January 24, 2025 - 11:50am
The UK Government’s Prevent programme has once again come under scrutiny following the revelation that Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana had been referred to the anti-terrorism programme on three separate occasions, with no action being taken. Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned this week of the threat from “loners and misfits” who are “fixated on violence for its own sake”, and declared that “terrorism has changed.” A number of experts have disagreed, though, arguing that this threat has in fact been growing for years, all while warnings fell on deaf ears.
Sky News’s analysis, for example, used the annual Prevent statistics to show how referrals for two categories — “Vulnerability, but no ideology or CT [counterterrorism] risk” and “High CT risk but no ideology” — have eclipsed even those referred for far-Right or Islamist radicalisation concerns. There may be growing numbers of possibly violent individuals with no clear ideological bent, but this case is not made by Prevent referral figures, which do not accurately reflect the terror threat picture in Britain.
One example of this shortcoming concerns Islamism, which while accounting for the vast majority of live terror investigations is submerged by the far-Right and other categories when it comes to Prevent referrals. This mismatch was highlighted in the 2023 review of Prevent led by William Shawcross, which was heavily criticised by Left-wing academics and think thanks under the auspices that the threat has moved on from jihadists and now mainly comes from the far-Right. Shawcross’s conclusion, though, was backed up this week by Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who announced a review of referral thresholds and asserted that referrals for Islamism were “too low”.
Whereas Counter-Terrorism Policing or MI5 may only intervene according to clear legal thresholds, Prevent referrals are skewed by a number of external factors. They trend young compared to actual terror arrests because schools are the main delivery mechanism, while the mainly Left-leaning education sector is more sensitive to concerns about far-Right radicalisation. At the same time, there are greater incentives within the extremism sector to push the threat posed by Andrew Tate than that posed by Islamists. This creates a feedback loop in which increased training and awareness encourages an uptick in referrals, which is then used as evidence of the mounting threat posed by the thing everyone has been excitedly warning about already.
It’s therefore possible that overall referrals to Prevent are too high, rather than referrals for Islamism being too low. Perhaps safeguarding professionals are simply not encountering as many individuals deemed at risk of becoming jihadists. While the threat has far from evaporated, Isis is no longer calling on Muslims everywhere to make Hijrah (migrate) to their genocidal “caliphate” in the Middle East, and its capacity to inspire acts of terror in Britain is presently more limited to the loners and misfits cited by Starmer.
Simultaneously, there are more cases of violence which don’t resemble the traditional tactics of al-Qaeda or Isis, but instead individuals taking it into their own hands to attack the West for its support of Israel, or to avenge against perceived acts of blasphemy. Given that many of these attackers did not appear steeped in Salafi-jihadist ideology or propaganda, it’s unlikely they would’ve come onto Prevent’s radar, or that the programme would’ve known what to do with them if they had. It’s even possible that some of those referrals going into the “unclear” buckets concern people who inhabit this sub-jihadist but nonetheless Islamist universe, as their ideological make-up confounds existing lenses.
Prevent’s algorithms are attuned to black flags and beheading videos yet, as Isis and al-Qaeda’s relevance wanes, there is growing evidence for a pool of potentially violent individuals no longer acting in allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or Osama Bin Laden, but instead out of a perceived irreconcilable moral clash between themselves and the world around them. Out of all the factors converging to explain the drop-off in Islamist referrals, this is the most urgent for both Prevent and the security services to address.
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SubscribeStarmer didn’t mention Islamic Terrorism in his press conference. That should give you a clue. Prevent is not a person. It cannot underestimate anything. No one has any idea what Prevent’s directors’ strategy is. No one asks and no one is told. Ever.
The government narrative is being followed to the T.
Yesterday during the tv coverage of the sentencing of the Southport murderer, a young lady was interviewed on GB News. She is a former member of a Govt Prevent team. She described how members of the team “polish their halos by looking for and going after ‘far right’ people”.
Something in this. Govt also recognised Prevent’s ‘filters’ not working, although they’ve also recognised there is a gap in what you then do with the psychopath ‘lone-wolf’ who doesn’t have an ideology and will just find stimulation from multiple sources.
Author refers to Shawcross. Of course whilst seeking a rebalance that had some validity he missed the ‘lone-wolf’ psychopath too. And then the pattern of the previous Govt doing v little with commissioned Reports compounded inaction.
Personally I don’t think we’ve thought enough about the psychopath incidence within populations. Increasingly Neuroscience has identified a small percentage seem have different brain responses (especially in the frontal lobes linked to empathy and morality – worth a read of James Fallon’s work). The potential percentage might be between 2-5%. That of course is millions. Now self-evidently not all who’s brain may be wired differently go on to commit such horrors, but perhaps we’ll find in years to come that if you have this risk factor it then takes certain environmental triggers and you have a killer.
