A highly-anticipated report into the Government’s Prevent strategy, which is designed to detect and prevent radicalisation, has been published this week, with scathing findings about the state of the nation’s flagship anti-extremism programme.
The report, headed by William Shawcross, who was appointed as the Independent Reviewer of Prevent in January 2021 by the Government, has made several shocking revelations.
Principally, the report laments that the approach to tackling Islamism has become ever narrower, while the approach to the far-right has become broader. This has various manifestations, including different thresholds for what constitutes Islamist extremism and far-right extremism, and an excessive focus on relatively minor threats from the far-right over more urgent and serious threats from Islamist groups. The Research Information and Communications Unit, a Home Office unit established in 2007 as part of the Prevent programme, comes in for heavy criticism in the report for focusing too much on the far-right at the expense of Islamism.
