‘One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.’
Voltaire
How do you spot a terrorist? How do you pick out a violent jihadi? How do we identify an insurgent? How do we work out that someone is of a type to have terrorist tendencies? Is there even a type? Is there an identifiable pattern of behaviour we should look out for? Is there a ‘look’, a style or manner we can easily identify with terrorist sorts? Do they hang out in particular haunts? Do they live in specific places? And, yes, let’s address the big elephant in the room: do they follow a particular faith, Islam?
Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could have a terrorist version of night-vision goggles, where the darkness would part and reveal the terrorist to us. Because if we could spot them we could then stop them.
The Muslims would love to be able to spot them, to pick out the few hundred who brainwash our kids into becoming bombers, the few for whom we, ‘the Muslims’ are as much, if not more, of a target as you, ‘the rest of Britain’. If we could hand over to the authorities the bad apples who spoil it for the rest of us, the ones that cause carnage and leave ordinary Muslims to pick up the pieces as victims of the Islamophobic backlash and the ever-intrusive policy-making which invariably follows a terrorist attack, trust me, we would. For us Muslims, the terrorists are the enemy within our faith.
But we, the British Muslims, all 3 million of us, like the rest of Britain, like government and the whole police and security apparatus of this country, find it hard to spot the terrorist because there is no single road to radicalization, no identifiable journey to violent jihad and no specific identifiable type of Muslim that’s on a terrorism trajectory.
Our domestic intelligence service, MI5, set out terrorist telltale signs in a document in 2008 which included, amongst other factors such as a history of criminality, experience of marginalization and racism, low-grade employment despite having a degree and religious naivety.1 Another assessment, developed by Elaine Pressman, includes twenty-eight factors, including sexual orientation, marriage, age, past criminality, contact with violent extremists and extremist websites, to name a few.2
Simply put, the picture is not black and white.
We are now twelve years on from 7/7, and yet I believe government’s understanding today of what makes a jihadi is less sophisticated, less evidence-based and, sadly, less honest. We have been on a slippery slope of bad policy-making that can be seen most starkly in the development of the UK’s official policy response to terrorism, CONTEST, a publicly available strategy developed in 2003 by the Labour Government in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack and published for the first time in 2006 as a response to 7/7, a strategy continued by the Coalition and the Tories.
Today’s government is worryingly less engaged with British Muslim communities than it was in 2005 and less trusted by them. Policy-making has over time shifted the focus away from the hard evidence of what makes a ‘jihadi’ and chosen instead to shine a spotlight on the abstract notion of ‘ideology’. Counter-terrorism policy has extended the tentacles of officialdom into not just attempting to prevent violence but also preventing thought that the government finds unacceptable. Rather than doing counter-terrorism with British Muslims to defeat the menace of terrorism collectively, we have chosen to do counter-terrorism to Muslim communities. And through this approach we have both created an obstacle to confronting and defeating terrorism and alienated a large community of law-abiding citizens.
CONTEST is a strategy in four parts: Protect, Prepare, Pursue and Prevent.
Protect is the P whose purpose is to strengthen protection against a terrorist attack in the UK or against its interests overseas and so reduce their vulnerability. The work focuses on border security, the transport system, national infrastructure and plans for the protection of public places. It’s looking at the potential weak links terrorists could exploit and putting protection measures in place – as politicians would say, getting ahead of the curve.
Prepare is the P that works to mitigate the impact of a terrorist attack where that attack cannot be stopped. This includes work to bring a terrorist attack to an end and to increase the UK’s resilience so we can recover from its aftermath. This is about us making sure we are ready to deal with the aftermath when terrorists strike, which sadly they will.
Pursue is the P that attempts to stop terrorist attacks by detecting, prosecuting and otherwise disrupting those who plot to carry out attacks against the UK or its interests overseas. This includes the sneaky-beaky world of the security services, police investigations and having the right laws in place to find, capture and lock up those that want to cause carnage.
And Prevent is the P in the strategy with the stated aim ‘to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism’. It was supposed to be the helpful ‘upstream’ intervention and yet it’s the P that’s managed to perturb the most people. The Prevent strand of the strategy was potentially a brave, dynamic and cutting-edge approach to counter-terrorism; it was committed to tackling terrorism by tackling the causes of terrorism. And yet now, a decade on, it is considered by a whole coalition of academics, lawyers, politicians, police officers and others to be not just ineffective but indeed counterproductive. Described as a policy ‘to be remembered as a textbook example of how to alienate absolutely everybody’, a policy designed to spot terrorists and stop terrorism has become a policy which has put on ice genuine policy work to understand the varied and complex causes of terrorism.3
The official purpose of Prevent in its first public outing in 2006 was to tackle the reasons which could result in people becoming terrorists and the milestones in the journey to the violent act. This first pillar of Prevent in 2006 was to tackle disadvantage, inequalities and discrimination. This thinking was an early acknowledgement that discrimination such as Islamophobia, racism and inequality of opportunity in education and employment feeds terrorism, something supported by research into terrorism in other developed countries, which shows a correlation between these issues and the prevalence of terrorism.4 It was borne out in the academic studies looking at the numbers of Belgian Muslims joining IS and the increase of terrorist attacks by Belgian Muslims in Europe, which found that the education and employment gap between native Belgians and Belgian immigrants was higher than anywhere in Europe. It also found that an astonishing 50 per cent of Belgians of Moroccan origins lived below the poverty line.5
The second pillar of Prevent was deterring those who facilitate and encourage others to engage in terrorism by creating an environment where these ideas are subjected to civic challenge and debate.6 And the third was engaging in a battle of ideas, ‘challenging the ideologies that extremists believe can justify the use of violence primarily by helping Muslims who dispute these ideas to do so’. That is an intra-community struggle against violence.
I agreed with all four strands of the original CONTEST strategy, including the early thinking behind Prevent. For me the Prevent policy was, and still should and could be, a battle between violence and democracy, based on a belief that everyone has a right to their view, providing it does not break the law or incite or encourage someone else to break the law. Unsavoury views are something democracy, if it works, should be able to temper, although the 2016 US presidential election has left many questioning this notion.7 Democracy is the process through which changing views are reflected. And, as we’ve learned from history, one generation’s unsavoury view can become another generation’s acceptable policy position. The promotion of homosexuality as a lifestyle of equal value and worth as heterosexuality was considered by the Thatcher government as an unsavoury anti-family view; for Cameron’s Conservatives it was the cornerstone of his belief in family, although there is sadly nothing to guarantee that it won’t swing back the other way. Democrats, those of us who are advocates and supporters of democracy as opposed to anarchists or terrorists, agree that democracy is the process that allows all views to be aired and tempered.
