His mum thought he was on video games but teen was being groomed by far right

Lucy* thought her teenage son was busy in his room playing video games and talking to friends online – but in reality he was getting groomed into the far right under her very roof.

- MAYA OPPENHEIM

“He was 14, but I didn’t find out for a couple of years,” she tells The

Independent. “I had no idea. I just noticed a lot of changes within him. His attitude. His general wellbeing. Our relationship fell apart. His schoolwork started to suffer.”

Her comments come in the wake of an explosion of far-right anti-immigrant violence across the UK earlier in the month. Rioters attacked mosques, ambushed riot police, set fire to a hotel housing migrants and torched a public library and Citizens Advice Bureau building in the aftermath of the fatal stabbing of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club in Southport at the end of July.

There have been multiple incidents of ethnic minorities being attacked on the streets. In the aftermath of the Southport stabbing, false information spread rapidly online, wrongly claiming the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker who came to the UK on a small boat crossing.

Recounting her son’s radicalisation process, Lucy says he never shared his opinions on politics or current affairs for the first two years he was involved in the far right but his deeply concerning views then began to surface.

“It was all around immigration and religion,” she adds. “I thought this seems very, very out there, very not like him. He did not make racist comments per se. It wasn't so much antiIslam. It was questioning passages in the Quran, saying that they meant something different, and as much as I argued with him, that just created a bigger divide between himself and myself.”