How do you create a low-trust society? One way to do so is to have an administrative class which seems to treat the views of ordinary people with contempt. Today’s news of a leaked Home Office report on counter-extremism is a classic of the genre. The report, commissioned by the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, in the wake of the August 2024 riots, says that claims of ‘two-tier policing’ are a ‘right-wing extremist narrative’.
This is a rather bold assertion, not least because the widely held and almost certainly correct perception that police obfuscation over the identity of the Southport child murderer Axel Rudakubana was a catalyst for disorder in the summer. Trust in our public institutions is at historically low levels. There have been legitimate concerns amongst citizens over widely differing policing postures on everything from rape gangs to public order. Effectively labelling them as neo-Nazi adjacent won’t reverse this trend.
The body count does not lie. The number of thwarted terror plots do not lie
The review, styled as a ‘rapid analytical sprint’ on counter-extremism policy, fell at other hurdles. It suggested that rather than curtail the use of non-crime hate incidents (NCHI) beloved of the permanently outraged and authoritarians, these should be expanded. Policing is in a deep crisis of public confidence and resources already. This was at least recognised by the previous Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, who ordered the police to stop investigating and recording incidents that did not cross a criminal threshold but would otherwise have a chilling effect on free expression. But the Home Office, now freed from any semblance of control, is defaulting back to the activism-led progressive worldview it believes suits its new masters.
We can see this in the ambition of this farrago of recommendations to widen the approach to counter extremism from ‘ideologies’ of concern to ‘behaviours’ of concern. One of the key criticisms that emerged from the review of our counter-terror strategy Prevent in 2023 was precisely this sort of mission creep threatening to overwhelm the primary function of practitioners to spot and stop tomorrow’s terrorists. The Home Office runs the Prevent strategy. William Shawcross found in his assessment that officials there were guilty of sending public money to organisations antithetical to its mission and who campaigned for its abolition. I would not take bets with you on the same officials being responsible for this ‘rapid sprint’.
The government is fond of saying that its policies are evidence-led. If this was the case rather than the usual bloviating guff, it would accept that in scale and lethality Islamist extremism remains the pre-eminent terrorist threat to the United Kingdon, followed some way behind by extreme right-wing ideology.
The body count does not lie. The number of thwarted terror plots do not lie. The balance of threats the security service tackles does not lie. The number of convicted terrorists in prison does not lie. The sure way to destabilise social order is to have an administrative cadre in the government department responsible for security and safety knowing these facts, then tipping them into the shredder.
The edited version of this review reveals nothing if not a disdain for the feelings and concerns of ordinary voters. Or, at the very best, a sort of elite obliviousness conceived in the senior common room and marinaded in years of failing upwards in public service, where saying good was more important than doing good. When I was a senior civil servant at the Home Office, a couple of decades ago, these forces were (barely) held in check. Ministers are now discovering what happens when the new mediocracy think they are back on the front foot. It’s worth remembering that such a sensitive and controversial review would have gone through multiple drafts and been signed off by a person at Director level or above. Yet heads will not roll.
These are awful headlines for the government that we would never have even known about, were it not for a leak from someone inside the Home Office who remains true to its mission to protect the public. We are unlikely to ever know how much the depth of reported ‘disagreement’ between ministers was thanks to embarrassment rather than the content of the ‘sprint’.
There is one issue, however, in the report which is usefully highlighted: we have no effective capability for managing the risks posed by very dangerous people who may not have committed crime or be nascent terrorists but whose behaviour sets alarm bells ringing with the various services struggling to deal with them, usually thanks to a skewed perception of their ‘vulnerability’. Axel Rudakubana was waving red flags galore but could not be stopped in his depravity because in counter-extremism terms he was a square peg in a round hole. This cannot stand. We have to have a single, executive high-risk management agency that can fill that breach in our defences. Restoring trust in government is a marathon, not a sprint.
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