Governments are properly concerned with security and public safety. Historically, this has been about external threats from foreign powers, but, increasingly, it is directed at actors within the state using violence to secure political ends. Such actors are routinely described as hostile to ‘our’ values, and we are enjoined not to let them win by resiling from our democratic way of life.
The UK now has the most extensive legislation in Europe covering both violent and non-violent terrorism. It also has an extensive programme of counter extremism measures – called Prevent – to tackle ideas and activities which, while lawful in themselves, are claimed to be possible precursors to terrorist actions. Interventions under Prevent, therefore, potentially represent a major challenge to civil liberties (especially, the rights of children and young people, as we shall see) in the name of public safety.
In this review, I address the Independent Review of Prevent that was first announced as part of the passage of the Counter Terrorism and Border Security Act in February 2019. This was to have been the first since the strategy had begun in 2003. There had been an internal review by the Home Office in 2011 (endorsed by the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Lord Carlile) but nothing since then that addressed the mounting criticisms of its associated programmes and interventions.
William Shawcross, Independent Review of Prevent, Home Office, UK Government,2023.
There have been many vicissitudes along the way. First, the initial appointment of Lord Carlile to head the review was met with widespread criticism from civil society groups and a legal challenge after which he stepped down. He was replaced in January 2021 by William Shawcross, someone active in neo-conservative think tanks like the Henry Jackson Society and Policy Exchange. He was also a former Head of the Charity Commission between 2012-18 when he initiated investigations of Muslim-led charitable organisations. This was regarded as provocative and many individuals and organisations – Muslim-led groups and wider civil liberties organisations like Liberty, Amnesty International and the Runneymede Trust – announced a boycott of the review.
The People’s Review of Prevent was set up to represent those who were impacted by Prevent and to provide an analysis of research and other reports into Prevent that we believed – correctly as it would turn out – would be ignored by Shawcross. In anticipation of the imminent publication of his report we published our own in February 2022. It was not until March 2023 that he finally published his report, although its content was leaked to right-wing media during the six months prior to publication, together with lobbying activities and reports by Policy Exchange supporting its projected conclusions. These included the claim that, ‘activists’ against Prevent were seeking to ‘delegitimise counter-terrorism’ and were themselves extremists and should be subject to measures to curtail their activities and the expression of their views.
Significantly, the Shawcross Report itself would claim that if there had been a ‘chilling’ effect on the free speech of Muslim students and staff on campuses this should be regarded as a consequence of the ‘anxieties’ generated by campaigners and not by Prevent itself. At the same time, it was claimed that a campaign by MEND (Muslim Engagement and Development, a non-profit that promotes British Muslim involvement in media and politics) against Prevent at Salford University had meant that worrying signs were not identified before Salman Abedi detonated his bomb at the Manchester Arena in May 2017.
The final volume of the Manchester Arena Inquiry Report was published shortly after the Shawcross Report and explicitly denies that Abedi could have been identified through Prevent and stopped – that report lays any blame squarely with the security services acting under the Pursue strand of CONTEST (and also on inadequate safety measures at venues).
There were also claims that Prevent had been too sensitive to safeguarding the vulnerabilities of individuals with not enough attention paid to protecting the public. Prevent, it was argued, lost focus on ‘Islamist’ extremism and was giving too much attention to right-wing extremism, despite the former being where the real threat to the public lay.
When the Shawcross Report was finally published it was as tendentious and poorly researched as the media promotion of it had led us to expect. Our own People’s Review of Prevent was not discussed, despite it having been published a year earlier. Nor were the earlier reports of groups like Medact, MEND, Cage or the Open Society Foundation discussed. Instead, critics were attacked in an adjacent report on ‘Delegitimising Counter-Terrorism’ published by Policy Exchange the previous April. The Shawcross report also ignored the critical commentaries of UN Rapporteurs.
It even ignored the various reports of the government’s own Commission for Countering Extremism. This is particularly significant since it proposes a major change in its role from a body advisory to government, to a body having responsibility for directing Prevent. This was among 34 recommendations, all of which were immediately accepted by government with very limited debate in parliament.
