A week after entering Downing Street, Andy Burnham promised to adopt the “zero tolerance approach to hate crime” he developed with Greater Manchester Police. Before that approach is rolled out nationally, the Prime Minister’s record on counter-extremism merits closer examination. That’s because he has consistently viewed policy through the prism of Muslim grievance, and built relationships with organizations that have attracted serious scrutiny.

Take Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), a community group the Conservative government’s Shawcross review of Prevent deemed to have a “well-established track record of working alongside extremists”. As Shadow Home Secretary in 2016, Burnham told a MEND event at Labour Party Conference that police officers could have a “conflict of interest” because they received hate-crime reports and participated in Prevent.

His solution? Introducing “trusted third parties for reporting hate crime”. Speaking at the same event, Burnham described Prevent as “highly problematic” and claimed “there’s a lot of people in this country not necessarily at risk from ‘Islamic extremism’ but it’s far-Right extremism… where is the statutory duty on that?”

The Prevent duty was never confined to Islamist extremism, instead covering people at risk of being sucked into every kind of terrorism, including the extreme Right. According to MEND’s website, at a 2019 roundtable event Burnham attended as Mayor of Greater Manchester he “agreed to further discuss MEND’s Islamophobia PSHE lessons as part of an overall strategy to address hate crime through the curriculum”.

It’s tempting to believe MEND was chancing its arm, yet the online page for its Manchester branch claims: “We have previously engaged with young people in tackling Islamophobia by working with local school students and teachers.” The group was so supportive of Burnham that it quoted his 2016 speech to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce calling for Prevent to be replaced three times in its submission to the Shawcross Review.

Burnham’s criticism was not merely procedural. He compared Prevent to the internment of IRA suspects during the Troubles and argued that it was “creating a feeling in the Muslim community that it is being spied upon and unfairly targeted”. At the time, Britain’s official terrorism threat level was severe, with an attack considered “highly likely”. Hundreds of Britons had traveled to join the Islamic State, and the security services had disrupted six terrorist plots over the previous year.

MEND remains shut out of official Government engagement following the Shawcross Review, along with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), another organization with which Burnham found favor. A letter he received from the MCB following his denunciation of Prevent reveals Burnham was privately briefed by the group before echoing their talking points. The MCB wrote that his intervention “reflects the conversations we had” and referenced private meetings with group representatives in December 2015, as well as a round-table briefing the following March.

The MCB is far from a harmless community group. In 2009, its then-deputy secretary-general, Daud Abdullah, signed the Istanbul Declaration, which branded foreign warships preventing weapons reaching Hamas a “declaration of war” that must be “fought by all means and ways”. At the time, then-PM Gordon Brown was considering deploying the Navy to tackle arms smuggling, and Burnham was a senior member of his cabinet. The MCB refused to sack Abdullah, arguing he’d signed the declaration in a personal capacity. Brown’s administration responded by locking the group out of official engagement, a policy adopted by every UK government thereafter.

Now, the immediate question is whether Burnham will invite the likes of the MCB and MEND back around the table. From the comfort of Opposition, he found it easy to argue that Islamic extremism was the fault of Government heavy-handedness, yet the responsibilities of office may curtail his dovish instincts.

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Arthur Reynolds is a journalist, and was formerly a civil servant and Government speechwriter.

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