Over the last two months we have seen an increase in the scale and frequency of street protests across Britain. Those that have taken place under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement have focussed not only on placing a spotlight on the relationship between the police service (and indeed the wider Criminal Justice… Continue reading “We need to talk about what is driving the Radical Right”
Often when extremisms come about, they don’t occur in isolation. In the UK, for example, the emergence of extremist mobilisations have occurred subsequent to high-profile counter-movements, counter-protests and terror attacks that suggest a ‘connectivity between extremisms’ (Ranstrop 2010). In the far-right space, we’ve seen this in the creation of the English Defence League (EDL) in… Continue reading “Cumulative Extremism Online: How Moral and Strategic Aims Predict Narrative Escalation”
As a Special Branch officer I watched the anti-Islam protest movement, the English Defence League (EDL), develop in 2009, I was struck by their apparent strategic acumen, not something normally associated with the far-right or football-related gang. The traditional Special Branch role of providing chief officers with intelligence on public order had slipped down the… Continue reading “Guest Blog: The catalyst for the EDL: March 2009 Luton – a terrible mistake”