The battle of ideas about violence and the justification of violence is one in which government needs to be a player and quite rightly stand against groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and their offshoot Al Muhajiroun, who have condemned Muslims engaged in the political process. It is right that the battle of ideas and views on everything from tax to torture, farming to family to foreign policy, welfare to wind farms is debated and accommodated through our parliamentary democracy.
The battle of ideas was but one part of the Prevent work, alongside tackling discrimination, engaging communities and addressing grievances.
The Prevent strategy, however, over time from 2003 to 2015, slowly started to shift its emphasis. Concerns around discrimination and grievance were no longer the starting point and they moved from the first pillar under Prevent to the last. The process of understanding – not accepting, but understanding – why British Muslim communities themselves felt people were being drawn into violent extremism for politicians and policy-makers became a less important issue. The ‘Muslim communities’ views’, which themselves were varied and broad on the drivers of terrorism, were sidelined, and we saw the start of a process of disengagement between government and British Muslims, an issue I will address in chapter 5.
Since 7/7 in the UK, as had happened after 9/11 in the US, discussions around the ‘root causes’ of terrorism became too difficult an area for policy-makers. The emphasis shifted from academic evidence, polling data and indeed the reasons given by the terrorists themselves to the abstract notion of ‘ideology’. To discuss root causes was seen as an expression of disloyalty. Politicians were paranoid that to seek to understand would result in them being labelled as apologists. Politicians needed to be seen to be fighting these evil terrorists with raw force; ‘shock and awe’ was the order of the day. For politicians of Muslim heritage the policy space within which to operate was even narrower. And as the space to discuss root causes closed down, from around 2006 ‘radicalization’ became the new buzzword for the discussion of all things that led up to the actual violent act of terrorism. Radicalization was defined as the process someone goes through in becoming a terrorist, not a reason or root cause. And with this shift of focus to process we could turn a blind eye to the reasons. We moved to the how of terrorism without sufficiently understanding the why. This was one of a number of early mistakes in tackling terrorism, because without understanding the why, without engaging with the root causes, we created a vacuum in the thinking of policy-makers who needed to prevent individuals from setting foot on the track towards terrorism.
I accept that a terrorist attack like 7/7, played out in the glare of a twenty-four-hour international media circus, triggered a political need to find a quick and easy answer to what makes a terrorist. But it is at times when our nation faces the greatest threat that we need our politicians to raise their game. The right answer was a considered and measured response, but the easy answer was a quick answer: we reached for ideology, the ideology of Islamism. Islamism became a quick, catch-all term, a reason that could encompass and explain radicalization in all its formats and manifestations, a term that would inform our thinking on how to spot a potential terrorist, a term that is now used in counter-terrorism policy-making across the world.
Islamism as the answer also allowed us to shift the problem of terrorism on to ‘them’, ‘the Muslims’, whose religion, Islam, politicians argued, was the basis of the ‘ideology’, albeit, as politicians would take great care to stress, ‘a perverted version of the faith’. Terrorism became ‘their problem’ for them to fix as opposed to anything that may appear to be ‘our problem’ that we all needed to fix together. Civil war, foreign invasions, conflict, upheavals, strife in countries around the world are shared problems. As I explored in chapter 3, where we see these challenges is where we find the vast majority of terrorist acts and deaths caused by terrorism. These are our problems to solve.
Similarly, in developed countries where discrimination and disengagement are prevalent, terrorism is too. These too are our problems to fix, as a country, as a nation, to create more equal, more engaged communities where all feel as if they have equal access to opportunity and feel as if they belong. And yet in Britain we pushed on to the shoulders of a fragmented and challenged community of 3 million a problem which we as a country with all our resources could not easily fix.
But what exactly is Islamism, and what is Islamist extremism?
Islamism has been used in its modern sense as a shorthand for political Islam since the 1970s and ’80s.8 It is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘Islamic militancy or fundamentalism’. In UK policy-making it been used as a term to describe the basis of extremism that leads to terrorism. I’m not a huge fan of Wikipedia but I would encourage you to read the Wiki page on Islamism, which gives a helpful dozen-plus definitions of the term, which starts to explain just how varied and broad its use can be.9
‘Islamism’ was originally used as a term in the 1700s and 1800s by the likes of French philosopher Voltaire and French philologist Joseph Ernest Renan simply to mean the religion of Islam. This was reflected in the 1900 version of the New English Dictionary, which defined Islamism as the ‘religious system of the Moslems’. It was seen as the more respectable way to describe this religion, which was at that time regularly referred to as Mohammedanism. So for over 200 years and until less than a hundred years ago Islamism simply meant Islam. By the time of the completion of the publication of the Encyclopedia of Islam in English, German and French editions in 1938 the more recognizable term ‘Islam’ was being used to describe the religion.10
Decades later, when the West tried to find a term to describe a form of Islam which we felt was anti-modern or aggressive, or when we needed to project negative connotations on to a particular practised version of Islam, the preferred term was ‘fundamentalism’. ‘Fundamentalism’ was used to describe Protestant Christians in America who asserted a literalist version of Christianity, but became a term to describe the Iranian revolution in 1979, with the followers of Khomeini described as Islamic fundamentalists.11
Many French scholars preferred the term ‘Islamism’ to the English term ‘fundamentalism’. Some instead used ‘intégrisme’, a term which had been employed to describe a Catholic movement in nineteenth-century France which rejected the creation of individual state churches and believed the state to be subordinate to worldwide Catholicism united under the Pope. This pan-Catholic movement, which placed religion above state and the Catholic ‘ummah’ brotherhood identity above national identities, was seen as anti-pluralist and as a movement that sought to assert a Catholic underpinning to all social and political action, rejecting all alternatives. I believe this is a fair description which could be given to some Muslim thought today, and thus ‘intégrisme’ may well be that elusive term that is missing in today’s policy-making, a more accurate and politically less objectionable term than ‘Islamism’.
