Journalist Lizzie Dearden has been covering terrorism and extremism for about a decade. In her first book, Plotters, she looks at a series of botched terrorist attacks in the UK between 2017 and 2022, examining the attackers’ motivations and the reasons they failed. Sometimes it was down to luck: one would-be perpetrator got waylaid by a malfunctioning satnav; another mistakenly equipped his homemade bomb with acetone-free nail polish remover instead of the regular stuff, rendering it harmless. Often it was a matter of an indiscreet boast to a friend, who then tipped off the police. Surveillance by the security services, whose undercover agents infiltrate online extremist networks by posing as fixers or sympathisers, proved critical in several cases.
As Dearden explains, these agents have to tread delicately: they must gain a suspect’s trust without actively egging them on – because entrapment would probably scupper any eventual prosecution; and they have to discern “the difference between online boasting, genuine intent and actual capability”. She speculates that the banning of far-right groups under anti-terrorism legislation – as happened with National Action in 2016 – may, in the long run, make this information-gathering work more difficult, forcing extremists to meet offline to avoid detection: “If terrorists move completely away from … formal or informal online groups, the loss of intelligence could be catastrophic.”
