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Home Secretary Suella Braverman called it “superb,” the Daily Telegraph’s Home Affairs Editor, Charles Hymas, described it as a “landmark” review but with the exception of the incumbent Tory government and sections of the right-wing media, everyone else disagreed. Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, said it was “confused” and a significant opportunity had been missed. Ilyas Nagdee, Amnesty International UK’s Racial Justice Director, called it “plain anti-Muslim prejudice” that has “no legitimacy.”
After four years, former Charity Commission Chair, William Shawcross, published a supposedly independent review of the much-maligned Prevent programme imposed on the government by the House of Lords. The counter-terrorism strategy aims to thwart an envisaged conveyor belt of radicalisation. It is based on false premises and was directed at the Muslim population in the UK.
Ill-conceived and long criticised by civil liberties groups and Muslim NGOs that it has increasingly discriminatorily targeted, Prevent is not and has never been fit for purpose. Dwindling support for the strategy among jurists meant then-PM Theresa May was forced to self-select a chair to review it.
After the appointment was overturned by a legal challenge, her successor Boris Johnson contemptuously sought out the divisive Shawcross, known for his alleged anti-Muslim views. The result was a mass boycott by human rights groups, academics, and Muslim organisations with the foregone conclusion that it would be a whitewash. Bafflingly, Shawcross found the strategy merely “broadly right” in its objectives, while claiming it “fulfills many of its functions.”
Prevent aims to divert people from radicalisation and rehabilitate them into law-abiding citizens. According to Braverman, one of the main issues was that “only 16% of Prevent referrals in 2021-22 were Islamist.” But this apparently couldn’t be because of the vast rise in far-right extremism, as it had shown “cultural timidity and an institutional hesitancy to tackle Islamism for fear of charges of Islamophobia.” She insisted that accusations of spreading fear and misinformation in communities were “false.”
The Home Secretary used stats from the counter-terrorism police network’s ongoing investigations, which showed that “eighty per cent were focused on “Islamist terrorism” to prioritise over the far right. Prevent had “defined the extreme right-wing too broadly, encompassing the respectable right and centre-right,” she told MPs.
Too often, “the role of ideology in terrorism is minimised.” This was how the government wanted to intensify its harassment of Muslims. “Prevent’s first objective will be to tackle the ideological causes of terrorism.” Staff and all those with a statutory duty needed “better training and guidance” to identify extremism.
So, the culprit in Prevent’s failure is not merely its counterproductive misdirection; it is that the goalposts are forever changing, as was the case in 2011 when its scope was broadened to include “non-violent” extremists. The previous Labour government’s failure to confront “those who oppose our values” was blamed for the need for an epic expansion of the definition.
In 2015, the measures became even more desperate, imposing specific intelligence-surveillance duties on schools, universities, hospitals, prisons, and other frontline services, with even more revisions in 2021.
The Shawcross report has become the latest feeble attempt to patch up an unviable and fictitious foundation strategy. Even worse, it makes no bones that its target is the country’s Muslim community. It has become so politicised that even using such yardsticks as having any sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians is now claimed as a marker of having terrorist sympathies. The thrust is also in line with how callous successive governments are in being so contemptuous of anything other than their own increasingly right-wing policies, thus placing yet more emphasis on ideology.
Counter-terrorism guidelines have long constrained academic freedoms. Not only are university students prohibited from reading certain books, but would-be speakers are vetted for their opinions. The answer to criticisms of Prevent is to outlaw criticism itself. The message is clear: anyone challenging or even questioning the strategy will be met with an absurdly disproportionate response. They risk being tarnished as extremists and terrorists and joining the growing list of groups and organisations denied government access and funding.
Emphasising the review’s bias, if any evidence was needed, is the absence of any reference to recent right-wing terrorist attacks. Nothing constructive was expected from a government wanting to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and wishing to get rid of the European Convention of Human Rights and dilute domestic legislation to implement draconian policies.
How independent Shawcross was supposed to be was shown by how quickly the Home Office is rushing to implement all of his outlandish recommendations, even in encouraging friends and families to also make referrals, as well as drawing in job centres and border forces.
Prevent will never be reformed as long as those in power are unwilling to listen, as demonstrated by Shawcross’s dismissal of any criticism of the strategy as “an insult.” Despite the fact that in his recommendations, the Home Office acknowledges that it has been “too hesitant and timid thus far in countering misinformation, disinformation, and extremist narratives that undermine Prevent” and needs to tackle it better. The Labour Muslim Network went so far as to suggest that a “McCarthyite blacklist of Muslim groups” was being drawn up that was “dangerous and divisive.”
In Parliament, Braverman named Cage, which she said, “excused and legitimised violence by Islamist terrorists,” as well as Mend, which has a “history of partnering with actors of extremist concern,” as examples of what the government called a “persistent Islamist-led campaign by a network of closely linked groups and individuals” who encouraged “misperceptions of Prevent and undermine its work.” The net widens to include narratives.
Ironically, the day after the Home Secretary backed the review to refocus Prevent primarily on Muslims, several hundred far-right protesters engaged in a violent disturbance at a hotel in Knowsley, near Liverpool, which housed asylum seekers. Braverman also provoked controversy in October when she used inflammatory language when describing refugees arriving in Britain as an “invasion” and was followed by right-wing terrorists carrying out a petrol bomb attack on an immigration centre in Dover.
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