Poisonous ideas turn people into terrorists, not poverty or racism

Telegraph

20-03-2025

A new report entitled 'The enduring role of ideology in terrorism and radicalisation' is a meticulously researched and timely riposte to the Keir Starmer's view that we are now facing a 'changed' terrorist threat in the aftermath of the Southport attack. What the author of the report, Robin Simcox, found instead was the enduring power of ideas and beliefs.
Many in the counter terrorism community fell in behind Starmer's paradigm. According to them, factors such as environment, upbringing, misogyny, mental health and a fixation with extreme violence are the foremost factors in terrorist motivation. In other words, terrorists gravitate to their heinous actions because of what has been done to them by society, or what can be diagnosed by a doctor or discovered by a social worker, rather than what the terrorists themselves affirm as inspiration for their actions.
While many of the people Simcox studied had some or all of these additional pathologies, he is clear that there is a remarkable consistency in the significance that terrorists of all types attach to political or religious ideology.
These toxic belief systems, assembled online and often repurposed in their own manifestos, provide violent extremists a 'baseline' way of seeing the world that gives them permission to kill and spread fear.
Simcox looked at 100 convicted terrorists and 6,000 pieces of the 'mindset material' they had collected. He found there was a diversity of material that influenced them: from far-right texts such as Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf to Islamist books like Sayyid Qutb's Milestones.
Ideology co-exists with other deficiencies that turn hateful thought into action, but it is still the dominant force. This is bad news for the Home Office officials who had bought the Prime Minister's line that material deprivation is more important to radicalised killers than a poisonous vision of the world. In January, a leaked report from these experts signalled that extremism should no longer be looked at through an ideological lens.
I have personal experience of discussions with these mandarins. They are sincere and well-meaning, but one gets a sense of palpable relief at the prospect of replacing 'problematic' religious or political beliefs with the behaviours that can be medically or sociologically categorised.
This is utterly misguided: a 'mentally ill' Jihadi can kill just as efficiently as his 'sane' white supremacist counterpart, and vice versa; many Islamists come from affluent or comfortable backgrounds. But it is far safer to focus on psychological impairment, or material deprivation, than the straightforward fact that some people have been driven to murder under the inspiration of Islam.
Wilcox has proven the Prime Minister comprehensively wrong. It might be one reason his tenure as counter extremism tsar will not be renewed. But Sir Keir is right on one thing: we do have a serious problem spotting and stopping people who want to kill for its own sake and kill at scale.
Violent offenders who follow no ideology except their own nihilistic rage are here to stay. But while we tackle them, we must also retain a sharp focus on combatting those prepared to kill in the name of ideas. Tomorrow's terrorists are already in the making, dutifully reading their dangerous texts.