Reading the Riots, Two Years On: Why We Still Can't Measure Extremism

Insights report

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Jon Clements, Chief Executive

4 August 2026

Two years ago this week, a wave of violent disorder and thuggery swept through towns and cities across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This rioting followed the Southport murders and was fuelled by anti-immigration sentiment, far-right extremism, Islamophobia and misinformation, both domestic and foreign in origin. 

It prompted a fierce debate about rising extremism and the state of the UK’s social cohesion and democracy and uncomfortable questions for policing, local authorities and central government. 

Why did some neighborhoods erupt in violence and others not? 

What made some people take as fact lies spread on social media and others not?

Why did police and local leaders not see this coming? 

What can be done to better identify communities which may be susceptible to extremists exploiting tensions?

Attempts to answer these questions to date reveal an inconvenient truth for the state, for civil society and anyone with a stake in maintaining the UK’s social cohesion and democratic resilience: we don’t actually know how to measure or monitor risk of extremism at the community level or the conditions which allow it to flourish.

Beginning to address this major gap is the purpose of our new research project - laying the foundations for an evidence-based extremism framework.

Supported by the Nuffield Foundation, our in-house thinktank Crest Insights will spend the next 6 months developing the foundations for an integrated framework to strengthen community resilience and inform upstream prevention strategies. You can read more about the project on the Nuffield website, but in summary we are looking at seven key research questions:

• What are the key indicators and factors for assessing community-level extremism risk, including both indicators of current extremist activity and structural factors affecting vulnerability and resilience? 

• How can these indicators/factors be defined in a conceptually robust and policy-relevant manner, based on existing literature and expert insight? 

• What data currently exist to operationalise these indicators, and how complete, reliable, and comparable are they (across the UK)? 

• Where are the critical gaps in available evidence, and what data would be required to address them? 

• How can identified indicators be organised into a coherent framework? 

• What further research and methodological development would be required to produce a fully operational extremism risk assessment framework? 

We’ll shortly be putting together our expert advisory group for this project, which will be chaired by the UK’s leading expert on extremism and cohesion, Dame Sara Khan. We’ve worked with Dame Sara before, on our recent The Fraying Social Contract and its Implications for National Preparedness, and on our 2024 report Societal Threats and Declining Democratic Resilience.

This new project is the logical development of this work, with a growing consensus that police, councils and central government need to better understand a rapidly changing threat landscape. And it’s the latest milestone in Crest’s exploration of extremism which is increasingly a key issue for the policing, justice and public safety sector. 

Through our wider work, for example around violence against women and girls, extreme misogyny, deepfakes, and the use of proxies by hostile states, we’re observing a convergence of threats around cohesion and new forms of extremism emerging. We want this project to make a practical contribution to identifying and mitigating these which leaders across policing, central and local government, including mayors and combined authorities,  the wider public sector and civil society benefit from.

To achieve this we’ll be conducting an evidence review, data audit and interviews with experts and will use the definition adopted by the government in 2024 as our starting point.

We intend to publish our findings next year and if you’d like to know more about this project please email contact@crestadvisory.com