My concerns about the term Islamism have always been that to ordinary people, Muslims or otherwise, it simply means Islam. It was exactly the same argument put by Maxime Rodinson, one of the most authoritative French historians of Islam. ‘Islamism is often given as a synonym for Islam,’ Rodinson warned. ‘If one chooses this term, the reader may become confused between an excited extremist who wishes to kill everyone and a reasonable person who believes in God in the Muslim manner, something perfectly respectable.’12
These concerns on the use of language and descriptions were initially taken on board by David Cameron, who wrote in 2007, ‘Many Muslims I’ve talked to about these issues are deeply offended by the use of the word “Islamic” or “Islamist” to describe the terrorist threat we face today,’ and argued that efforts to fight terrorism ‘are not helped by lazy use of language’. Indeed Cameron argued that ‘by using the word “Islamist” to describe the threat, we actually help do the terrorist ideologues’ work for them’.13 In government this seemed to concern David less. It’s a term I dislike, because to average Mrs Smith it means ‘the Muslims’ and to average Mrs Hussain it means ‘her’. For the average Brit it simply means ‘Islam’.
It’s a term that even in its academic use has such a broad spectrum of meaning, encompassing at one end democratically elected parties in countries such as Tunisia, Turkey and Morocco, parties who are our partners, allies and business associates, to Al Qaeda and ISIS at the other. It simply fails to accurately describe the problem. This was an argument made by the then US assistant secretary of state Robert Palletreau Jnr in 1994, namely that:
‘Islamists’ are Muslims with political goals … They do not refer to phenomena that are necessarily sinister: there are many legitimate, socially responsible Muslim groups with political goals. However, there are also Islamists who operate outside the law. Groups or individuals who operate outside the law – who espouse violence to achieve their aims – are properly called extremists.14
And the issue was explored in 2016 by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, in its report on ‘Political Islam’, where it recommended that the government ‘devise a vocabulary that doesn’t group these types together’.15
Some of my colleagues in government were unable to draw this distinction between ‘Muslims with political goals’ and those on a trajectory to terrorism. And thus they were unable to draw a distinction between policy-making to tackle terrorism and policy-making towards British Muslims. This inability to differentiate is a problem in the media too.
I am a politician and I am a Muslim. I am a Muslim with political goals: a goal to have a low-tax economy; a goal to have a small state but one which always provides a safety net for the most vulnerable in our nation; a goal to have healthcare free at the point of need; a goal that a child’s achievement should be determined by their ability and not by how much their parents earn; a goal that we preserve and protect this planet that is our shared home; a goal that we treat all communities equally irrespective of race and faith; and a goal that we take our place in the world with humility and understanding rooted in history, ethics, and principles based on universal human rights.
Politicians with a faith or religion are not new. Many of our modern-day European political parties are rooted in faith, in Christianity. The Christian Democratic Union, the CDU in Germany, the party of Angela Merkel, is probably the most well known, but there are similar parties all across Europe, from the Christian Democratic People’s Party in Switzerland, to the Austrian People’s Party and Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) in the Netherlands.
Like Christian political ideology, Islamist ideology too has created a new generation of Muslim democrats from a plethora of parties which played a pivotal role in the Arab Spring, such as the Ennahda Party in Tunisia, the Justice and Development Party in Morocco and the AK Party in Turkey, which, as a centre-right party, presided over a period of unprecedented economic growth and with whom the Conservative Party are aligned as an international sister party.
In 2011, my party eventually adopted the term ‘Islamist extremism’ to try and differentiate between Islamists, many of whom we had strong international relationships with, and those that we felt had a world view which involved imposing ‘their’ values on ‘us’. But although the terminology changed, a little, the thinking did not, with many politically active British Muslims still seen as part of the problem. Policy-makers failed to understand and acknowledge that British Muslims who are deeply political didn’t want to take over or Islamize Britain or impose Sharia law. There is no denying that young Muslim Brits are today politicized by their Muslim identity like my generation were politicized by the colour of our skin. This isn’t a bad thing. It was after all politicized people of colour who pushed for the necessary equality laws we are all so proud of today. A politicized British Muslim is as important as politicized British Christians who fight for equality and freedom of religion and belief in Muslim-majority lands, individuals such as Lord Alton and Baroness Berridge, whom in government and since I am proud to champion as human rights defenders. Politicized British Muslims are as important as politicized British Jews who see Israel as a political expression of their faith.
Why should it be wrong to be angry at the vilification of your faith by the media, offensive headlines, being the target of the far right and on the receiving end of anti-Muslim hate crime? And is organizing as a community to lobby government to take these issues seriously an exceptional occurrence or simply British Muslims following in the footsteps of other communities who’ve gone before and tackled such issues via political engagement and influence? And is taking a position on foreign policy and trying to influence the government of the day to think like you think any different to what every diaspora in this country has done and continues to do? Politicized Muslims are not all Islamists, Islamists are not all extremists, and extremists are not all terrorists. To therefore suggest that one leads to another and use that as a basis of policy is simply flawed and isn’t supported by evidence.
Let’s take Sharia law. It has been argued that the ultimate objective of Islamist extremists is the merger of ‘mosque and state’ under Sharia law. This is not a position I recognize amongst the vast majority of British Muslims, nor is this borne out by polls.16
That is not what our British Muslim ancestors migrated to the UK for and it’s not what they desired. British Muslims did not come to colonize, to impose their way of life on us nor reduce us to second-class citizens. They, like my grandfather, came as subservient, submissive, poor labourers. They kept their heads down and worked hard to crawl out of poverty.
Their descendants, at least the majority of them, just want to build a successful life in which they can combine faith, fun and finance. A few want to be left alone to live their conservative, closed lives, much like the Hassidic Jewish community of Stamford Hill. Only a tiny number want to live out their gangland fantasy of a takeover, a mirror image of the far right, and this last group hate the Muslims as much as they hate the rest of Brits.
But one thing I do see is a new generation of Muslims who are neither subservient nor submissive and, yes, they are politically engaged and aware, but that does not make them Islamist extremists, or the enemy within.
After much wrangling, the term ‘Islamist extremism’ was defined in a policy paper in 2013, prepared in response to the tragic murder of Drummer Lee Rigby. Extremism is now defined by the UK government as:
Vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs … [and] includes calls for the death of members of our armed forces, whether in this country or overseas.
Islamist extremism in particular is defined as:
an ideology based on a distorted interpretation of Islam, which betrays Islam’s peaceful principles and draws on the teachings of the likes of Sayyid Qutb. Islamist extremists deem western intervention in Muslim-majority countries as a war on Islam, creating a narrative of us and them. They seek to impose a global Islamic state governed by their interpretation of Sharia as State law, rejecting liberal values such as democracy, the rule of law and equality. Their ideology also includes the uncompromising belief that people cannot be Muslim and British and insists that those who do not agree with them are not true Muslims.17
This definition of Islamist extremist ideology became the catch-all answer to explain what makes a terrorist. It was arrived at after a long and tortuous debate which had started in opposition with the policy paper An Unquiet World,18 was further detailed in government by David Cameron in his ‘Munich Speech’ in 2011, the most comprehensive account of his thinking on this issue in his own words, and subsequently led to the publication of the definition in the Extremism Task Force policy paper in 2013, a paper that was deferred because Nick Clegg – the then deputy prime minister – and I continued to argue, with the prime minister, about the failings of the definition.