Few of the recommendations require primary legislation to implement, and many had already been quietly put in place under new Home Secretaries as part of the rapid turnover of government ministers. This included the interim appointment of Robin Simcox as Commissioner for Countering Extremism in March 2021. His ‘substantive’ appointment was confirmed in July 2022. He is a former research fellow at the Washington-based, Heritage Foundation, whose president, Kevin Roberts was a keynote speaker at the recent National Conservative Conference in London.
The recommendations in the Shawcross Report represent a power-grab by the Home Office and a considerable centralisation and concentration of power. It is taking place under a neo-Conservative ideological framing of a ‘clash of civilisations’ in which the issue is not simply that of countering terrorism, but of limiting the expression of normative Islamic values within the public sphere. It is a power-grab that has been ignored by the mainstream media and Parliament. Where there are concerns expressed about the very serious lurch to the right in the Conservative Party represented by ‘national conservatism’, it is mainly seen as positioning to capture the party after a forthcoming electoral defeat. There is little appreciation that it is currently in control in the Home Office where it has the full support of the prime minister.
How did we get here? And what is at stake?
Prevent is one of the four component parts of the UK government’s counter-terrorism strategy – CONTEST. This strategy was first put in place in 2003and has four strands.Protect, which is concerned with strengthening protection against a terrorist attack (now subject to new legislation following the Manchester Arena bombing – ‘Martyn’s Law’); Prepare, which is about the mitigation of the impact of a terrorist attack; Pursue, which is directed at stopping terrorist attacks; and Prevent, which has the purpose of stopping people becoming terrorists, or from supporting terrorism.
Significantly, the three other strands of CONTEST come under the remit of the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation who has a statutory obligation to provide an annual report and also has the power to initiate investigation of different aspects of the strategy. Prevent is exempted from this oversight.
Prevent has undergone multiple iterations since 2003, but one feature remains constant. Unlike the other strands of CONTEST, it operates ‘upstream’ of any intention to commit a terrorist offence. It is part of what criminologists call the ‘pre-criminal space’. In one aspect – which, in the light of subsequent developments we might regard as relatively benign, albeit that it pathologised Muslim communities – Prevent involved programmes to secure community integration and mitigate what was perceived as ‘self-segregation’ and distance from the influence of ‘British values’.
It is striking that Shawcross is both hostile to these programmes and strikingly ignorant about them. He criticises them for being insufficiently focused on extremism and also of including individuals and groups in their delivery that he regards as extremist. Yet most of his discussion concerns evaluations of individual programmes conducted by the Behavioural Insights Team as far back as 2017.
He seems unaware that all such programmes have been gathered within the Home Office under the umbrella of ‘Delivering a Stronger Britain Together’ since 2015. This has involved local coordinators in each Prevent Priority Area. The programme was positively reviewed by Ipso Mori in June 2021, since when there have been no new funding calls and the system of local coordinators has been disbanded. On this, Shawcross is silent, despite it being a large part of his remit. It is instead a fait accompli carried out within the Home Office during the review period, seemingly with his nod of approval.
His silence is significant. It follows from the priority he gives to the security side of Prevent over that of community cohesion. This shift is something that was indicated in 2011 following the internal Home Office review of the Prevent Strategy, which Shawcross treats as his benchmark. This flagged up the need to clearly distinguish the promotion of community cohesion from the security concern to identify individuals at risk of being radicalised and disrupt that process.
This was despite the fact that there was no evidence that precursors to the development of a terrorist mindset could be identified despite extensive interventions being planned to uncover those vulnerable to radicalisation. In fact, the checklist of indicators that has come to be used in all training is derived from a study of prisoners convicted of non-violent terrorist offences and deemed to be at possible risk of committing violent offences. There are no studies that show the validity of the indicators when applied more generally.
The expansion of Prevent in this direction was on hold during the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, but was put in place by the new government in 2015. A new Prevent Duty was set out in the Counter Terrorism and Security Act of 2015. Paragraph 26 set out a general duty that: ‘(1) A specified authority must, in the exercise of its functions, have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.’
