Dr. Sara Wilford explores the alarming trend of middle-aged individuals embracing far-right ideologies, revealing the complexities behind this phenomenon.
London, United Kingdom Jul 26, 2026 ALN: Dr. Sara Wilford is one of the few academics in the world studying the phenomenon of people in midlife increasingly embracing far-right ideology. She talks to our Writer at Large
There's a short video on YouTube scripted by Dr. Sara Wilford which neatly sums up her research into ‘middle-aged radicalisation’.
The film is entitled ‘A Family Tea’. It opens with an average family of three sitting around their kitchen table having tea together. Mum and dad are in their 50s. Their son is in his 20s.
Mum is online, tapping at her laptop, looking anxious and angry. She’s been turned down for promotion.
Her husband and son seem worried and unsettled. Soon, her upset at being overlooked for promotion turns to anger at immigration.
She starts talking about the people she meets online and the “research" they’ve shown her about Britons being “replaced”.
Her husband challenges her, asking if she believes everything she reads online. Her son says she’s probably talking to bots. He’s married to an eastern European and is clearly offended.
Her son gets up and leaves. Her husband warns her that if she continues like this, she’ll never see her grandchildren again. Nothing seems to get through to her though.
Dr. Wilford is from the SMIDGE Project. SMIDGE stands for Social Media Narratives Addressing Extremism in Middle Age. It’s the only academic research project on the planet dedicated solely to investigating radicalisation in people aged 45-65.
That’s the entire cohort of Generation X. It’s also the demographic which holds political power. Our new Prime Minister Andy Burnham is 56. GenX shapes opinion. Elon Musk is 55. Many senior figures in the British media are over 45.
Wilford is an expert in public policy and computer ethics and an associate professor at De Montfort University.
She says the public think of radicalisation and extremism as problems which affect the young. That’s far too simplistic. Increasingly, it’s mums and dads who are being radicalised - not their kids.
Dr. Sara Wilford (Image: Supplied)
SMIDGE’s research has been conducted across Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Kosovo, Cyprus and Britain. SMIDGE academics investigate online networks spreading extremist content, identify key players, and interview middle-aged people to understand their changing attitudes and behaviours.
In September, Wilford will talk to the Cabinet Office about her work and ask government ministers to turn their attention to combating middle-aged radicalisation. Currently, most resources target the young. She’s already given a presentation at the House of Commons.
TERRORISM
The issue of middle-aged extremism in Britain has become such a problem that the Combating Terrorism Centre at America’s West Point - the US military academy similar to Britain’s Sandhurst - published a paper entitled ‘The Growing Concern Over Older Far-Right Terrorists: Data From The United Kingdom’.
This isn’t just a British issue, though. Yes, many of the far-right rioters who have taken to the streets in the UK of late have been notable for the fact that they are middle-aged, but that was also the case at the US Capitol Riot.
During recent Northern Ireland riots, police noted that it was older men often encouraging the young to commit acts of violence.
However, as far back as November 2022, the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation noted that “the most recent completed” extreme right-wing terrorist attacks had all been “carried out by older men”.
In that same year, a man in his 60s firebombed a migrant centre in Dover, and those arrested for plotting to overthrow the German government included people in their 60s.
Many Islamic terrorist cases feature older men as well. Most offences involving left-wing extremism seem to feature younger people. Wilford says that far more people are radicalised by right-wing extremism, however, than by left-wing extremism.
When Jo Cox MP was assassinated during the 2016 Brexit campaign, it was 53-year-old Thomas Mair, a far-right extremist, who murdered her.
In 2017, 48-year-old Darren Osborne drove a van into worshippers outside Finsbury Park Mosque, killing one person.
The US Combating Terrorism Centre said: “In contrast to Mair, Osborne’s radicalisation was rapid, driven by his disgust at a May 2017 BBC drama-documentary about the sexual abuse of children by a group of British-Pakistani men.
