Why Prevent isn’t fit for purpose It has turned counterterrorism into social work

When I heard Axel Rudakubana had entered guilty pleas for the Southport stabbings, I imagined a collective sigh of relief in Downing Street. There would be no prolonged trial. No daily reports of Rudakubana’s gruesome crimes. My scepticism was, I suppose, a reflection of how politically-charged extremist crimes have become. Sadly, the Prime Minister’s slightly uncomfortable, hiding-behind-process press conference did little to dampen my cynicism. I suspect the PM’s legal background has become, ironically, an impediment. After all, barristers ask difficult questions, not answer them.

As a young special branch officer, I worked on the Admiral Duncan bombing, a gay pub blown up by the neo-Nazi David Copeland. Towards the end of my service as a counterterrorism investigator, I worked online, tracking offenders and investigating extremist content. I’m painfully aware how the troubled, deranged and just plain dangerous walk among us. Those tasked with intercepting such offenders face possibly one of law enforcement’s most difficult challenges: we can’t predict where and when lone wolf offenders will strike. The challenge is complicated by the politics swirling around violence linked to terrorism, extremism or what’s known as “Individualised Extreme Violence” (IEV) a term you can expect to hear much, much more of.

Loosely translated, IEV means “violent, mentally-ill young men we can’t pin an ideology on”. And, at first glance, Rudakubana is a classic case study. Yet his possession of Al-Qaeda manuals is problematic for the Government. Merseyside police and counterterrorist officers initially chose not to link the killings to terror, allegedly on the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service. Rudakubana, they said, left no manifesto, made no confession: though they surely wouldn’t have been so nervous about a suspect with Mein Kampf by his bedside.

But if that hints to Britain’s grim squeamishness over the politics of race, the real problem here is with the police itself. Given vast incentives to box-tick, and constrained by unfit laws and a looming army of bureaucrats, officers are increasingly unable to spot the monsters in our midst. Rather than announcing yet another knife ban, then, Labour should instead focus on sending counterextremist police out into the community.

I was only ever interested in politics inasmuch as it related to motive, profiling, identifying and predicting suspect activity. As well as routine public order intelligence, I’ve worked on operations against the IRA, Loyalist paramilitaries, neo-Nazis, the Animal Liberation Front, al-Qaeda, and a dozen other groups you might never have heard of. Ultimately, each posed an actionable threat to the public. Then, after 9/11, everything changed. We entered an era of suicide terrorism, one that made the IRA’s pre-bombing warnings seem quaint.

In response, the Government introduced a strategy called CONTEST. This approach is built on four ‘Ps’: Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Prepare. It sparked the single most comprehensive restructuring in the history of British internal security. Like most wide-ranging government strategies, it was also extremely complicated, which brings me to Prevent. It’s already being blamed for the Southport stabbings, not least given officers reportedly identified Axel Rudakubana as a person of interest on three separate occasions.

Prevent has a troubled history. Embedding multi-agency working into counterextremism, it was meant to flag people of concern before diverting them from violence. Soon enough though, the usual cultural sensitivities shone through. “Prevent had become a safeguarding crèche for unhappy teenagers who were unlikely ever to take up arms,” Professor Ian Acheson of the Counter Extremism Project has noted. “This distraction and mission creep — fuelled by an unjustifiable focus on far-right extremism — made it more likely highly dangerous people would fall through the cracks.”

The practical workings of Prevent were just as woolly. To some in law enforcement, Prevent became little more than an attempt to turn counterterrorism into an adjunct of social work. I remember colleagues viewing it as a punishment posting, one involving the usual police chicanery around performance figures. Metrics were based on a nebulous concept of “interventions” — with predictably facile results.

Consider, for instance, a meeting between “faith leaders” and police at a place of worship. That counted as an intervention. Taking down a beheading video from YouTube? An intervention. Submitting a report on a child whose teacher thinks they might be a racist? An intervention, one which I imagine would be familiar to any retired Stasi officer. Points mean prizes, and in the difficult-to-quantify world of counterterrorist performance, prizes mean promotion. I think the only prize worth winning is an absence of violence, but that’s probably why I left at the rank I did.

