A second official who works in counter-extremism monitoring said the previous Tory government had successfully monitored public health disinformation related to the pandemic which served as a “rallying cry for conspiracy theorists” but had overseen a drop-off in focus in other areas of threat from the far-right.
“It was through the lens of public health that they looked at [the far-right] and went to great lengths to look at that threat, but it was only through that lens,” the official said.
They added that in the past “Conservative and Labour governments alike have kept an eye on the right wing, the Nazis. Most recently there was a huge drop in the amount of time resource dedicated towards that.”
The official said that part of the reason for what they described as a “drop off” in monitoring was ideological. “There are civil servants in the Home Office that care about violence from any source. But it’s fair to say that the last government, particularly by the end, weren’t really as interested in the extreme right wing or far-right.”
No strategy
Professor Paul Thomas, a counter-extremism expert at the University of Huddersfield, told POLITICO another reason for the lack of focus on the far right was financial, as the government battled the post-Covid cost of living crisis. He said: “For the last two to three years, there hasn’t been a new or revised counter extremism strategy, so that level of preventative activity, a significant amount of which was concerned with far-right extremism in some priority areas, has been discontinued. Some of that, I suspect, is those tightening budget cuts.”
A review by Sara Khan, the government’s social cohesion and resilience adviser until her term ended in May, this year warned that not enough was being done to combat breakdowns in communities, which could be “exploited by extremists” including the far right, and highlighted the impact of budget cuts.