Conquest’s Second Law states that the behaviour of an organisation can best be predicted by assuming it’s controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies – and that certainly seems to apply to Prevent (although it’s a ‘programme’ rather than an organisation). Prevent is a key strand of the counter-terrorism framework introduced after the 7/7 bombings and aims to stop people becoming radicalised. Given the historical context – and the fact that 75 per cent of MI5’s counter-terrorism work involves monitoring Islamist extremists – you’d think the main focus would be radical Islam. At least, you would if you weren’t familiar with Conquest’s Second Law.
Is Prevent actually controlled by a cabal of Britain’s enemies?
Of the 6,817 people referred to Prevent in the year ending 31 March 2023, just 11 per cent were suspected of Islamist extremism, compared with 19 per cent in danger of succumbing to ‘extreme right-wing terrorism’. And according to a Prevent Refresher Awareness Course on the Home Office website, one of the three most common subcategories of extreme right-wing terrorist ideology is ‘cultural nationalism’. As defined in the training materials, this encompasses the belief that ‘western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups’.
In other words, if you’re a white working-class lad who’s expressed disquiet that there are whole neighbourhoods in Leicester and Bradford where no English is spoken, you may find yourself in the Prevent programme alongside a Hamas-supporting Muslim teenager who’s been caught downloading a bomb-making manual. Ironically, treating a young patriot as a potential terrorist because he’s worried about recent arrivals from Yemen and Sudan might actually end up radicalising him. Does that mean the masterminds who’ve designed the Prevent Refresher Awareness Course should refer themselves to Prevent?
In my capacity as head of the Free Speech Union, I wrote to the Home Secretary about this course last week, gave the letter to the Telegraph and the paper stuck it on the front page, which was gratifying. But, really, the fact that Prevent has gone off the rails shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sir William Shawcross carried out a government review in 2022 and warned that its officials were preoccupied with ‘mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, right-wing-leaning commentary’ while ‘ignoring Islamist narratives’. Among his findings was that some ‘moderate’ Islamic groups funded by Prevent, supposed to provide young Muslims with a wholesome alternative to extremism, supported the Taliban.
But perhaps his most jaw-dropping revelation was that Prevent’s Research, Information and Communications Unit published a report in 2019 analysing the social media posts of a group it dubbed ‘actively patriotic and proud’ and discovered to its horror that one political figure revered by these radicals was Jacob Rees-Mogg: a man, said the report, ‘associated with a far-right sympathetic audience and Brexit’. Quick, round them up before they plant a bomb under Broadcasting House.
The same team of researchers listed books, films and TV programmes that were also red flags. These included The Lord of the Rings, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the poems of G.K. Chesterton, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, The Great Escape, The Dam Busters and Yes Minister.
Only last year, a former civil servant wrote of a counter-terrorism course for senior officials she’d attended at King’s College London. All the participants had to research a topic and give a presentation and one woman, whose brother had fled to Syria and joined Isis, chose Prevent, which she condemned as ‘racist’ because it focuses on Islamist extremists. (If only!) Sir William’s report was dismissed by one of the course lecturers because he’s ‘the type of person who would say all current counter-terrorism professionals are woke’ – and the same lecturer went on to brand Douglas Murray and Joe Rogan ‘far right’ and said, because it wasn’t possible to ban them, ‘society needs to find other ways to suppress them’.
So is Prevent actually controlled by a cabal of Britain’s enemies? Perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but the people who run it seem to have an intense dislike for Englishness, particularly as expressed in quintessentially English culture. They pretend that having an affection for Orwell’s ‘old maids bicycling to holy communion’ means you’re at risk of becoming a terrorist, when the reality is they just hate this nostalgic vision of England and are looking for ways to suppress it.
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