The duty applies to education settings from nurseries, primary and secondary schools and on to colleges and universities, to health settings and across youth services. It also applies in prisons and probation services, although measures had already been in place there before the 2015 Act. It is also available to the police who encourage reporting from members of the public outside the settings described above.
According to the Home Office, over a million individuals responsible for the provision of public services had by 2019 been trained to spot the signs of possible extremism (data on those trained since then are not available). For the most part, the Shawcross Report deals with Prevent in the years since the introduction of the Prevent Duty.
Nowhere in the 2015 Act is extremism defined. Nor does the Shawcross Report provide any new definitions, relying instead on those provided in the Home Office Prevent Strategy Review from 2011, where it is described as ‘opposition to British values’. However, in a worrying paragraph, the Shawcross Report refers to legislation to define extremism as something that would have served as the ‘backbone’ of the Prevent strategy (paragraph 2.9). Instead, he said, the government left it to a new Commission for Countering Extremism which it set up in 2017. In other words, guidance on what constitutes extremism is provided by government agencies responsible for the implementation of Prevent. The Commission for Countering Extremism is no longer operating in an advisory role, but is now the political backbone of Prevent.
This is aligned with the reorganisation of the Home Office and its relationships with other government departments, as well new forms of control over the implementation of Prevent nationally. It is a concentration of power for which there is no independent scrutiny – the Shawcross Report proposes that complaints should be the responsibility of the very body within the Home Office that will direct Prevent.
It also represents a centralisation of power. The Report recommends that local autonomy should be reduced and Prevent panels organised through Regional Commissioners directly responsible to the Home Office. This reverses a move in the opposite direction which had been taking place under ‘Operation Dovetail’. This had been piloting greater local autonomy in nine Prevent Priority Areas. There is no discussion in the Shawcross Report of the evaluation of the pilots, though there had been an initial plan in 2018 to extend it across all areas.
Notwithstanding this, the recommendations for a more draconian implementation of Prevent do include the shadow of a recognition of what is at issue from the perspective of civil liberties. Adopting the language of Policy Exchange, the Shawcross Report comments that, ‘the campaign against Prevent has included some civil liberties groups and activists who seemingly, as a matter of principle, oppose a state-run scheme to counter specific ideas, attitudes, and non-criminal behaviours, no matter how light touch the scheme’s methods’ (paragraph 6.250).
Prevent is, indeed, ‘a state-run scheme to counter specific ideas, attitudes, and non-criminal behaviours’. It is one, as we have seen, without any independent checks against its powers and operating under a neo-conservative (in truth, national conservative) ideology. However, it is far from ‘light-touch’ – one indication, perhaps, is the cry of pain and outrage expressed in the report about the application of Prevent to right-wing views, even where these are considered by Shawcross to be distasteful. Islamophobia, apparently, is a problem generated by ‘Muslimness’.
Let me examine just how ‘light touch’ is the hand of the state.
There is a deceptively simple set of procedures associated with Prevent. First an individual is flagged within a setting where the Prevent duty applies. There will be an initial assessment by responsible members of staff, usually also involving a counter-terrorism police officer. The matter will be either dismissed (albeit data on the individual can be kept on police data bases and potentially shared with other agencies) or referred to a local Prevent panel. The latter includes counter-terrorism police officers, as well as representatives of other agencies.
We only have data on cases when they reach this point, but the Prevent panel makes a decision whether the case merits adoption onto the Channel programme, dismissal or some other intervention (for example, by mental health services). Participation is voluntary – as it has to be since no laws have been broken – but the context is coercive. The parents and guardians of children and young people caught up in Prevent will also be at risk of social services being brought to bear on them.
Prevent has a particularly significant role in the lives of children and young people. All children are subject to scrutiny under the Prevent duty from the moment they start nursery school until they leave secondary school (and it continues in higher education). In 2021/22, the education sector provided over a third of all referrals (36%). At the same time referrals are younger than from other sectors – the median age being 14, means that half of all referrals (1152 children) are under 14, representing around five children for each school day in England. There can be no serious claim that these children can represent any kind of serious terrorism risk.
