Suella Braverman, the home secretary, has said she will shake up the UK’s anti-radicalisation policy, called Prevent, after a review found it was “out of kilter” with the counter-terrorism system and too focused on ideology of the extreme right.
Following publication of the independent review on Wednesday, Braverman said she would adopt its 34 recommendations “wholeheartedly”, promising “major reform” to “better understand the threats we face and the ideology underpinning them”.
The report’s author, William Shawcross, a journalist and commissioner for public appointments, commended the counter-radicalisation programme for saving lives.
But he criticised what he called its “double standards when dealing with rightwing extremism and Islamism”, calling for the restoration of its “overarching objective: to stop individuals from becoming terrorists”.
He also took aim at what he said was funding towards civil society organisations who were themselves promoting extremist narratives and caricaturing the counter-radicalisation programme as discriminatory against Muslims.
“Prevent takes an expansive approach to the extreme rightwing, capturing a variety of influences that, at times, has been so broad it has included mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, rightwing leaning commentary,” he said.
By contrast, “with Islamism, Prevent tends to take a much narrower approach centred around proscribed organisations, ignoring the contribution of non-violent Islamist narratives and networks to terrorism”, he wrote.
The Prevent strategy was launched after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US and 2005 bombings in London, in an effort to both educate communities at risk of radicalisation and to avert future terrorist acts.
The policy makes it a statutory duty for schools, local authorities, prisons and NHS trusts to report any concerns about individuals potentially under the influence of extremist ideologies.
To underline his points, Shawcross cited figures from 2020-21, when 46 per cent of 688 cases that referred to the “channel” part of the Prevent programme, which handles individual cases, were the result of concerns about extreme rightwing radicalisation. About 22 per cent related to Islamist extremism.
By contrast, he wrote “80 per cent of the counter-terrorism police network’s live investigations are Islamist while 10 per cent are extreme rightwing”.
Shawcross’s findings were criticised by rights groups, 17 of which joined many UK Muslim associations in boycotting the report after it was set up.
The review was launched in 2021 in a bid to address resentment of the programme, which was undermining its legitimacy particularly among Muslim groups. However, the appointment of Shawcross, formerly head of the Charity ommission, to lead the review inflamed tensions.
Ilyas Nagdee, Amnesty International’s racial justice director, said on Wednesday the review had no legitimacy and that Shawcross’s history of “comments on Muslims and Islam” should have precluded his involvement.
It was “riddled with biased thinking, errors and plain anti-Muslim prejudice”, he said, adding that it had passed over the “disastrous” consequences Prevent was having for freedom of expression, activism and civil rights.
“A proper independent review of Prevent should have looked at the host of human rights violations that the programme has led to — but these have largely been passed over in silence.”
Detective chief superintendent Maria Lovegrove, counter-terrorism policing’s national co-ordinator for Prevent, welcomed the report’s recognition of the work of the programme in reducing the risk of violent extremism.
“We will now work alongside the Home Office to respond to the recommendations, and continue our contribution to the government’s . . . strategy,” she said.