Perhaps it was inevitable that a performance-based system would concentrate on low-level extremists, those presenting a negligible level of risk. Yet if genuine “lone wolf” attackers are notoriously difficult to track, let alone prosecute, they can clearly sow chaos. Consider people such as David Copeland, the Admiral Duncan bomber, or else the self-starting Islamists who committed the Westminster and London Bridge attacks. Did the sheer quantity of Prevent subjects, caught up in the “safeguarding crèche” Acheson describes, create too much extraneous work for investigators? I suspect it did.

In the end, though, to blame Prevent for Rudakubana is only half right. The law, after all, has been subsumed by a thoroughgoing counterextremism industry, one supporting a coterie of academics, researchers, think tanks and quangos. That’s turned it into a hydra, too many of its heads consisting of beard-stroking academics, identity-politics experts and serial conference attendees. In a similar vein, Prevent’s approach is overly shaped “by committee” — unduly impacting how officers deal with risky subjects. That is if subjects wish even to cooperate: Prevent referrals are wholly voluntary. I’d argue the programme’s real value lies in intelligence-gathering, but without action, intelligence is meaningless.

It should be clear, in short, that success comes on the ground, with police given the time and incentives to deal with genuine threats. To be fair, the situation isn’t hopeless, even somewhere like Parliament. Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, is one of the few experienced operators in Keir Starmer’s otherwise dismal cabinet. I remember how, as a young MP, she was entrusted with a place on the prestigious intelligence and security committee. If anyone in the cabinet knows what’s needed, it’s her. At the same time, Cooper could also do worse than listen to Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation. Well-respected and astute, Hall has a proven record in counterterrorism. He’s already made helpful suggestions around the release of post-attack material to the public and argued officers need extra resources to tackle IEV.

What should the police do? In response to the rape gang scandal, Cooper advocated covert internet operations against suspects. The right answer — but probably the wrong target. Unlike many paedophiles, the modus operandi of Rotherham’s sex offenders didn’t involve the dark web. But what, then, of lone wolves like Axel Rudakubana? They’re often internet-fixated, along with the terminally online edge-lords who inspire them.

I’d therefore say Cooper is onto something, though my solution would involve sending counter-extremism investigators into local police teams, and monitor suspects in the community. When I served in the Met, the officers focused on paedophiles were known as “Jigsaw Teams”  — so-named because they used a multidisciplinary approach to piece together solutions and keep the public safe. The Jigsaw officers I met did an impressive but terrifying job, charged with keeping tabs on dangerous sexual predators upon their release from prison. I would add “IEV” to their list of duties, beefing them up with covert online monitoring, intelligence support, surveillance capability and counterterrorism liaison.

I’d also look across the water, to the former Royal Ulster Constabulary. I’m reluctantly coming to the view that an increasingly balkanised Britain would benefit from the model which served the RUC well during the Troubles: keeping an occasionally intrusive eye on subjects of local interest. I’m biased, but we could even call it Special Branch. Rather than squatting in faraway headquarters, small, dedicated teams would work where suspects actually live. Just as important, these groups would be composed of officers who intimately knew their patch: and potential troublemakers like Rudakubana. Their interventions would be operational, designed to disrupt, deter and prosecute would-be lone wolves.

Naturally, such a revolution would involve the devolution of money, resources and personnel to local forces. It would also mean organisational risk, and upset the domestic extremism industry, as Home Office funds were shifted from university lectures to police stations. Yet whenever there’s a government emergency — one where “something must be done” — there are bound to be winners and losers. And political leadership, if it means anything, must involve hammering out these rivalries for the common good.

For the moment, at least, progress looks unlikely, with the Government soothing itself with working groups and committees. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: troubled individuals like Axel Rudakubana require intrusive policing. That means accepting trade-offs between individual rights and collective safety, exercised by experienced, well-resourced officers capable of demonstrating moral courage in the face of politically motivated criticism. Until then, where are we? Too scared of political shibboleths. Too worried by legal challenges. All the while, people organising dance classes for schoolgirls wonder if they should book stab-vested bouncers. You know, to stand outside. Just in case. It’s not like the police can protect them, can they?