On 19 June 2026, a 36-year-old man was arrested and charged over a series of machete attacks in Edinburgh in which five men were injured, several of them Muslim. Footage from the scene reportedly showed him shouting about protecting “our women and girls.” The prime minister said the attack appeared to be motivated by anti-Muslim hatred. Within days the news cycle filed him under “lone wolf,” “mental health crisis,” or some other category designed to seal off the incident before it connects to anything larger.
Do not let it be sealed off.
He is not the story. He is the predictable consequence of the story. If the case against him is proven, this is what the pipeline produces: a man radicalised by rhetoric he did not originate, allegedly doing the dirty work for people who will never stand within a mile of a machete. Arresting him is triage. It is not a solution. Before this gets filed away as another tragic isolated incident, I want to name the mechanism, trace the pipeline, and refuse the comfortable lie that this has nothing to do with the people in tailored suits on the television.
The strategy of tension — a known playbook
There is a term for what we are watching. Political analysts call it the strategy of tension. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is a documented political phenomenon.
The clearest example is Italy’s anni di piombo (the years of lead, from the late 1960s through the 1980s), in which far-right networks, with documented links to elements of the Italian state and NATO’s stay-behind apparatus (Operation Gladio), manufactured or permitted sufficient street violence and social chaos that the population would accept authoritarian stabilisation as relief. In 1995 an Italian parliamentary commission confirmed in writing that the strategy of tension had been “supported by the United States to stop the PCI from reaching executive power.” This is not contested fringe history. It is in the parliamentary record.
It works in three stages. A population is divided along identity lines through sustained inflammatory rhetoric: immigrants, Muslims, minorities named as an existential threat to the nation. That rhetoric finds the people who are already angry, already marginalised, already deep in a media ecosystem that tells them who their enemy is. Then someone acts. The state responds, not by addressing the rhetoric or the pipeline that produced the violence, but by expanding its own powers of control, framed as protecting the population from the chaos that has emerged.
Watch the British news cycle alongside the legislative calendar and tell me that sequence does not describe what we are living through.
The transatlantic pipeline
The content behind attacks like this does not originate solely in Scotland. It was manufactured at scale in the United States, refined by figures including Elon Musk and the network around Donald Trump, and piped directly into British homes through platforms built to monetise outrage.
During the 2024 UK riots, triggered by misinformation that spread on social media following a mass stabbing in Southport, Musk used his platform, X, to post that “civil war is inevitable” in Britain. When Nigel Farage posted that Keir Starmer posed “the biggest threat to free speech we’ve seen in our history,” Musk replied with one word: “True.” Farage later confirmed to the BBC that he and Musk had discussed a donation to Reform UK during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago. Musk has since expressed support for Restore Britain, the breakaway faction that felt Reform’s immigration policies were insufficiently extreme.
Steve Bannon, the architect of Donald Trump’s political machine, founded The Movement, a Brussels-based organisation explicitly designed to incubate and connect right-wing populist parties across Europe. The National Conservatism (NatCon) conference, funded by the Washington DC based Edmund Burke Foundation and linked to the Heritage Foundation, held a London conference in 2023 at which the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, appeared as a keynote speaker alongside the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts. Braverman was later announced as a headline speaker alongside Bannon himself at the 2024 Washington NatCon. The ideas have a return address.
The trope that keeps recurring in cases like this has a return address too. Muslim men as a predatory sexual threat to white women and children: it was industrialised during British media coverage of grooming gangs, stripped of statistical context, and amplified first by Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) and then, with steadily more polished packaging, by Farage himself. X and YouTube’s algorithms do the distribution. The content is not random. It is a product.
The man with the machete will face the consequences of his actions. The people who spent years manufacturing the fear, grievance and suspicion that fuelled them will not. They will condemn the violence, disown the attacker, and continue selling the same story. That is why treating incidents like this as isolated acts misses the point. The individual may be arrested, but the pipeline remains open.
What the state actually does
Watch what the state does with all of this. It arrests the attacker. It does not arrest the people who built the pipeline. It prosecutes the symptom. It does not touch the disease.
