Dominic Cummings has claimed that the UK’s expanding definition of terrorism shows that Whitehall is “terrified of violence breaking out”.

Speaking at Oxford University, the Brexit architect questioned why online guidance from Prevent, the counter-radicalisation programme, is treating “cultural nationalism” as “terrorist ideology”.“The idea that it’s somehow terrorist is obviously stupid,” he said. “But the fact that these ideas are percolating in Whitehall shows what a crisis it is in”.

Cummings went further by suggesting that last year’s summer riots were allowed to spread due to fears about who the police could and could not arrest. “Police are of the feeling that they can’t take what most of them regard as sensible action, because they’re fearful of what it will encourage,” he said.

He also warned that these fears were creating a “slippery slope” in British free speech protections, citing the recent prosecution of Hamit Coskun for burning a Quran as a troubling example. “You can see that slippery slope in operation,” he said, calling such cases “obviously disastrous and very corrosive.” Cummings argued for a more robust legal framework, saying: “We need a regime that says all of this stuff is getting binned straight away.”

The former Chief Adviser to Boris Johnson then harked back to Thucydides’ writings on “civil conflict and civil war”, suggesting that the ancient themes are “very live issues for us now.” Asked whether democracy is overrated, he paused before answering “no”, but nonetheless praised classical critiques that favoured a mixed democracy which favoured rule by the most educated over simple mass democracy. “Democracy is obviously in crisis,” he said. “Personally, I hope we find a way of reviving the regime, rather than it being replaced by some oligarchy.”

Cummings’s lecture was part of a series of talks organised by the Pharos Foundation, a research and educational institute headquartered in Oxford. He began by describing the political regime, headed by Keir Starmer, as “cancerous” and warning that it has “metastasised.” He argued that the current political moment has similarities to 1848, during which “a new elite with new ideas, allied with a subset of the people, took over.”

Doubling down on this theme, Cummings declared that “both the old parties are already dead” but warned that insurgent parties like Reform UK weren’t the finished product. “It is obvious that Reform has not embarked on the kind of major outreach of talent which I think is needed,” he said. “Nigel Farage is in a sense the same as a lot of the other parties. He formed his views in the 1990s and 2000s. It’s very hard for him to adjust to a world where the truths and conventional ideas of that time have broken down.”