The science on psychopathy is fascinating as well as disturbing. One thought is the best fighters in total War tend to have this tendency, so did evolution have a role? But also the Concentration camp guards that enjoyed the brutality will have had it too.
Maybe one day we’ll screen for it. The question then might be what we do with the results.
Not talking about the Southport case but in general. I still don’t understand why a small group of individuals of common background are called ‘terrorists’ but one working alone, with no friends is labelled a ‘psychopath’. Don’t we have a group of psychopaths working together forming a terrorist cell?
I suspect if we could fMRI many terrorists we’d see the faulty wiring Neuroscientists believe may explain psychopathic tendencies in many.
The issue for Prevent was it’s ‘filters’ required the person they were picking up to have a clear ideology. The Southport murderer took from a smorgasbord of on line horror and manuals but had no clear ideology. The fact he wasn’t crying ‘allahu akbar’ when his committed his horror seems to further indicate he’s psychopath rather than some ISIS ideological terrorist.
Among scholars of evolution and Darwin’s theories there is an hypothesis that this tendency to get violent is gradually being reduced by female selection. Un-married women and their families have been selecting the kind of grooms that won’t explode in senseless violence when dinner is late or the house is a mess; the kind who won’t hurt the children. Or, at least enough women have, for hundreds of generations, and as a result the whole species has become on average much less violent.
Of course results may vary.
It doesn’t seem to me that Muslim families have been using this criteria for choosing their daughters’ grooms.
How many Muslim families do you actually know UR? How many Muslims you worked with or socialised with?
Just intrigued as to whether your on line education also aided by any real life experience.
Yes I think the role of evolutionary Neuroscience still in the foothills, but would concur. Stephen Pinker’s ‘History of Violence’ a decade now behind the latest research but still fascinating on this sort of stuff.
Perhaps the mistake is not to associate al-Quaeda or Isis with words like ‘clever’ or ‘intelligent’. Surely, a clever member of Isis will stay away from anything labelled ‘Isis’ because he wants to avoid detection. So, for Prevent (or anybody, especially Starmer) to assume that terrorist attacks only come from those organisations, not from other individuals, is at best naïve and at worst stupid.
Also, is it possible that Prevent is concentrated on the large conurbations so that Southport, for example, would not attract much attention?
That’s what our “intelligence” services (the one’s who used to be concerned with spying) would certainly have thought. It would appear that Prevent isn’t part of our intelligence services.
There is one very simple anti-Islamic terrorism strategy I can think of.
Identify any anti-UK propaganda emanating from a mosque, any calls for jihad, any calls for retribution for what is happening in Gaza, and then close down that mosque.
Cut away the source of anti-West rhetoric, so preventing any young person from being radicalised in that way. It would be such a simple thing to do.
BUT the majority of mosques are in Labour areas etc etc etc. Just where the Pakistani rape gangs operate etc etc etc. So would that even be considered as a proposal in Prevent’s headquarters? Would the mainstream media allow debate on this?
In 1995-7, my place of work was next to Regents Park Mosque. They were putting up posters warning of the influx of Islamist preachers and linking them to Marxism. As a country we’re we listening?
In 2009, Channel 4 broadcast a Despatches documentary called Undercover Mosques. It revealed alarming evidence of exactly what was being disseminated in some mosques up and down the country. Even then people were very concerned by what they were seeing and there was some relief that at last here was investigative journalists bringing the evidence to the fore. What happened?
The police launched an investigation into the programme makers accusing the of television fakery. Huge denial, huge deflection. The police were eventually forced to issue an apology but the damage was done, the evidence swept under the carpet and public attention successfully distracted elsewhere.
This policy has betrayed not only the population in general (including many ex muslims) but many muslims who don’t want this backward rubbish either but far too many tolerate it in the name of misplaced loyalty. That must be challenged.
The burning question we need to demand an answer to is why there has been this conspiracy at the highest levels of government and the state to give cover to what should be roundly exposed and condemned for the safety of all?
“Is Prevent….?” To what extent is Prevent hamstrung by being staffed with the kind of people full of precious nonsense about “racism” and other such counter-productive, virtue-signalling? Just asking.
can just picture stuffy middle-aged female teachers all over the country observing some kid poke fun of the multi-coloured flag & immediately referring them to Prevent
In Manchester yesterday lunchtime near the Arndale shopping centre three men flanked by Palestine flags were reading aloud with megaphones verses of the Q holy book. They switched to Arabic to recite the most violent verses targeting the historical victims of the Prophet.