And while it prosecutes the symptoms, it is building something else entirely. In 2016, the Investigatory Powers Act, nicknamed the Snoopers’ Charter, legalised bulk interception, bulk metadata collection, and bulk equipment interference by intelligence agencies and police. Liberty brought a legal challenge on the grounds that the safeguards were insufficient to protect journalists and their sources. The legislation remains in force. In 2023, the Online Safety Act handed Ofcom sweeping regulatory powers over online content, including provisions to break end-to-end encryption that were not removed from the Act and can be activated by ministerial order at any time. Critics argue that provisions within the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act (2026) give ministers extensive powers to restrict access to websites and online services through secondary legislation. The Open Rights Group has named these “Henry VIII clauses.” VPNs are explicitly in scope.
Each is presented as child protection. Each comes with a justification that sounds reasonable right up to the moment you look at what the power actually does. Together, they describe a state that keeps finding new reasons to reach a little further into what you are allowed to read, watch, and say, building infrastructure that will outlast the justification it was built for and be available to whoever comes next. The Open Rights Group has warned that future governments might use these powers to restrict LGBTQ+ content, citing the United States as the obvious precedent.
That is how the loop closes. The manufactured chaos justifies the controls. The controls are then available for purposes the chaos was never about.
Part two: the machinery behind it
Part one examined the final stage of the pipeline of violence: a machete attack on Edinburgh’s streets, which the prime minister said appeared to be motivated by anti-Muslim hatred. But focusing solely on the attacker misses the larger question. Radicalisation does not occur in a vacuum. Ideas are manufactured, amplified and normalised long before they are acted upon. This section examines the machinery behind it — the political networks, organisational structures and state’s response that allow the cycle to continue.
I am told that Nigel Farage is a legitimate political figure. That Richard Tice is a businessman turned politician. That Sarah Pochin, who won the Runcorn by-election for Reform UK and whose first question at Prime Minister’s Questions on 4 June 2025 was to demand a ban on the burqa, is simply a representative of her constituents. That Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, who appeared at National Conservatism conferences funded by the US Heritage Foundation (and in Braverman’s case alongside Steve Bannon at the 2024 Washington NatCon), are former cabinet ministers whose views, however robust, fall within the bounds of acceptable political discourse.
And then there is Rupert Lowe. Ejected from Reform UK following allegations of violent threats and apparently too volatile even for Farage, he founded Restore Britain and promptly attracted what HOPE Not Hate described in April 2026 as a “tidal wave of fascists, neo-Nazis and other extremists,” including former officials of the BNP, the British Democratic Party, and Patriotic Alternative. Lowe’s signature policy position: “Millions will have to go.” The Financial Times described Restore Britain in May 2026 as “seeking to outdo Farage in anti-immigrant rhetoric,” embracing “a form of hardline nativism that has rarely been seen in British politics since the de facto disappearance of the British National Party.”
I am told that Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) is categorically different from all of these people. A street thug. A convicted fraudster. Outside the pale.
I do not accept that distinction. Neither should you.
The posh accent, the media training, the careful positioning just above the threshold of prosecutability: these are not evidence of respectability. They are evidence of better PR. The underlying ideas are familiar. Muslims are presented as a threat to women and children. Immigration is framed as an invasion. Britain is portrayed as being replaced. Farage says this in a television studio, with careful phrasing and a practised smile. Someone acting on the same underlying idea did it with a machete on the street. The idea travelled. Only the packaging changed.
HOPE Not Hate documented a Reform candidate who stated he wanted to “blast Muslims off the face of the earth.” In April 2026, a joint investigation with the Daily Mirror found three Reform candidates on a leaked BNP membership list. The Ferret reported that Reform knowingly re-selected Scottish candidates with documented extremist histories after those histories came to light. And rather than tighten its vetting procedures after serial failures, Reform loosened them. With this background, it’s hard not to see this as a policy choice rather than a vetting problem.
Scotland’s own far-right history: the Orange Order
Scotland likes to tell itself a particular story: that the ugliness consuming England is an English import, foreign to Scottish values, something that happens down there. It is a comforting story. It is also wrong.
Scotland has its own far-right history, older than Reform UK, older than Farage, older than the current cycle entirely. It runs, in part, through the Orange Order — a loyalist fraternal organisation with around 15,000 members in Scotland. Most of that membership has nothing to do with paramilitary violence. But for decades, some of its members have had documented links to loyalist militarism and sectarian violence, and the organisation’s own attempts to act against that have not always succeeded. More recently, one of its former members became one of the most influential far-right activists in Britain. Bylines Scotland has documented its electoral influence. Less attention has been paid to this thread running through it.
