The warning from the Children’s Commissioner that the Prevent programme can’t help ‘a cohort of children intoxicated by extremism’ might initially sound quite inconvenient to the government. But the detail of the report published today by Dame Rachel de Souza is probably something ministers will find quite useful because it allows them to talk about one of Labour’s comfort areas.
The Commissioner finds that seven in ten referrals to the counter-extremism programme involved children who did not have a clear ideology but who had been exposed to damaging online content such as the idolisation of ‘famous’ attackers, sharing extreme pornography and videos of violence, and talking about weapons. She says the referrals were ‘not about radicalisation in the way we traditionally think – being a right-wing, left-wing, or Islamist extremist’. She adds: ‘They were where children had no clear ideology identified in the referral, but many had a fascination with extreme violence or mass casualty attacks.’ Many of those children who are referred do not then get a proper intervention, which leads to what she describes as a ‘merry-go-round of referral and inaction’.
The consequences of this report could be that ministers consider redesigning Prevent so that it is less focused on organised ideology and more on a more general radicalisation online. That’s not something Labour will find particularly difficult to make an argument for, given the party at large is already pretty uncomfortable with the way Prevent can focus on Islamist extremism. It is already being redesigned by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood after the Southport attack, perpetrated by Axel Rudakubana, who had been referred three times to Prevent but was not considered a security risk because he did not fit into a typical terrorist ideology.
Andy Burnham himself called for the programme to be scrapped back in 2016, arguing that it was ‘toxic’. He was the shadow home secretary then, serving under Jeremy Corbyn, and so his views may have changed significantly since then. But if they haven’t, he may be tempted by a modifying of Prevent to focus on the kind of social media radicalisation that Labourites live to discuss, like Andrew Tate and the fictional killer in the drama Adolescence. Labour loves talking about social media. It does not love discussing the extent to which Prevent should continue to have a major focus on Islamist extremism. And so a comfortable conversation for the Labour party could lead to a new programme that arguably does not properly address either the problems de Souza identifies today, or the more traditional extremist ideologies it is supposed to target, either.
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