So Germany finally admits what any observer of European politics has known for years. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution announces that there are now 60,000 far-right extremists lurking in the Fatherland. Panic. Outrage. Demands for yet another crackdown. But here is the uncomfortable truth that will make the liberal commentariat choke on their oat milk lattes: Britain’s hard-won intelligence model, forged in the fires of the Troubles and refined against jihadism, is now the envy of a continent that once looked down its nose at us.
Let me take you back to the Victorian era, when Britain understood that order was not a gift but a conquest. Our intelligence services, from the Special Branch to MI5, were built on a principle that modern bureaucrats find quaint: know your enemy before he knows himself. We measured threats in numbers, tracked networks in church halls and pubs, and never apologised for profiling. It worked. The IRA bombed, but they never took over. Islamists plotted, but they never achieved their caliphate. Today, our model of community intelligence, of counter-extremism that dares to name the problem, is being copied from Berlin to Paris.
Germany, for all its economic might, has an intelligence culture that would have amused Cardinal Richelieu. Their Verfassungsschutz was designed to watch, not to act. They compiled files on leftists and anarchists with Teutonic diligence, but when it came to the far right, they saw only a fringe of weirdos in lederhosen. The result? Now 60,000 extremists, including a terrifying number with military training, and all the while the German press worried about ‘Islamophobia’. The British approach has always been different: we treat all extremisms with the same cold suspicion. Whether it’s a jihadi in Luton or a neo-Nazi in Cumbria, we monitor, we infiltrate, we disrupt. That is why our far-right threat, though real, is nowhere near as organised as Germany’s.
Consider the numbers. Britain’s far-right extremists are estimated at perhaps 3,000 to 5,000. A fraction of Germany’s. And it is not because we are more virtuous, as the bien-pensant would have you believe. It is because our intelligence services have been doing this for decades. We have the Prevent programme, for all its flaws, that engages communities and identifies vulnerable individuals before they turn to violence. Germany, by contrast, relied on a ‘firewall’ of anti-extremism that was more rhetorical than operational. They thought that simply condemning the far right was enough. It never is.
Now the German interior minister is praising the British model. How delicious. They want our community policing, our early intervention, our no-nonsense approach to intelligence sharing. But let us be honest: this is not just about tactics. It reflects a deeper cultural difference. Britain, for all its current troubles with left-wing identitarianism, still retains a sense of national identity that allows for robust security measures. We are not afraid to say that some ideologies are incompatible with liberal democracy. The Germans, haunted by their history, are terrified of appearing ‘too tough’. They have replaced actual security with symbolic gestures, and now they are paying the price.
There is a lesson here for Europe as a whole. The fall of Rome began not with barbarians at the gates, but with a ruling class that no longer believed in its own values. Germany’s 60,000 extremists are a symptom of a deeper decadence: a failure to integrate immigrants, a patronising attitude toward the provinces, and an intellectual elite that views national security as vaguely distasteful. Britain, for all its Brexit chaos, has at least kept its intelligence services intact and effective. That is why we are the beacon.
But let us not be smug. Our own problems are real. The far right is growing here too, and the left’s obsession with ‘decolonising’ institutions threatens to weaken the very agencies that protect us. Still, as Germany scrambles to copy our playbook, one thing is clear: when faced with a choice between the feathers of multicultural pieties and the steel of intelligence-led security, the continent is finally realising that steel wins. It always has.
