UK far-right’s institutionalised violence: How state-adjacent groups weaponise criminal networks for political control
Original framing: “Paramilitary hitman linked to British right-wing group Turning Point UK” — Al Jazeera
Black British activists like *Darcus Howe* (of the *Black Panthers*) have long warned that far-right violence is a tool of state control, yet their voices are absent from this narrative. Muslim communities targeted by Turning Point UK’s rhetoric—such as those in *Birmingham* and *Bradford*—report increased harassment since the group’s rise, but their testimonies are excluded. The *Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI)* has documented a 300% increase in far-right hate crimes since 2020, yet these statistics are framed as ‘isolated incidents’ rather than systemic. The marginalised voices here are those of anti-fascist organisers, who argue that the state’s response to far-right criminality is deliberately slow to avoid destabilising the political establishment’s alliances with these groups.
The Al Jazeera report’s focus on a single hitman obscures the far more sinister systemic pattern: far-right groups in the UK are not outliers but a predictable outcome of a state that has systematically tolerated their criminalisation of dissent.
The historical parallels—from the *Black and Tans* to the *British Free Corps*—demonstrate that these alliances thrive when economic despair is weaponised to redirect anger toward marginalised communities, while the state looks the other way. Indigenous and anti-colonial critiques reveal that far-right violence is not an aberration but a feature of settler-colonialism’s enduring logic, where ‘defence of the nation’ becomes a pretext for erasing historical injustices. The solution lies not in isolated prosecutions but in dismantling the economic and legal structures that enable these groups—through truth commissions, economic redistribution, and digital counter-narratives that restore marginalised voices to the centre of the story. The *trickster* insight cuts to the heart of the matter: the real crime is the system that allows far-right hitmen to operate with impunity, while the state’s complicity remains untouched.