If the final definition is unworkable, the original one was explosive. The original arguments went something like this. The following groups are the most prominent Islamists: Tablighi Jamaat, Jamaat-e-Islami, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb ut-Tahrir. (This list is in itself flawed, as three of the four groups are democratically engaged both in the UK and overseas. We regularly deal with political figures overseas who belong or affiliate to, or identify with, the first three of these groups.)
The argument continued: all Islamists are extremists, some advocate violence, others are non-violent extremists. Those who are not violent provide the ideological climate or justification for terrorism. Even if these non-violent groups engage with democracy, that engagement should be seen as subversion, the individuals should be viewed as entryists, for whom MI5 should have a remit, and certainly these individuals should never have access to classified material. This argument too is flawed and indeed dangerous on many levels. Not all Islamists are extremists; politically engaged Muslims are not subversives or entryists; and disclosure of classified material should be based, as it is now, upon a full security clearance not on an individual’s faith.
The argument was further built that the values of Islamists – despite there being no single set of agreed values that could be ascribed to all who even themselves self-identify as Islamists – are ‘demonstrably subversive of modern British values’. Islamism manifested itself, the paper argued, as anti-western views, particularly anti-US or anti-Jewish rhetoric. Another example given was that the Islamists saw the world progressing towards a paradise that both is inevitable and justifies violence to bring it about. I agree, this is a view which is present amongst some Muslims, but it is also a view of some Christians, many in the US, and Jewish settlers in the West Bank. The original definition also made specific references to a number of Islamic scholars, including Mawlana Mawdudi.19
Now, leaving aside the political game-playing that went on behind the scenes in the drafting of this definition and the more extreme definition originally proposed by one of my colleagues in cabinet, even the tempered definition as a catch-all reason for terrorism in the name of Islam isn’t supported by evidence.
Let’s look at the facts. The security services, academics, the police, criminologists and indeed successive governments’ own papers acknowledge that the evidence base of what makes a terrorist is weak, and there is no single driver of terrorism and no one recognizable road to radicalization. Indeed, evidence given by the Home Office itself admitted, in 2012, that:
There is no standard profile of a terrorist and no single pathway or route that an individual takes to becoming involved in a terrorist organisation. Not all drivers will play a role in every instance of radicalisation. Rather, drivers and risk factors appear to be inter-connected and mutually reinforcing but exert influence on individuals to varying extents.20
A Home Office-commissioned paper found that
The empirical evidence base on what factors make an individual more vulnerable to Al Qaida-influenced violent extremism is weak. Even less is known about why certain individuals resort to violence, when other individuals from the same community, with similar experiences, do not become involved in violent activity.21
The Home Affairs Select Committee in 2012 found that ‘it is clear that individuals from many different backgrounds are vulnerable, with no typical profile or pathway to radicalisation. However, there is a lack of objective data, much of the evidence inevitably being anecdotal.’ However, it then argued:
One of the few clear conclusions we were able to draw about the drivers of radicalisation is that a sense of grievance is key to the process. Addressing perceptions of Islamophobia, and demonstrating that the British state is not antithetical to Islam, should constitute a main focus of the part of the Prevent Strategy which is designed to counter the ideology feeding violent radicalisation.22
There is little evidence of these issues being addressed. But there are recurring themes which could help build a picture of a potential terrorist. Let me quote a few.
The Government’s research has included work on the ‘path to extremism’. MI5 have themselves been focusing on understanding the processes and psychology of radicalisation and extremism since 2004. They have found, for example, a high proportion (60 per cent) of terrorists are involved in other types of criminal activity, typically violent crime and fraud.23
This factor was borne out in the profiles of many, such as the brothers Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui, the 2016 Brussels bombers, who had a string of criminal convictions between them, including amongst others armed robberies.
A European Parliament briefing in 2015 explained how ‘Radicalisation can be viewed as a phenomenon relying on a combination of global sociological, political factors and with ideological and psychological aspects … ideology is not alone decisive.’24
And for me a fascinating insight from the UK government’s own research is that ‘a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly and many engage in behaviours such as drug taking, drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes’. The report goes on: ‘many who become involved in violent extremism lack religious literacy and could be regarded as religious novices. Indeed there is some evidence that a well-established religious identity may actually serve as a protective factor against violent radicalisation.’25
There is a mountain of evidence from those who have studied the lives and backgrounds of these so-called Islamist extremist ideologically driven terrorists which shows that the ‘Islamist extremist ideology’ definition used now to determine counter-strategy and impacting on the lives of British Muslims simply does not fit them. A former CIA officer and forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman, the political scientist Robert Pape and French professor and Islamism expert Olivier Roy are but a few. And the American-French anthropologist Scott Atran, who in 2010 gave evidence to the US Senate, said: ‘what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Qur’an or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world’, and described these would-be terrorists as ‘bored, underemployed, overqualified and underwhelmed’ young men for whom ‘jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer … thrilling, glorious and cool’.26
These expert opinions are borne out in the profiles of numerous terrorists. The 9/11 bombers indulged in drink, drugs and partying at strip clubs in the run-up to the attack on the twin towers. Neighbours of the 2004 Madrid train bomber Hamid Ahmidan remember him as ‘zooming by on a motorcycle with his long-haired girlfriend, a Spanish woman with a taste for revealing outfits’.27 Omar Mateen, the Florida gay bar terrorist, had a history of crime and violence, drug and alcohol use and was conflicted about his sexuality.28 Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the Nice truck terrorist, took drugs and, despite being married, used dating sites to pick up men and women.29 None was, as our definition would suggest, ‘rejecting liberal values’.
Few terrorists show a deep understanding or indeed a committed practice of religion. In 2014 would-be Birmingham terrorists Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed purchased Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies online from Amazon before they set out for jihad in Syria. Both later pleaded guilty to terrorism offences. Didier François, a French journalist held captive by ISIS for ten months, said he and his fellow captives never saw a Qur’an; nor did their captors ever discuss it.30 And Drummer Lee Rigby’s murderers, Michael Olumide Adebolajo and Michael Oluwatobi Adebowale, are both British nationals whose families originate from Nigeria. Both were born and raised as Christians.