In 1974, an Orangeman named Roddy MacDonald became the UDA’s commander in Scotland. When the Orange Order attempted to discipline him in 1976, 300 Orangemen showed up to block the hearing. His successor as UDA Scottish commander, James Hamilton, was also an Orangeman and the auditor of the Ayrshire Grand Lodge. A Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee estimated Scotland was supplying around £100,000 a year to the UDA and UVF. Orange meetings were used to fundraise for loyalist prisoners.
This is not ancient history. The connective tissue between that tradition and the contemporary British far-right has a name and a postcode: Jim Dowson, from Airdrie. An Orange Lodge member, forced out of the movement and later a public critic of it, who became the BNP’s chief fundraiser, claiming £4mn raised. Who co-founded Britain First in 2010. Who moved to Budapest to run Knights Templar International alongside former BNP leader Nick Griffin, meeting there with Leonid Savin, the right hand of Russian fascist Aleksandr Dugin, to train Serbian far-right activists in online propaganda. Who was named by HOPE Not Hate as Britain’s single most influential far-right figure in 2017. Who is currently co-founding the Christian Nationalist Party alongside Jayda Fransen. One man, from one Scottish town, who helped build significant parts of the infrastructure of the entire modern British far-right, and parts of the European and American far-right, runs on.
And in December 2024, Reform UK’s Scottish organiser Craig Campbell was sacked after the Daily Record revealed his father had been named as the UVF’s Glasgow commander and jailed for pub bombings. His uncle was among those convicted in the same case. His cousin was jailed for life for a sectarian murder. Three generations of direct connection to loyalist paramilitary leadership. Reform UK handed its Scottish operation to this man.
Scotland is not a victim of English contagion. Scotland is a country with its own sickness, and the current far-right movement knows exactly where to find it. The rhetoric reported from the Edinburgh attack — of protecting “our women and girls” — maps with uncomfortable precision onto the sectarian loyalist tradition in which Catholic Irish identity was framed for generations as a sexual and cultural threat to Protestant British womanhood. The targets have shifted. The psychological architecture has not. The English far-right did not import this. They found it already built and moved in.
What actually fixes this
Arresting radicalised men is not a solution. It is crowd control. Here is what a solution looks like, or the beginning of one.
Platform liability, not platform requests. The companies profiting algorithmically from radicalisation must face meaningful legal liability for the content they amplify. Not takedown notices. Not transparency reports. Liability. The distributors should face meaningful legal scrutiny where negligence or amplification can be demonstrated.
Political funding transparency. Reform UK’s and Restore Britain’s funding sources require full public scrutiny. Two-thirds of Reform’s funding comes from a Thailand-based crypto investor. Farage confirmed discussions about a donation with Musk at Mar-a-Lago. The nationalism is branding. The money is international. That gap should be auditable and its influence on policy mappable.
Address the rhetoric at source, not the violence at output. Prosecuting street violence while affording parliamentary platforms and television airtime to the people whose rhetoric produces it is not a coherent response. It is a performance. Peer-reviewed academic literature now describes this kind of violence as “stochastic”: plausibly deniable, decentralised, arising from cultural immersion rather than direct command. The producers of that culture are not difficult to identify. Naming them plainly is not censorship. It is accuracy.
Resist the authoritarian response to authoritarian-manufactured chaos. The VPN restrictions, the Online Safety Act powers, the Henry VIII ministerial order clauses: none of this addresses radicalisation. It is the harvest of it, the state consolidating control using fear the far-right manufactured. The Open Rights Group are fighting this and need support. Scotland’s representatives at Westminster should be making the civil liberties argument loudly, not quietly going along with it.
Scotland specifically. Map the far-right organisational infrastructure in Scotland now, before the next incident. Fund the community organisations working in areas being targeted for recruitment. Address the sectarian loyalist tradition not as heritage but as a subject worth scrutinising in its own right: a documented four-decade history of paramilitary violence, and potential connections between that tradition and the contemporary British far-right that deserve closer examination.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions
It is also, it turns out, paved with tailored suits, careful deniability, and the strategic patience to move an Overton window one inflammatory television appearance at a time, until someone picks up a weapon believing he is simply doing what everyone has been telling him needs doing.
The suit is a costume. The strategy has a name. The pipeline has a return address. It is past time we used all three.