By James Bethell, Director of NothingBritish.com
British police are maintaining close surveillance of white supremacists espousing a violent ideology of race hate after the recent arrests of “white bombers”. That is the finding of an important new report – Britain’s Far Right Militants – published by Nothing British and the Centre for Social Cohesion, and covered in yesterday's News of the World.
The news is a scary reminder that there remain in dark corners of British society groups like Blood & Honour and Combat 18 that are militantly opposed to the principles of tolerance and fairness that we now take for granted.
No one argues that we are on the brink of an armed uprising. And the police are rightly adamant that the threat from better-organised, externally-financed, hi-tech Islamist terrorist is a far greater priority. But they are fully aware that circumstances might arise that make racial unrest a serious threat to the social fabric, for instance during a period of financial or social instability of the kind seen in the 1970s. These groups, hardly a threat to public order in today’s world, could become at a moment of national crisis the catalyst for the sort of clashes that saw inner cities burning in Britain’s race riots thirty-five years ago. Responding to this threat forms a part of the Police’s scenario planning.
Behind the writing of the report is a distasteful journey into the world of race hate, taken by the authors Edmund Standing and Alexander Meleagrou Hitchens. What they found in the lyrics of cult punk bands, the field manuals of secret societies and the ideology espoused on far-Right bulletin boards was disturbing enough for Dame Pauline Neville-Jones to call for these groups to be legally proscribed.
At present, there are no organised terrorist structures, say police, just the arrest of a few highly-publicised but mostly low-tech “lone wolves”. But the intellectual inspiration, emotional arousal and terrorist know-how necessary for such an uprising are all well-rehearsed, circulated amongst a tight group of fanatics who meet at invitation-only music events and exchange racist propaganda on password-protected web-forums, ready for a crisis in the social climate.
Analysts rightly characterise the race hate scene as introspective, riven with internecine in-fighting and preoccupied with profitable criminal endeavours. The BNP claim the media dream-up B&H/C18 stories to smear their law-abiding election campaigns by association. Some say the consumption of B&H and/or C18 materials by convicted lone-wolves like Nathan Worrell, Martyn Gilleard and Neil Lewington simply demonstrates their warped minds, that the music, propaganda and manuals do not create conveyor belt to violence for vulnerable types (the courts attributed Lewington’s radicalisation in part to the influence of B&H materials).
These sceptics all have, to greater or lesser extent, a point. However, Police remember that in 2001 security services tracked young Islamist radicals at outward bound camps that seemed harmless at the time. Four years later, some of those men had become terrorists who sought to kill innocent civilians on July 7 and 21, 2005. They do not want to make the same mistake again.
For my part, I hope the report is a wake-up call for anyone who underestimates the threat to our British way of life from racists and extremists at a time we might face enormous social pressures. The values of tolerance and fairness that make Britain a great country require vigilant protection against extremists who are determined to turn national set-backs into civil unrest and worst. We forget this at our peril.