Adebolajo was an Essex boy from what neighbours described as ‘a pleasant, ordinary, normal family’. He attended university and studied sociology. Adebowale too came from a good family: his mother was a probation officer, his father an official at the Nigerian embassy. Adebolajo had previous convictions for assault and possession of weapons. He had also been arrested in Kenya in 2010 and received consular support. He was known to the intelligence services and had been investigated by MI5 on five separate occasions; there is some suggestion that he was asked to work for them, and indeed both he and his family had complained about what they described as ‘harassment’ by the British Security Services, although a committee of parliamentarians found no evidence of this in their report.31 Adebowale complained of being bullied at school as a child and had issues with gangs and drugs. He had been investigated by MI5 on two occasions and indeed at the time of the murder was considered a low-priority suspect.32
Neither fitted the ‘issues of concern’ that politicians cite when discussing extremism that leads to terrorism and makes someone a jihadi. They did not grow up in a segregated Muslim community, or go to the daily after-school madrasa that government is now keen to regulate. Neither seems to have the ‘traditionally submissive’ mothers, the types that David Cameron felt couldn’t tackle extremism because they couldn’t speak English. Neither had forced marriages or seemed to have been impacted by female genital mutilation. All these are so-called manifestations of extremism.33 Neither appeared to be a scholar of Islam, or expert in theology. Nor was there any suggestion they had been radicalized in school or university. No reference was made to the writings of Sayyid Qutb; nor was there a rant about the rejection of British values in their post-murder street sermon.
I mention the above because it’s a list that policy-makers quickly reach for when trying to understand those who commit terrorist attacks. These were two young men who had found a new gang, found like-minded men, found a cause through which they could vent their anger, frustration and criminality. They became part of a banned group, Al Muhajiroun, started by Omar Bakri Muhammad and rabble roused by the ‘TV star’ Andy Chowdry, who was finally convicted in 2016. Al Muhajiroun was a band of mainly young men who are as misogynistic as they are aggressive.34
The latest wannabe terrorists are those who have left Britain to join ISIS. Big guns, big cars, plenty of girls and the opportunity to play out computer-game violence in the real world is sadly attractive for bored young men, many of whom are seen as failures at home. And as for the girls, the opportunity to have an adventure and marry a hunky European convert is a much more attractive proposition than their first cousin from a Sylheti village in Bangladesh. These young people are more the Snapchat and sheesha bars generation than experts in Sharia and the teachings of Sayyid Qutb. I did an impromptu poll of Muslim youngsters recently and asked them to tell me who Sayyid Qutb was, the man government has defined as godfather and key terrorism inspirer. The top three answers were: is he a rapper? Is he a cricketer? Sayyid who?
And yet despite all this information, including testimonies of returning jihadis and ex-extremists, we still insist, ‘It’s ideology, stupid’ and continue making policy based on a premise that is simply flawed. If it blatantly isn’t ‘all ideology, stupid’, it’s stupid of us to keep saying it is.
If the analysis of the problem is neither comprehensive nor accurate, the solution will inevitably fail. This is dangerous territory, because the longer we fail to understand or acknowledge the root causes of terrorism, the longer we will simply deal with the symptoms, not the disease. The longer we fail to do the painstaking work of understanding what makes a terrorist, the longer we leave ourselves vulnerable to terrorism. And unfortunately the Coalition government of which I was a part from 2010 to 2015 made things a whole lot worse.
That of the many factors driving terrorism ideology alone was the one that policy-makers wanted to focus on was signalled in the then PM’s speech in Munich in 2011. The speech was analysed by Dr Brian Klug, an Oxford University philosopher, expert in the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations and one of the academics who submitted evidence to the British All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism in 2006. In his expert dissection he makes a powerful point, which I repeat verbatim: ‘not for one moment do I mean to minimize the gravity of attacks, planned or perpetrated, that put civilian lives at risk in the name of Islam. The issue is not one of minimization on my part but overstatement on the part of Cameron and others.’35
According to Dr Klug, the speech simply is not based on fact or backed by evidence and crumbles upon greater scrutiny. As he argues,
he framed the issues in a tendentious way; appeared to grossly exaggerate the scale of terrorist acts carried out in the name of Islam, his distinction between Islam and Islamist extremism is not coherent and he perpetuated a discredited theory of causation. This is quite a catalogue of unreason.36
Let me quote what David Cameron defined as the problem in the Munich speech: ‘We have got to get to the root of the problem, and we need to be absolutely clear on where the origins of these terrorist attacks lie. That is the existence of an ideology, Islamist extremism.’37 And whilst casually acknowledging possible other factors, he went on:
Now, I’m not saying that … issues of poverty and grievance about foreign policy are not important. Yes, of course we must tackle them. Of course we must tackle poverty. Yes, we must resolve the sources of tension, not least in Palestine, and yes, we should be on the side of openness and political reform in the Middle East.
Having acknowledged these issues, he quickly cast them aside:
But let us not fool ourselves. These are just contributory factors. Even if we sorted out all of the problems that I have mentioned, there would still be this terrorism. I believe the root lies in the existence of this extremist ideology.
So, according to the prime minister at the time, if we addressed every grievance, from unemployment to discrimination, from mental health to the media’s portrayal of Muslims to the injustices in the Middle East, and everything in between, we would still have terrorism in the name of Islam in Britain. I honestly think this is nonsense, but I’d rather we at least tried resolving all these ‘other’ issues and be proven wrong than not address them at all and find ourselves fighting the battle against terrorism for decades to come.
From 2011, Prevent also shifted its focus further. Its first pillar firmly became a response to the ideological challenge; the second pillar became appropriate advice and support to prevent people being drawn into terrorism; and the third was to work with sectors and institutions where there are risks of radicalization. At this point, we started doing Prevent to the community rather than with them. We went into the battle against terrorism in the name of Islam having alienated our most important troops: the community itself.
This was compounded by the introduction of policy which was predicated on the idea that many of them were influenced by what some have called non-violent extremists and they took their radical belief to the next level by embracing violence. The process of radicalization was seen as a linear journey, a ‘conveyor belt’ which starts with non-violent extremism. And non-violent extremists are individuals who do not sign up to the definition of current-day British values defined as ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs’.
