The Radical Right in England and Wales: Permission to Hate?

Despite the prominence of the radical right in the UK, scant research has been undertaken to explore the influence that these organisations have on the perpetration of hate crime. Whilst current literature on hate crime predominantly looks at the impacts these crimes have on victims, it does not sufficiently investigate the conditions under which these crimes occur. The few studies on this issue have been conducted in the USA and Canada, the most recent of which was conducted by Perry and Scrivens (2019) who presented a new theoretical framework to account for this relationship. This framework - permission to hate - establishes a general environment of hate. This thesis contributes to the field by developing permission to hate to a more racialised social structure, and identifies the ways in which the radical right influences hate crime in England and Wales. Thus, this thesis is theory testing, adopting a similar sequential mixed-methods approach used by Perry and Scrivens. Due to the anti-minority ideology of the radical right, this thesis uses official crime statistics measuring racially and religiously aggravated crimes and demographic data to determine whether there is a correlation between these crimes and both the electoral performance of radical right parties and the protest activities of radial right organisations at the local level. In order to identify the causal mechanisms, a case study of the West Midlands is undertaken using semi-structured interviews with individuals who worked at Third Party Reporting Centres, media reports of radical right protests and more localised crime data. By combining these methods this thesis expands upon the work by Perry and Scrivens, contributing towards the theory permission to hate, whilst also highlighting the ways in which the radical right influence racially and religiously aggravated crimes. This study finds that the radical right achieve this through the consumption of alcohol during their protests, inserting themselves into local issues and how they emphasise the risks minority communities pose to British society, especially in the aftermath of high profile events.