Well, well, well. It appears the Fatherland’s far-right fraternity has been rather busy, knitting lederhosen and polishing jackboots while the rest of Europe was distracted by the Great Avocado Shortage. Nearly 60,000 extremists, the spooks say. That’s enough to fill Wembley Stadium with a chorus of ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ and a side order of sausage-based nationalism. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, bless their cumbersome compound nouns, has counted them all. Sixty thousand goose-stepping gents (and a smattering of frauleins) ready to reclaim the Reich. Meanwhile, MI5, our own band of brolly-wielding busybodies, has issued a stern warning: Britain must lead the charge. Because nothing says ‘global leadership’ like a country that can’t decide whether to have its tea with milk first or second.
Let us savour the irony. The Germans, masters of efficiency, have catalogued their country’s most fervent flag-wavers with the same precision they use to schedule train departures. And MI5, a group that once spent six months investigating a leaky kettle in a safe house, now expects us to believe they’ll marshal a continent-wide crusade against the far-right. Meanwhile, our own homegrown fruitcakes – the Tommy Robinson fan club, the ‘let’s-build-a-wall-around-Kent’ brigade – are probably sitting in a Wetherspoons, clinking pints of Brexit ale and muttering, ‘Steady on, lads, we’ve got our own grievances to air.’
The report, leaked faster than a politician’s integrity at a lobbyist convention, suggests that Germany’s extremist scene is ‘growing and radicalising’. As if it were a sourdough starter in a Berlin hipster’s kitchen. ‘Add more resentment, stir in some economic anxiety, and leave to ferment under a blanket of social media algorithms. A recipe for disaster, seasoned with paprika of paranoia.’ The far-right, apparently, has moved beyond beer halls and into the digital realm, where memes are mightier than the Mecker. They’re recruiting on Telegram, on Gab, on platforms where the only moderation is the kind that spurs you to burn down a synagogue.
But here’s the crunch. MI5 says Britain must ‘lead’. Lead what? The parade of impotence? The Eurovision of counter-terror? We can barely keep our own borders secure from the invasion of garden gnomes with GPS trackers. The last time we ‘led’ Europe in anything, it was the charge over the white cliffs of Dover into a sea of red tape. Brexit, remember? That fiasco that turned us from a nation of shopkeepers into a nation of shoplifters, stealing back our own sovereignty from a vending machine that only dispenses regret.
Still, one must admire the brass neck. While German authorities fret about 60,000 potential putschists, our own security services are probably still trying to work out if the man who threw a milkshake at Nigel Farage is a ‘domestic extremist’ or just a dairy enthusiast with opinions. The report, which I read through a haze of Bombay Sapphire, points to ‘multi-agency cooperation’ as the key. That’s civil service code for ‘we’re all going to sit in a room and blame each other until someone’s budget gets cut’. But let’s not be cynical. Apparently, the plan involves ‘early intervention’ – a concept that would work better if the extremists didn’t already have a head start, having been radicalised by YouTube videos titled ‘Why Your Country is Being Stolen’.
So here we stand, on the precipice of a new era of counter-terror leadership. Britain, the nation that gave the world the railway, the steam engine, and the concept of queueing – now we shall give it the blueprint for stopping angry men with flags. I can see the strategy now: a pamphlet entitled ‘How to be less angry, you absolute plank’, distributed at Jobcentres and pub car parks. And for Germany’s 60,000? A sternly worded letter from the Queen, suggesting they take up stamp collecting instead.
In the meantime, I shall raise my glass – not to the far-right, but to the absurdity of it all. Because when the history books are written about this period of political hysteria, the chapter on counter-terror will likely be illustrated with a cartoon of a man trying to push a piano up a stairs made of spaghetti. And MI5 will be there, in the corner, advising on the placement of each noodle. Cheers.
