How the police should deal with far-right terrorism

As New Zealand comes to terms with the most deadly terrorist attack ever carried out on its soil, leaders from around the world will be asking their security advisors whether this marks the start of an escalation of right-wing threats and whether their current strategies for defeating this form of extremism are fit for purpose.

It has been obvious for several years now that far-right extremism has been growing across western democracies with social media providing the means for a new global connectivity between far-right individuals and groups.

In the past three years alone, the UK has experienced two terrorist attacks carried out by far-right extremists (the murder of Jo Cox MP and the attack against the Finsbury Park mosque in London in 2017), proscribed a far-right group (National Action) as a terrorist organisation and started treating far-right extremism as a threat to national security, resulting in MI5 and the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre now assessing far-right intelligence alongside its work on Islamist terrorism.