This conveyor-belt theory is a favourite of right-wing think tanks in the US and the UK. Like ideology alone, it has little evidence to support it and much academic and legal opposition.38 As Arun Kundnani says, ‘How a government makes sense of political violence directed at it usually tells us at least as much about the nature of that government as it does about the nature of its violent opponents.’39
This leap of faith, if you will pardon the pun, the tenuous evidence that those with unsavoury, unorthodox, radical or, dare I say, even conservative religious views are on a journey to becoming terrorists, has become a key plank of the UK’s counter-terrorism policy. This is dangerous policy-making. We now have a counter-terrorism policy which casts its net so wide that it catches anyone whose views the government at this moment considers extreme, even if we ourselves in the recent past held such views on homosexuality or, in the more distant past, on women and race.40 It should worry us all that government believes this is the best way of defeating terrorism.
And while you sit there worrying, try this little exercise. How many people can you think of, either in your personal life or in the public eye, who fit the following definition and are thus extremists who have set off on their journey to terrorism? ‘Vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.’
Here’s my list: an office bearer of one of our very successful local Conservative Associations in the south of England with some dubious racist views; many an opinionated black cab driver; Christians who didn’t abide by the rule of law and smuggled bibles into communist countries over the last 100 years; Christians who believe in the Old Testament edict that God’s law is above man-made law; practitioners of civil disobedience like Martin Luther King; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who ‘did not accept the final authority of the rule of law – democratically passed in a democratically elected assembly – over issues of German Jewish citizens when the law was manifestly evil’;41 everybody in this country who is a communist, an anarchist or a racist. Hey, according to our definition, even that party-loving, non-voting eccentric Russell Brand, who believes ‘it is a far more potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm than to participate’ and advocates a ‘total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system’ is on the road to terrorism.42
Despite my reservations about the current definition of ideology, I do believe we must address religious ideology as a driver of terrorism. It’s important for us to support scholars and activists within British Muslim communities and wider to push back theologically against those who selectively adopt verses from the Qur’an and twist interpretations to justify violence against innocents. This is necessary and important work, and this debate on theology has been part of the Islamic way for centuries and is already happening across the UK. What I take issue with is how we currently practically disregard the whole basket of radicalizing ingredients, from previous criminality, gang culture, mental health issues and the ones that are overwhelmingly cited – discrimination, marginalization and victimization – and focus simply on ideology.43
Unfortunately, in the past five years, the problem hasn’t just been in failing to identify all the causes of terrorism but also ignoring the many ways to address it. Not only are we focused on only one kind of terrorism, but we’re ill-defining it and tackling it in the wrong way. In Munich, Cameron laid out his solutions: ‘Let us give voice to those followers of Islam who despise the extremists and their worldview.’ Well, most British Muslims despise the terrorists, but what is ‘their worldview’?44 If it is that Islam and the West are at war, as intimated by the government’s definition of Islamist extremism, then that’s a worldview held by many a right-wing politician around the world, including the current US president.
And the rallying call goes out: ‘Let us engage groups that share our aspirations’, without clarity on what our aspirations are. In practice, this work simply became engaging with groups who tell us what we want to hear. This favoured group status, with access to ministers and handsome financial rewards reserved for those who simply repeat our policy back to us and pitting community groups against one other, is something I will cover in chapter 5. It is an approach that was raised starkly at the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2016 during the questioning of one such group, Inspire, which has received public funding from both central and local government. (It was challenged on its independence, with reference made to one of its co-directors being the sister of a civil servant.45 Inspire disagreed that it was not independent, stating that it carries out its work as a voluntary organization.)
The Munich speech continues: ‘We must build stronger societies and stronger identities at home … a lot less of the passive tolerance … and much more active muscular liberalism’. So this involves not just a belief in, but a promotion of, our values, which are espoused as ‘freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality’. I could not agree more. The speech goes on to say: ‘To belong here is to believe in these things.’ I agree again. But if we really believe in these values – freedom of speech, democracy, the rule of law and equal rights – why does Prevent actually cut across this very approach?
The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, 2015, made it compulsory for local authorities, schools, universities, NHS staff, and a whole range of other public-sector workers to police the government’s definition of extremism. It has led to teachers, academics, medics and others raising their concerns about the challenge this presents to relationships like teacher and student, doctor and patient, and on university campuses this approach flies in the face of genuine and robust debate around controversial issues.46
Despite deep reservations amongst many of these professionals and indeed open rebellion from some, they are now officially the thought police and the frontline in our battle to cleanse hearts and minds. This Act, passed just before the 2015 General Election, with a Labour Party floundering under Miliband and a Liberal Democrat party exhausted from Coalition battles and bracing itself for electoral wipeout, was the perfect opportunity to kick in an awful piece of legislation with little formal opposition. Colleagues from across the political divide sounded the sirens of concern in the House of Lords.47 All political parties bear the responsibility for the corrosive fallout from Prevent stigmatizing young people and pushing debate and dissent into dark corners rather than under the shining light of a learning environment such as schools, colleges and universities, where it belongs. Censoring debate out of the public space doesn’t make the debate go away, it simply masks the problem. Not allowing a space to discuss the tough issues of our time doesn’t make us safer, it simply means we don’t get to hear them until it’s too late.
Let’s look at what Cameron in his Munich speech suggests Prevent professes to protect and yet in its implementation it rejects. Take freedom of speech, a British value, a beacon of tolerance. This is not and has never been an absolute right: we have laws that determine what isn’t acceptable and we quite rightly prosecute when those lines are crossed. But Prevent steps in to stop freedom of speech when no law is broken. It requires a whole range of professionals to police thought and controversial but legal views on university campuses, by banning speakers, not allowing public buildings to be used for legal gatherings and demanding pre-prepared written speeches to be delivered for censorship before events.48 Prevent has had a chilling effect on freedom of speech, a freedom it sought to protect.
And politics too cut across the very approach Prevent espouses to preserve. Take freedom of worship. I know many a local councillor, often sadly Conservative, who has secured his seat at an election by opposing the building of a place of worship, in most instances, sadly, a mosque. Is this public display of intolerance and lack of respect for the beliefs of others an indication that these councillors are extremists on a journey to terrorism? Bigoted, yes; extremists, I think not.
The Munich speech also has a swipe at multiculturalism, or state multiculturalism as I defined it, as the reason why British Muslims had confused identities. It’s a concept I discussed at some length in chapter 2.