“He joined Twitter in early June 2017, following far-right accounts including that of Tommy Robinson and Britain First and engaging with material from those ‘determined to spread hatred of Muslims’.”
In 2018, Tristan Morgan, 51, set fire to a synagogue in Exeter on a day commemorating the Holocaust.
In March 2019, 50-year-old father-of-four Vincent Fuller threatened passers-by near his home in Surrey with a baseball bat, shouting: “All Muslims must die. White Supremacists rule.” When Fuller broke the bat damaging a vehicle, he took a knife from his home and slashed a 19-year-old sitting in a parked car.
Lucy Connolly, 42, was jailed for stirring up racial hatred following the Southport attack. Connolly said on Twitter: “Set fire to all the f*****g hotels full of the bastards for all I care.” Rioters did attempt to burn a hotel. Her husband is a Tory councillor.
There has also clearly been acts of left-wing political violence around the world. Some of the offences remain sub judice, so for legal reasons cannot be discussed in detail in this article.
WOMEN
While Islamist terror remains Britain’s greatest security threat, far-right extremism is the fastest-growing threat.
More far-right extremists were referred to the government’s anti-terrorism programme Prevent, according to the most recent figures released in 2025, than suspected Islamist extremists.
In the year to March 2025, 1798 referrals were due to ‘extreme right-wing concerns’, compared to 870 cases for Islamist ideology.
One mosque is attacked in Britain every five days. Police are currently investigating an alleged extreme right-wing attack plot against an Islamic event in England.
There are a number of ‘engines’ driving middle-aged radicalisation. One key engine, says Wilford, is the sense among many GenXers that they are forgotten, sidelined and ignored. That feeling is particularly strong among women, she says.
She gives a hypothetical case drawn from her research into the kind of middle-aged people becoming radicalised and turning to extremism.
“Imagine you’re 52. You’ve done well at your job, got a house, a car, you’ve got nice things. Maybe you’re an accountant. You’ve done alright. You work for a big company and then that company does the inevitable and downsizes.
“They go to the spreadsheet and say ‘look at Fred, he’s been here 30 years, he’s very loyal but look at how expensive he is. We could bring in three junior accountants to replace Fred’. So they get rid of Fred.
“Fred is obviously upset, but Fred thinks he’s very experienced so enters the job market. Then suddenly, Fred, who has nearly 20 years left to work, finds out he’s too old to retrain, too expensive, too set in his ways. Not that Fred recognises any of this about himself.
“Over the next six months to a year, Fred gets turned down over and over again for jobs at the level Fred was working at. He ends up in B&Q because that’s the only place that will take him.
“Now Fred is remarkably pissed off with the world. He did everything right, and now he’s told he’s on the scrapheap with 20 years to work.”
Not only does Fred - or Freda - feel pushed aside and discriminated against, the hit to their self-esteem comes at a time when the country is in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis.
So here you have both anger and fear. The anger stems from a sense of humiliation, and the fear stems from the worry of not being able to cope financially as the economy crumbles.
Fear and anger need an outlet. Enter those other middle-aged extremists: the tech barons.
The dominant narrative on sites like X, formerly Twitter, owned by Elon Musk is that immigrants are dangerous and stealing resources from white Britons.
If you’re angry and afraid, Wilford says, migrants make a very easy scapegoat at which you can direct your negative emotions.
A group of demonstrators from the anti-immigration protest, organised by Unite the Clans Scotland, break away from the rally and march towards Glasgow city centre (Image: Lesley Martin)
CLASS
Middle-aged radicalisation is no respecter of class, Wilford explains. Working-class GenX Britons were sold “a dream”, she says: that life would get continually better, that they’d have better lives than their parents, and that their children would have better lives than them. None of that turned out to be true.
The average working-class 50-year-old saw their parents able to buy their own council house. Today, buying a house is out of reach for those on low-incomes.
The children of middle-aged GenXers face crippling debt if they want to go to university - whereas their Baby Boomer parents could attend university for free.
“Generation X has been really stitched up,” Wilford adds. “Many people did worse than their parents in that age group.”
