Last year I obtained a leaked copy of the new government’s ‘counter-extremism sprint’. It caused a huge political backlash – and was disowned by ministers within hours – for saying the UK’s approach to extremism should no longer be based on ‘ideologies of concern’, such as Islamism, but on a very wide range of ‘behaviours’, including misogyny, violence against women and spreading conspiracy theories.
Fourteen months later, we risk sliding back into the same folly. In a report this week, the Commons’ home affairs select committee says Britain’s ‘failure to move on from a counter-terror mindset’ has made Prevent, the main counter-extremism programme, ‘outdated’, and ‘left the country ill-prepared to deal with new forms of extremism’.
The MPs took far too much evidence from the kind of activists who deny jihadism as a threat, the kind of pressure groups whose idea of ‘hate’ is opposing net zero, and the kind of academics who go on for pages about the far-right with barely a mention of Islamism.
And just as in the sprint that was binned, the committee’s supposed ‘new forms of extremism’ include, among other things, ‘misogyny’, ‘conspiracy theories’ and ‘com networks’, online forums where young people compete to commit crimes. One such network, it said, ‘engages in sextortion, glorifies violence, coerces minors into producing child sexual abuse material, blackmails victims into committing acts of violence, animal abuse or self-harm and carries out harassment and intimidation campaigns.’
The government should certainly be alarmed by, and should tackle self-harm, violence against women and other social harms. But they are not, or mostly not, extremism. Most are also very far from ‘new’. As in the sprint, we’re extending the definition of extremism to cover any shocking crime, bad belief or nasty social phenomenon about which we are worried.
Why does that matter? Why shouldn’t we use the term to describe anything which shocks us? Because it means that the people and programmes fighting extremism and terrorism will be sucked away from their actual job – defending the security of the country, its democratic system, its values and its institutions against those, and only those, whose beliefs and acts intentionally threaten them. And we will all be less safe.
The murder of David Amess MP, for his vote on bombing Syria, was more than a shocking crime. It sought to change policy through violence. It wanted MPs to fear that if they vote a particular way, they might be put to death. At the moment the chance of this happening is low, so the threat is not very potent and the fear not very great. But as we know, Britain’s counter-extremism programme, Prevent, let Amess’s killer slip through the net. If its focus was broadened, it will miss many more such people and the risk of being killed for your political choices will grow.
It’s quite true that more violence is being perpetrated by people like Axel Rudakubana, the Southport killer, who had a fascination with murder but no creed or political goals. He was dropped from Prevent because too much weight was placed on his absence of ideology. It’s true, too, that large numbers of people with behavioural problems and no clear politics are now referred to Prevent.
The murder of David Amess was more than a shocking crime
But the mistake, as the committee fails to realise, is trying to fit Rudakubana and all those others into an ‘extremist’ label, or on to an extremist programme, in the first place. We don’t need to change Prevent’s focus to deal with people like them. We need a separate programme, because they’re largely a separate problem. In other words, we need to tighten Prevent, not loosen it. (And of course, in a more effective justice system, someone with Rudakuba’s record should have been picked up by normal police work.)
By demanding that extremism policy ‘move on from a counter-terror mindset’, and by trying to divorce the concept of extremism from terrorism, the committee downplays the obvious relationship between the two. It is death, injury and the reactions they cause – not animal abuse or sextortion – that are the most serious consequences, and the most potent drivers, of extremism. And, in Britain over the last quarter-century, it has been Islamism which has been responsible for 94 per cent of those terrorist deaths.
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