William Shawcross’s long-awaited review of Prevent – the Government’s counter-radicalisation programme – is one of the boldest official documents of recent times. As such, it constitutes a radical reappraisal of a key state policy which has gone seriously off-piste and is in urgent need of rebalancing.
Much of the critique of Prevent has historically come from Islamists – who contend that it singles out Muslims for particular obloquy. For a programme that cost the Home Office a little less than £50 million per annum in 2020-1, Prevent commands a lot of attention.
In his comprehensive ‘anatomy lesson’ published today, Shawcross lays bare in painstaking detail the ways in which Prevent has been faltering – but for a quite different set of reasons from those given by its loudest detractors.
He paints a picture of a highly bureaucratised system that has become profoundly unbalanced in ideological terms – with resources dissipated on multiple forms of mission creep. In consequence, Prevent is found to be ineffective against the real threats to national security and to society.
Islamists and their allies have thus policed the boundaries of debate with some success
Shawcross’s review poses a fundamental question: how can it be that Islamist plots constitute 75 per cent of hard ‘downstream’ counter-terrorism cases, but nonetheless form a mere 16 per cent of ‘upstream’ Prevent referrals – those early interventions aimed at heading things off at the pass before actual terrorist violence occurs?
Conversely, how can it be that the combined total of Extreme Right Wing (XRW) and Mixed, Unclear and Unstable (MUU, in the jargon), Incels and school shooters represent a full 56 per cent of upstream Prevent referrals but a minority of actual terror plots?
Shawcross shines a bright light on this striking disparity. He shows how the threshold for triggering the Prevent mechanism – in complete contrast to what Islamists believe – is actually much higher for Islamist plots than for XRW. XRW individuals tend to be interdicted at a far earlier stage.
Non-violent XRW ideology and beliefs are rightly dissected and rebutted; whereas non-violent Islamist ideology tends either to be downplayed or ignored, especially when advocated by Islamist entities active within the UK. By contrast, when Islamist ideology is recognised, it is mostly in the context of the terrorism perpetrated by violent groups such as Al Qaeda or Isis, and then often overseas.
Not only are the thresholds lower for action against XRW; but in some Prevent system analyses, the definition of the non-violent XRW threat comprises mainstream conservatives and Brexiteers. Those characterised as such include ex ministers and commentators such as Melanie Phillips and Douglas Murray.
As Shawcross notes, Prevent’s misplaced focus actually short-changes ordinary Muslims by diverting attention away from real XRW physical force threats; the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has now accepted his key recommendation on the need for consistency of treatment across all ideological boundaries. Shawcross even wonders whether some MUU actors belong in Prevent at all, bearing in mind they are not ideological actors.
How has this imbalance come about? As the Home Secretary points out in her foreword to the review, there is an ‘institutional hesitancy’ in the public sector about calling out Islamism – one of the most powerful themes of the whole report.
By contrast, there is no comparable hesitancy when it comes to challenging the expansively defined XRW. Even use of the word ‘Islamism’ has not necessarily been a given within the Prevent system, for fear that it might be confused with Islam itself. Shawcross therefore takes care to reaffirm its use as a legitimate term for a political ideology.
There is an ‘institutional hesitancy’ in the public sector about calling out Islamism
The institutional hesitancy flagged by the review process can be found at all levels. The most telling example of all is Shawcross’s case study of the Manchester Arena bombing of 2017: a security guard on duty decided not to challenge the suicide bomber for fear of being accused of racism.
Much of this institutional hesitancy can be ascribed to the success of multifarious anti-Prevent campaigns; so much so that it is almost as if the Conservative Government in 2019 had never rejected the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims’ expansive definition of Islamophobia.
Islamists and their allies have thus policed the boundaries of debate with some success. As Irish Republicans might say, they have ‘put manners’ on the British state. This anti-Prevent campaign has been particularly efficacious in Higher Education, from which Shawcross notes there are remarkably few referrals to Prevent. He also calls out those who have given too much head room to anti-Prevent campaigners – including the National Association of Muslim Police, which has worked with MEND.