I accept that in the 1980s and ’90s a number of odd decisions were made at a local level which emphasized difference and segregation, but in reality by the noughties the message from the later Blair years, ‘the duty to integrate’ speech and constant posturing by us, the official opposition, had signalled change, and both local and central government had shifted its approach. Long before the Munich speech there had already been a shift away from single-group funding and the provision of community facilities which were unnecessarily divisive. The reason I know this is because every year in the run-up to Christmas the Conservative Research Department would be tasked to find ‘Christmas stories’ to brief the press which would embarrass the Labour government by exposing ‘Winterville’ and ‘no tinsel in council offices’ type stories. The annual scouring of newspaper articles and fast and furious FOI (Freedom of Information) requests that we the Conservative Party would engage in to ‘expose’ state multiculturalism and embarrass the government became harder every year as we approached 2010. In all seriousness the state multiculturalism project was over by the time we got into government, but we, including me, continued to politically exploit the term ‘multiculturalism’ for many years after. Again, this doesn’t help.
Cameron in the Munich speech goes on: ‘Each of us in our own countries, I believe, must be unambiguous and hard-nosed about this defence of our liberty.’ Well, this liberty, this freedom which many of our allies are ‘unambiguous and hard-nosed’ about in their countries, sometimes results in Christians and other minorities not being able to build places of worship or proselytize. What we were advocating for in our own country didn’t look great when our foreign allies implemented it in their countries. This blowback of a domestic policy which makes little sense in our foreign policy world is something I will return to in chapter 8.
Cameron continues: the answer is ‘English language’ for all, a ‘common culture and curriculum’, the ‘National Citizen Service’, a common purpose. Yes, yes, yes, I shout from the minaret, this is all fantastic stuff, but it’s not counter-terrorism and it isn’t Prevent; it’s the P that’s been missing from policy-making: it’s Promote. Promote is the confident, sure-footed presentation of who we are as a nation, an inclusive shared identity, genuine two-way integration. I call it the sunny uplands of policy-making rather than grey skies that is Prevent: not the old-fashioned madrasa-style beat-them-into-learning that is Prevent but the inspirational environment of a chi-chi prep school.
It’s not a demand to join modern Britain but commanding the aspirational high ground, so that people beat down the door not just to get into Britain but buy into what Britain is. It’s what David Cameron in 2007, early on in his leadership, called ‘inspiring loyalty by building a Britain that every one of our citizens believes in’.49 It’s a celebration of what we stand for rather than a denigration of what others might believe. It’s a genuine, sincere and long-term political commitment from government to support and resource the promotion of a shared, inclusive Britain rather than short-term political posturing. It’s work often called Community Cohesion and Integration in government, and in my experience it is badly funded and the first to face the axe in the face of austerity and budget cuts, in my view attracts some of our least-talented civil servants and is generally seen as low priority and not the serious work of government
It’s the positive of Promote that I believe could eventually prevent terrorism, not the pernicious pursuit of ideas we don’t like in UK plc. It’s when all in the country feel as if they both matter and belong that the attraction to extreme ideas is diminished.50 It’s when the mainstream accommodates the overwhelming majority that the fringe no longer has a purpose.
In discussing the elements of successful counter-terrorism, Jonathan Powell refers to coercive policies and conciliatory policies and argues that ‘Coercive policies should be restricted to the few actual perpetrators of the violence, while conciliatory policies ought to be focused on their potential recruits.’51 It is this latter group that are the attention of Prevent, and it is why Prevent should be conciliatory and addressing grievances whether discrimination, inequality, life chances or foreign policy should be a key element.
The killing of Drummer Lee Rigby presented a unique opportunity for this new conciliatory approach. It was an opportunity to create a new, honest and robust partnership with community groups and activists who comfortingly had displayed a maturity in their response to the murder, which in many ways was lacking in 2005 after the 7/7 terrorist attack, and a clear, unequivocal condemnation of the terrorist attack by a British Muslim community that stood resolute in its fights against terrorism despite the Islamophobic backlash that followed in the days and months after Rigby’s murder.52 Instead, this new goodwill between government and community was wasted. It was a moment to unite all against the small fringe of potential terrorists but it was mismanaged, and government cast the net of who we defined as ‘the problem’ wider and deeper.
Prevent has been widely criticized. Dozens of cases have now been reported, some disputed, others not, where Prevent-trained teachers have overreacted to everyday school incidents and referred a child to a counter-terrorism process. A student accused of being a terrorist after he was seen reading a textbook on terrorism for his degree; children deemed suspicious simply for having a toy gun; the four-year-old child who couldn’t pronounce ‘cucumber’, calling it ‘cooker bomb’; the child who used the word ‘l’écoterrorisme’ when speaking about climate change in his French class; and the much-reported ten-year-old Lancashire boy who misspelled terraced house using the unfortunate words ‘terrorist house’ are some of the most high profile.53 It’s what led to Rights Watch UK, a human rights organizations with over twenty-five years of experience in this area and leading lights such as Helena Kennedy, QC, and Michael Mansfield, QC, as its patrons, to conclude that Prevent has created a ‘dynamic in which Muslim youth come to be fearful of the educational setting and distrustful of their teachers and classmates; [it’s] counterproductive, discriminatory and a violation of the fundamental rights that are at the heart of the very civil society the government seeks to protect’.54
Muslim children are being singled out by a policy which fails to understand that 31 per cent of terrorist convictions in the UK from 2001 to 2010 were converts to Islam, who make up only around 3 per cent of the Muslim population of 3 million, individuals such as Lee Rigby’s killers, who were Christian children who converted in later life, or European ISIS recruits like Raphael Amar, who was born to a Jewish father and Christian mother, and Jean-Michel and Fabien Clain, brothers and former Catholics, who became known as the voices behind the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015.55
A 2016 report by the internationally respected Open Society Foundations, founded in 1979 by investor and philanthropist George Soros, described Prevent as ‘violating human rights, generating fear and distrust, and alienating Muslim communities while undermining their access to health and education’.56 And most worryingly the National Police Chiefs Council released figures showing that 80 per cent of Prevent referrals were set aside between 2007 and 2014,57 whilst the government’s own 2015 CONTEST annual report says that ‘several thousand’ individuals were referred in 2015, but only ‘several hundred’ received support.58
The Home Affairs select committee in its report Radicalisation: The Counter-narrative and Identifying the Tipping Point stated: ‘The concerns about Prevent amongst the communities most affected by it must be addressed. Otherwise it will continue to be viewed with suspicion by many, and by some as “toxic”.’59 And David Anderson, QC, the independent reviewer of terrorist legislation, said:
the Prevent programme is clearly suffering from a widespread problem of perception, particularly in relation to the statutory duty on schools and in relation to non-violent extremism. It is also possible – though I am not in a position to judge – that aspects of the programme are ineffective or being applied in an insensitive or discriminatory manner.60
Everyone from the Tax Payers’ Alliance to former extremists and Muslim communities now criticize Prevent. It has been a lose-lose policy, and ‘other faith groups felt hard done by’.61 And however well-intentioned Prevent may have been, it simply has not helped to address grievances or create a strong sense of belonging.
