Britain in top fifth of countries suffering terrorism

THE UK remains in the top 30 countries worldwide affected by terrorism, according to an international index.

It is ranked at 28th out of 163 nations on the list, which measures the impact of terrorism over the past five years.

The latest Global Terrorism Index (GTI) found that far-right extremism is on the rise in the West, with the number of people arrested for right-wing terrorism in Europe rising for the third year in a row.

There were also nearly three times as many counter-terrorism operations related to right-wing extremism in 2017/18 compared to the two previous years.

In the UK, in the year to June 30, 2019, just under 29 per cent (76) of the 266 terrorism arrests made were linked to far-right extremism. This proportion was up from 22 per cent (76 out of 354), the previous year.

Around one in 10 of police counter-terrorism investigations in the UK are linked to the far right, up from around six per cent in 2017/18.

The number of disrupted plots linked to the ideology has also increased, with four stopped so far in 2019 alone.

In October, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick said that 24 plots had been foiled since March – 16 Islamist and eight extreme-right wing.

In January, head of UK counter-terrorism policing Neil Basu had said that 14 Islamist-inspired attacks had been stopped, and four far right.

The proportion of people being referred to the Government’s counter-extremism programme Prevent for holding far-right terrorist beliefs has also gone up. In 2015/16, 10 per cent of referrals were linked to far-right beliefs. In 2017/18 it rose to 18 per cent.

Steve Killelea, of think tank Institute for Economics and Peace which publishes the report, said that there were 95 incidents in the UK that it would class as terrorism in 2018, the vast majority of which were in Northern Ireland.