GenX has been particularly affected by the shattering of the social contract between government and voters, and the collapse of the post-war consensus, which promised good standards of living for the working-class.
As a cohort, says Wilford, GenX also tends to display a distinct characteristic which makes protecting them against radicalisation difficult: they don’t like being patronised and so are resistant to the idea that they need to be educated about the threat of disinformation online.
“In our research it was proven that GenX really doesn’t like being told what to do,” Wilford says. In research, it jumped out that many of those interviewed repeatedly said they had “been to the university of life”.
GenX believes that young people need advised about online radicalisation dangers, and that elderly people - like their own Baby Boomer parents - need help understanding how the internet works as well as protection from scammers. However, GenXers insist they know exactly how to navigate the digital world.
“They’re very reluctant and disinterested when it comes to education. It’s an arrogance borne from ignorance,” Wilford adds.
Wilford says we should think of the 1979 Pink Floyd song ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, with its famous chorus ‘we don’t need no education’. It hit the charts “right in the middle” of Gen X’s formative years and sums up their attitude to being told what to do. “It nails it,” she adds.
This belief within GenX that it knows best and so therefore needs no help may, she speculates, have some bearing on the fact that most government resources are targeted at dealing with radicalisation among young people. “The decision-makers are from the same generation,” she adds.
As most government ministers and senior members of the police and security services are GenX they too may not see the need to devote time and money to preventing middle-aged radicalisation.
INVISIBILITY
Another problem, when it comes to highlighting the risk of middle-aged radicalisation, is that in the public mind “middle-age is boring”, Wilford says.
Most advertising and most culture - whether movies or music - is targeted at the young. Elderly people are seen as the key constituency for most political parties as they vote in higher numbers. Around 75% of pensioners consistently vote. This fosters a greater sense of middle-aged “invisibility”.
Wilford says she has personal experience of middle-aged invisibility now aged 62. She was recently queuing at a coffee shop with a young woman in front and a young man behind. Once the young woman had been served, the waitress skipped Wilford and went to the young man. When she complained the waitress said ‘sorry, I didn’t see you’.
“The honesty of her response speaks starkly about the invisibility of middle-aged women. But it doesn’t just happen to women. It happens to men as well.”
Although culturally, it’s clear women suffer more than men, with women more likely to be removed from TV roles, say, than men when they enter midlife.
Middle-aged invisibility means that many of the initiatives used by the state to counter radicalisation fail. An advert featuring cool young men talking about misogyny with rap or dance music playing in the background, says Wilford, isn’t going to land with middle-aged men, for instance. “It’s focused on the youth.”
On the flip-side, other forms of public information focus on the “vulnerability of the elderly”, which is another switch off if you’re middle-aged.
One middle-aged cohort which Wilford and her team want to reach is journalists. Many senior journalists in print and broadcast across Britain are 45 and over. Wilford worries about the increased radicalisation she sees within some sections of Britain’s mainstream media.
Some right-wing newspapers have become increasingly extreme in their views, she says, and right-wing shock-jocks on TV and radio are increasingly peddling misinformation. Likewise, she sees increasing radicalisation among right-wing politicians.
She says that the acronym ‘smidge’ was chosen for her organisation as the team wants journalists, as well as politicians, to exercise a “smidgen of self-reflection” before they speak, write or publish.
“When it comes to journalists, we’re asking them to pause for a moment.” Wilford says she appreciates the pressure journalists are under to bring in more readers in the digital age, but she’s “shocked” by how extreme some UK journalism has become.
She fears that in the face of the wild west that’s social media, the mainstream media has “given up” when it comes to standards and “joined in the extremism, disinformation and misinformation. I’m so saddened to see it”.
Are Generation X being manipulated? (Image: Getty Images)
ALGORITHM
Meanwhile, online “the algorithm points you to outrage as outrage feeds engagement”. So extremism is monetised by social media platforms, creating an environment where radical ideas can flourish.
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