As a former Metropolitan Police chief superintendent said, Prevent is ‘a toxic brand’ run by ‘mainly white officers with little understanding of faith, gender or race’ and is ‘hampering efforts to stop vulnerable young people joining Daesh’.62 The Met has recently mounted its own charm offensive, with a Prevent social network presence only to be met by a counter-presence in the form of Prevent Watch and others which collates ‘bad experiences’ of Prevent.
Despite this damning indictment and extensive evidence to support it, the government continues to broaden its reach, both spending more and extending its scope. Ministers continue to insist it works, and government concluded after a secret Whitehall review in 2016 that the programme will be ‘strengthened not undermined’.63 And yet, despite the government continuing to exalt the virtues of Prevent and despite the decades-long and continuing threat from Irish terrorism and the thousands who have died as a result of that terrorism, we’ve never implemented Prevent in Northern Ireland.64 This issue was debated in parliament by Gavin Robinson, MP, a DUP member for Belfast East, who said:
The Government recently published a counter-extremism strategy. When I asked why Northern Ireland, which has a fair number of extremists, was not included in the strategy, I was told, ‘Don’t push the issue too far. It is really a counter-Islamic strategy.’65
All things Muslim have become all things counter-terrorism, with much work on equality and diversity, including the teaching of English to Muslim women, now rebadged by Prevent as counter-terrorism.
Over the years Prevent work has funded everything from football, cricket and basketball tournaments to a ‘talk on prophetic medicine’ to consular and healthcare support to British Muslims performing the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Many were worthwhile endeavours, all well-meaning and indeed some necessary projects, but they are not counter-terrorism and should not be funded and badged with preventing terrorism work. This should be Promote.
This approach has also spread a sense of Muslims as the problem, both as terrorists and the beneficiaries of anti-terrorism funding, with far-right groups seeing ‘the Muslims’ as getting all the attention and indeed money for behaving badly. In the world of the far right extremist the brethren of the ‘bombers’ are getting the cash, whilst those that haven’t been blowing people up are getting little support, the equivalent of the badly behaved child in class getting most of the teacher’s time, and this is feeding resentment and racism.66
It has created a lucrative ‘Muslim experts industry’, individuals and organizations receiving large amounts of public funding where neither the funding nor the objectives nor the outcomes are transparent or available to the public. Many offer ‘training’ to public-sector workers described by the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers as ‘poor quality … sometimes factually incorrect’. Training material has been described as ‘overdone stories of radicalisation filmed in black and white with emotive music’.67
‘The Muslims’, other than those making a small fortune from Prevent, are feeling ‘singled out’ and are generally sick of the attention, the defining of what one can think and cannot think. This programme has left communities feeling paranoid and suspicious and pitted groups against one another, with government determining the version of Islam that one must follow as a Muslim. Despite the up to £40 million per year spent on Prevent between 2011 and 2015,68 a YouGov poll in August 2016 showed that, whilst 25 per cent of those polled in 2010 felt the terrorist threat had increased in Britain, by 2016 this had risen to 73 per cent.69 We are not currently building a more cohesive, equal society.
So if any other group wants this kind of attention, trust me, Muslims are more than happy for you to have it: you are welcome to it. Make your application to government to be the Prevent community, and Muslims will be happy to step out of the ‘chosen ones’ category.
In Britain since 7/7 thankfully we have not seen any major loss of life at the hands of terrorists. This is testimony to the work of our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. We are good at this. We’ve been doing it for decades, mainly because of Irish-related terrorism. We prepare well, we pursue well, we protect well, and it shows. In 2015 the number of people arrested for terrorism-related offences went down, as did the number of people travelling overseas for terrorism.70 But through Prevent we undermine much of the hard work.
We are aware of the series of issues that are the drivers of radicalization, so why do we pick and choose only one – ideology – to focus on, speak about, invest in and tackle? Why is ideology more important than inequality, poverty, gang culture, Islamophobia, mental health and the whole basket of reasons given by experts, including our intelligence services.
This lack of comprehensive policy-making keeps me awake at night, as it should you, because it is putting the long-term security of our country at risk. I accept that for politicians it’s easier to sell ‘it’s their problem’ than ‘it’s our problem’ to the electorate. Focusing on an abstract, difficult-to-define, confused concept such as Islamist ideology as opposed to statistics on discrimination, social mobility, criminality, mental health and the legality and success of our foreign-policy positions is much easier. But by not dealing with real issues in real communities I believe we are not only in the short term making the matter worse but also prolonging the time we have to live with the scourge of terrorism.
Understanding the root causes of terrorism, the diverse and varied routes to radicalization and the journey to violence is the start of truly understanding the problem; and that is the start of fixing it.
Policing and preventing criminal acts should be the focus, not policing and preventing thought. In the UK democracy it is the route through which we flush out and flush away unsavoury views. The ballot box is always more powerful than a ban, and debate through bigger and better ideas puts bad ideas to bed. In the 2015 General Election we saw democracy at work. In Bradford, a city with a BME population of over 20 per cent, many with deeply held conservative views on gender, voters rejected both the politics of grievance and cultural bigotry by rejecting George Galloway of the Respect Party and electing a woman. South Thanet too, one of the ‘whitest’ constituencies in England with a large far-right presence, rejected the politics of fear and sent Nigel Farage the leader of UKIP off with his tail between his legs.
Population shifts and changes in the communities that make up the UK, whatever the perception of that change, something I will discuss in chapter 6, are never so dramatic, and democracy never so weak, in Britain for us to reach for draconian measures to protect ourselves from unsavoury views.
And the question we need to ask our politicians and those who influence policy-making is this. If what we are trying to do is fight terrorism, to kill ‘the crocodiles’, as one of my cabinet colleagues used to call them, then why in our counter-terrorism policy do we keep expanding the swamp and why are we in our approach possibly breeding more crocs? If we are committed to defeating terrorism in the name of Islam, then we must start by being committed to honest and evidence-based policy-making in which we acknowledge that ‘the Muslims’, our Muslims, are part of the solution. We must invest in community building. We must be connected to, trusted by and working with our British Muslim communities, not stigmatizing their kids, stifling them from being engaged in legitimate debate and alienating large sections of them. If we are to succeed in defeating the enemy, an enemy for all of us, then we mustn’t treat our Muslims as the enemy within.