Even within the Prevent system, Shawcross discovers that too many Prevent providers, funded by the state, express extreme views – but invariably on the Islamist rather than the XRW end of the spectrum. His solution is better due diligence, often in conjunction with the Commission for Countering Extremism, a body that is finally coming into its own as the ‘OBR’ of counter radicalisation. Not dramatic stuff, but sometimes a person like Al Capone can only be caught for tax evasion.
Indeed, Shawcross makes much of the fact that the Home Office has been hopeless at defending Prevent against relentless attacks. Partly this is because he contends that ministers and officialdom have not been well informed enough about the ‘Preventing Prevent’ network.
By way of example, he notes that one grievance narrative which went viral in some Muslim communities – but was vehemently denied by the school in question – concerned a boy who was referred to Prevent and questioned by counter-terrorism officers in 2016 for supposedly wearing a ‘Free Palestine’ badge.
Truly, the cliché about a ‘lie going half way round the world before the truth gets its boots on’ seems to have been invented with Prevent in mind. Hence Shawcross’s recommendation, accepted by the Home Secretary in her response to his report, for a dedicated unit to rebut such hostile themes.
Shawcross avers that the Prevent system was similarly slow in responding to threats related to accusations of blasphemy at Batley Grammar School in 2021, following which a teacher has been in hiding ever since. For the first time, the review recommends that blasphemy violence – and particularly intra-Muslim blasphemy violence – should form part of Prevent’s explicit remit.
The other major change proposed by the Shawcross review is the move away from a language of ‘vulnerability’ of subjects of interest to Prevent towards a language of ‘susceptibility’. He laments in particular the ascendancy of mental health frameworks over ideological frameworks for dealing with risk in this space.
All this means that a narrative of victimhood too often prevails – leading to a frequent denial of agency by Prevent suspects in making their own bad ideological choices.
One of the tragi-comic discoveries made by Shawcross is that some public sector mental health practitioners have been known to invoke the needs of Prevent to access funding that they would not otherwise receive; to adapt Dr Johnson, might Prevent be the last refuge of the cash strapped bureaucrat?
How will these eminently necessary changes ever be implemented? Looking back at the independent oversight of the last major Prevent review of 2011 by Lord Carlile KC, it is striking how many of Shawcross’s broad concerns were first articulated then – including the downplaying of Islamist ideology by Prevent practitioners and the correlated reluctance to spell things out clearly for fear of offending communities.
Too little has changed in the intervening 12 years, not least because the day-to-day operation of the Prevent system has largely gone unchallenged by the politicians. Mandarins are not keen on the politicians getting into the weeds of Prevent programmes; and ministers, for their reasons, have let the mandarins have their head. And that’s before addressing the para-political outreach to anti-Prevent Islamists by the police and the Security Service – dubbed by one Whitehall wag as the ‘independent republic of Thames House’ (on which Shawcross does not really opine). To invert the title of Norman Fowler’s memoirs, Ministers Don’t Decide.
Significantly, the Shawcross review and the Home Secretary’s response are at their weakest on questions of systemic accountability to elected politicians. There is only one reference in the review to an explicit new power of ministerial direction, namely to instruct action on public complaints on allegations of failing standards in Prevent. Yet ministers remain the last best chance for an ambitious outcome on Prevent – as articulated, for example, by then-candidate Rishi Sunak during last summer’s Conservative leadership contest.
The Muslim Council of Britain’s media release this morning asserts that Prevent as currently constituted is unacceptable to Muslim communities. Shawcross rightly points out that the polling evidence proves otherwise; but much of the Prevent system skulks around as if it thinks the critics are half right. If this review gives ministers and mandarins the self-confidence to take on those grievance narratives, then Shawcross’s report will have been well worth the wait.
Dean Godson is Director of Policy Exchange and author of ‘Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism‘
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