In fact, there are an increasing number of young people charged with terrorism offences (usually non-violent offences associated with downloading proscribed material). This is largely an artifact of the introduction of new offences associated with Counter Terrorism and Border Security Act in 2019. They do not indicate heightened risks that would justify a reinforcement of Prevent. Indeed, in his annual report published shortly after the Shawcross Report, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, recommended that such individuals were better treated outside the criminal justice system and without the stigma of their offences being regarded as ‘terrorism-related’.
Instead, the Shawcross Report proposes to push Prevent in the opposite direction, away from safeguarding and towards understanding individuals as ‘responsible agents’ rather than as ‘vulnerable’. Indeed, he expresses some concern that a lot of Prevent referrals end up being redirected toward other social services, including mental health services. Logically, this is an argument for removing Prevent from schools (and, indeed, also from the health sector) where, safeguarding should be focused on the interests of the child and not an ill-defined future risk of radicalisation.
Shawcross, however, is not interested in reducing the pervasive scrutiny of Prevent except where it is right-wing views that might be caught up in the net. He claims in the Foreword to his report that, ‘my research shows that the present boundaries around what is termed by Prevent as extremist Islamist ideology are drawn too narrowly while the boundaries around the ideology of the Extreme Right-Wing are too broad’ (page 3). However, the data suggests otherwise. In 2021/22 just 13% of all referrals were adopted onto Channel. Of these, 42% were for far-right extremism, while 19% were for Islamist extremism. Yet, the proportion of all referrals was similar for both categories (20% for right wing extremism, 16% for Islamist extremism). In other words, the implication already is the opposite of what he claims; the definition is drawn broadly for ‘Islamist’ extremism and narrowly for right-wing extremism. A greater focus on ‘Islamist extremism’ would give rise to a greater number of Prevent referrals of Muslims, but a decline in the proportion of them going onto Channel. For right-wing extremism, the opposite would occur; that is, that there would be fewer referrals, but a higher proportion of adoptions onto Channel.
So far it might seem that the Shawcross Report presages little more than a doubling-down on already established features of Prevent. I think that there is something more fundamental underway with particular implications for universities. The recommendations coincide with the passage of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. This sets out a ‘duty to promote the importance of freedom of speech and academic freedom.’ It derives from right-wing agitation around ‘cancel culture’. However, Prevent is itself a form of cancel culture, a cancelling of speech that is lawful, but deemed extremist. Is it, therefore, in conflict with the new legal framework on free speech?
As we have seen. the determination of what is ‘extremist’ is the responsibility of the Commissioner for Countering Extremism. The Shawcross Report makes two specific recommendations applying to universities. One is aimed at countering the ‘anti-Prevent agenda’ in Higher Education, which proposes revised training for those overseeing events (recommendation 28), the other is the creation of a network of advisors in the Department for Education who can be invited to speak at universities to promote Prevent (recommendation 33).
However, the Report also named two Muslim-led civil society organisations as ‘extremist’ – MEND and Cage. The Policy Exchange Report on ‘Deligitimising Counter Terrorism’ from which the new role for the Commission for Countering Extremism derives went further. There should be a register of approved Muslim-led civil society organisations and all bodies in receipt of public funds should be directed not to engage with those deemed ‘extremist’.
This, of course, has implications for local government as well as national government, but has a particular significance for universities. Not only would speakers involved in these organisations be excluded from speaking on campus, so, too, would students that volunteered for them risk being referred to Prevent. Academic research would be affected in so far as the ‘impact agenda’ requires the collaboration with ‘user groups’ – Muslim-led civil society groups deemed ‘extremist’ are potentially excluded from collaboration. The Policy Exchange report went further than Shawcross to indicate that not only MEND and Cage, but also the Muslim Council of Britain, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, Prevent Watch, the Federation of Student Islamic Society, and any active criticism of Prevent should be considered for identification as ‘extremist’. They also included the People’s Review of Prevent and its authors!
I began this review with the common view that terrorism is a threat to our values. In this context, it is a commonplace to refer to terrorism as a form of political communication. Perhaps we should also see counter-terrorism as a form of political communication, too. What is being communicated are not liberal values, but those of an authoritarian national conservatism.