terror offences in 2020, who admitted further crimes including possession of indecent images of children including videos of young boys being raped. Despite the severity of his offences, Vaughan was only given a suspended prison sentence, with the judge telling the elite schoolboy that the shame of being arrested and the trial was punishment enough. Clearly this did not work, because in June 2023 Vaughan was convicted again of making an indecent photograph of a child.
There was also the case of Jack Reed from Durham, who was convicted of plotting a terrorist attack and unrelated child sexual offences. He told police that he raped a young girl in an attempt to desensitise himself before embarking on a terror campaign. Reed was just 13 at the time of his arrest.
The common thread linking Reed, Vaughan and a number of others convicted of terrorist offences and found in possession of sexual images of children in recent years was involvement in Nazi Satanism, principally the Order of Nine Angles (O9A).
One of the leaders of the O9A in the UK was Ryan Fleming, who was also active in the Nazi group National Action. He is also a convicted paedophile.
One of the most popular channels O9A once had on the social media platform Telegram was called “RapeWaffen”. The conversation in this channel glorified sexual violence and encouraged using it as a political weapon. Young O9A supporters in the UK were also consciously sent child sexual abuse images by the group’s leader in the US as a way to prove that they were outside the norms of society.
While the O9A are at the very extreme end of the Nazi movement, their propaganda has been widely circulated amongst young far-right activists over the past ten years.
Prevention
A growing number of young people have been drawn into extreme far-right violence in recent years, and while the focus of the authorities is understandably of stopping acts of terrorism and extreme violence, more must be done to divert young people from getting to this stage in the first place.
The school environment is the best place for interacting with vulnerable young people yet, but as our research and polling graphically shows, teachers are over-stretched and schools are under-resourced. Likewise, Prevent, the Government anti-extremism programmes designed to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism, deals with the most extreme end of youth radicalisation. Channel, which is a confidential programme that is designed to address radicalisation, only deals with 500-600 referrals a year, is inadequate to both deal with the scale of the threat and also does not intervene early enough in the process.
As we have seen with James Crow and Robbie Mullen, bullying, social isolation and misogyny can act as slip roads into hateful extremism. Early intervention, be it to support James as he was being bullied or help Robbie come to terms with the death of his father, could have diverted them away from being radicalised in the first place.
With mental health issues impacting young people more than ever before, a new intervention strategy – that sits between traditional school engagement and Prevent, is needed to stop more young people drifting into violent extremism.
Plugged In but Disconnected looks at young people and the attitudes they hold. We find some shocking evidence of hateful attitudes, particularly amongst young men. Download the report today.
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