After the shocking events at Westminster on Wednesday, there was much speculation about the provenance of Khalid Masood. And now we’re learning something of his truth.
Born and bred in the garden of England, at some point the 52-year-old converted to a depraved strain of Islam. This isn’t a gratuitous swipe at the corpus of orthodox Islam to whom such behaviour is as alien as it is to everyone else. What happened on Wednesday is a product of the fragmentation of Islam through a century of political upheaval, history, culture and teaching. What seems particularly shocking is that it is happening in Britain. Masood didn’t go to fight in Syria; he was radicalised in Britain.
If we didn’t know it at 9/11, we knew after 7/7: that what we are confronting in our own country is a battle of ideas so potent that it is, as David Cameron often reminded us, the “struggle of our generation”.
The Government’s answer is its counter-radicalisation strategy, Prevent – dismissed the morning after Masood’s attack as “rotten” by Iqbal Bhana, deputy chair of the Government’s advisory group on hate crime, prejudice and community cohesion. “Rotten,” he said, is what “90 per cent” of Muslims think of Prevent.
The Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott has said Prevent “demonises whole communities. It criminalises ideas, even on the vaguest grounds.” There are many who agree with her.
The Muslim Council of Britain and a host of Islamist organisations have campaigned vociferously for Prevent to be scrapped ever since it was started a decade ago. The last independent reviewer of terrorist legislation, David Anderson QC, didn’t go that far. But he did argue for an “independent” review, saying that while Prevent was about safeguarding not spying, there was nonetheless a strong perception among Muslims that it involved the latter.
Prevent’s critics, however, are going to be disappointed. There has been, not an independent review of Prevent, but an internal review of the Government’s entire counter-terrorism strategy called “Refresh”. It is widely expected to propose a major expansion of Prevent after the review concluded it should be “strengthened not undermined”.
That is because the Government believes Prevent works. Those assessed within the public sector as being vulnerable to radicalisation are offered mentoring through a specialist Prevent programme called Channel. Referrals to Channel are now running at around 4,000 a year, many of them children. Approximately 20 per cent are offered mentoring sessions with Home Office-approved mentors, some of whom have themselves been extremists.
“I’ve worked with kids who wanted to go to Syria,” one mentor told me. “We stopped them from becoming terrorists. Their parents love that!”
Channel seems to flick a switch in most of the youngsters. Seventy per cent have not needed to return, but we don’t hear much about that because opprobrium from anti-Prevent activists inhibits these grateful parents from publicly expressing their support for the programme.
What about Abbott’s charge that Prevent “demonises” Muslims? A quarter of referrals to Channel are now those assessed as being vulnerable to right-wing extremist ideas. So much for singling out one community.
And Mr Bhana’s assertion that “90 per cent” of Muslims think Prevent is “rotten”? He hasn’t done an attitudinal survey of British Muslims. ICM, however, recently completed one of the largest.
Published by Policy Exchange last December, it found:
- 78 per cent of respondents backed government regulation to prevent “anyone unsuitable from being able to tutor in madrasas”.
- 74 per cent favoured the banning of tutoring that “promotes extreme views or is deemed incompatible with fundamental British values”. In the East and South East, it rose to 82 per cent and in Wales 93 per cent.
- 55 per cent expressed support for straight-forward law and order policies such as the provision of extra police on the beat.
- 30 per cent supported provision of security cameras.
- 29 per cent of Muslims said the Government should take primary responsibility for deterring radicalisation while 38 per cent said that “Muslims themselves” should do so. But as Policy Exchange points out, the latter “does not preclude an openness to government intervention and various initiatives”.
Not full-on support for Prevent-style measures, I grant you, but nowhere near the marginal 10 per cent support among Muslims as suggested by Mr Bhana.
Prevent has become victim to a lot of lazy falsehoods. On BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions this week, the Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood Shabana Mahmood breezily asserted that Prevent had “lost the confidence of the Muslim community in this country. I think that’s been recognised by individuals such as Lord Carlile” the former government appointed Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation. I checked with Lord Carlile. “I have never ever said that” he replied.
Bhana also says he wants Muslims “to point [radicalised Muslims] out to our security services as threats to our community and the well-being of our country and we can only do that if we take the community with us rather than making them, working against us”. In fact, many Muslim groups have engaged with Prevent.
Bhana declares that the Government needs to “start to learn to work with those communities to say: ‘OK, how do we tackle this? Because we are all in this together.’” Are we? The Government believes Islamist ideology is a major radicalising factor because it can batten onto whatever grievances may be swirling around the head of a person vulnerable to radicalisation – a person like Khalid Masood.
The problem with “community leaders” such as Mr Bhana and organisations like the MCB with their demands of “engagement” is that they seem determined to argue that almost anything but ideology is driving radicalisation.
Of course there have been problems with Prevent. No British government has ever before felt the need to launch an official strategy to challenge an ideology, and inevitably conservative Islamic practices have sometimes become conflated with radicalisation, leading to referral to Channel when no such action was needed.
But with 600,000 frontline public-sector staff having had some training in how to spot signs of radicalisation, such hurtful errors should be being minimised.
In any case, what’s the alternative to Prevent? No one has yet come up with one. More and more countries are developing similar de-radicalisation programmes. The irony is that they see the UK’s Prevent strategy as the gold standard.
At the heart of the fevered debate over Prevent is one searingly obvious fact: radicalisation posing a threat to national security does not emanate from the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jewish, Polish, Romanian, Estonian, West Indian, or any other community. It does comes pre-eminently from Muslim communities. But to point that out is to be accused of demonisation.
It’s hard to see how any government is going to make much further progress in deradicalisation, if certain political figures keep on suggesting that Prevent and its supporters are scapegoating Muslims.
