Christchurch has turned everyone’s attention to the phenomenon of extreme rightwing terrorism. But it is an alarm bell that authorities in the UK have been ringing for some time, having seen an ascendant extreme-right threat. Our collective attention, when thinking about terrorism, may be dominated by Isis, but given the rich vein of references to the UK in Brenton Tarrant’s screed, there are clearly other concerns to which we should pay attention.
Around the turn of the century and during the early noughties, the extreme-right threat in the UK tended to consist of a ragbag of isolated loners. For the most part middle-aged white men, they tended to be discovered by chance – violent characters with spotty employment histories, a few of them picked up as a result of investigations into online paedophilia. Some particularly shambolic cases, such as that of Neil Lewington, were uncovered by accident. Lewington was arrested by British Transport police after urinating on a train platform in 2008. Subsequent investigations uncovered an aspirant one-man terror campaign, planning pipe-bomb attacks and gathering Nazi memorabilia.
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