Metres away stood three police officers, two almost certainly of the ethnicity that predominantly adheres to the faith. Diversity ensures 1000s of Arabic speakers are walking past. None of them bat an eyelid. Able to understand what was being spewed, I spoke to the officers and asked did they know what was being said? The two bearded officers laughed. Their colleague of a different ethnicity walked away.
Police. Politicians. Prevent. Everywhere the two tiers are obvious. Those in charge fear the brotherhood more than they do everyone else. Two tiers of fear keeping the peace by ignoring what is going on.
Tommy Robinson has been talking about this for twenty years. He’s the one in prison.
Let’s hope Elon Musk keeps applying pressure from abroad.
As Dominic Adler wrote a few days ago: “here’s the uncomfortable truth: troubled individuals like Axel Rudakubana require intrusive policing.” If we import troubled individuals from societies with a history of violence – and Rudakubana came from a country with a recent history of genocide – or societies that are steeped in an anti- Western religious ideology that Islam often manifests itself as then we face the unsustainable burden of intensively monitoring such individuals once they have been identified.
In truth we don’t have sufficient officers to do this and can’t afford the numbers required. The solution is the exercise of far more discrimination as to whom we let in and at the first sign of criminal activity return them to their place of origin and this should apply to 2nd generation immigrants as well. Then Prevent can concentrate its energy on home grown psychopaths whether far right or far left.
“Is Prevent Underestimating Islamist Terrorism?” Not necessarily but the government and its apparatus refuse to accept the failure of multiculturalism.
For anyone interested how this works. Rudakubana pleads guilty.
Two day silence from Unherd. Starmer press conference. No terrorism here. Just an extremely violent individual. The new terrorism.
First article from Unherd. Academic supports the government line.
This article. But but what about Islamic terrorism? Don’t worry. It’s just young men at odds with the world. Just what Starmer set down in his press conference.
Unherd is playing you all.
No. You’re trying to play us all, and not very convincingly.
What you’ve just posted is arrant nonsense in terms of Unherd’s reaction to the events in Southport and subsequent trial.
In which case, you describe Unherd’s response after the trial.
You posted some sensible comments earlier – why ruin your case with adding the tripe about Unherd?
Unherd doesn’t have to take a political stance. All it has to do is allow debate on these issues, which you’re now taking part in, which is why your point is arrant nonsense. There have been a huge number of articles on the Southport killings and aftermath, from all sides of the debate. I’ve tried pointing you in the direction of articles which demonstrate you’re patently wrong before, but you just ignore them, so you can now swing, as the saying goes.
There have been only three. I’ve commented on them all.
Go on. You describe the course of the articles, their arguments and conclusions. If I am wrong. Tell me where..
But the idea of lone wolves having no ideology, , still less a plan, doesnt really hold up. Axel. sat in his room reading Was he reading Hayek? John Milton? Nietzche? No, he was reading the Al Quaida manual.
That could well be a means to an end. Chris Baylis has written an excellent article in The Critic entitled “The Nihilism Of The Newcomers”. I wish it would get much more exposure, it answers a lot of the difficult questions that our government(s) are trying to avoid.
And now it gets really creepy. I wanted to know what an Al-qaeda manual is. I stsrted to Google it but then didn’t. Would I get into trouble if I did.
Is there a chapter in the manual on cutting throats of your enemy and their children? We just don’t know and never will.
Have i suggested otherwise?
He was also making up a batch of ricin which he needed for a new recipe he found in Good Housekeeping. No terrorism here.
It’s Good Housekeeping’s fault! I knew it!
Prevent seems more driven by downplaying if not ignoring the reality of Islamist terrorism. When the nation’s response to the Southport murders is to fixate on how the killer bought a knife – a knife, not a bazooka, not explosives, not bioweapons, but a common tool – then the country has lost the plot.
If the killer was some random white guy from anywhere in the UK, then Starmer, his media wing, and the entire virtue-signaling class would be in full throat demanding “something be done” about those yahoos. But predictably, there is near-silence about a person from a group known to favor violence as a tool, silence driven by an irrational fear of offending someone or being labeled with an ism or phobia.
We can’t have that; far better to just suck up the senseless murders of little girls as one of those things that sometimes happens. Since I’m an American and perhaps not up to speed on the entirety of British history, can someone tell me if acts like this – or the incident at the Arianna Grande concert or the runaway driver or bus bombings – were commonly carried about by Englishmen? Please exclude The Troubles from any answer as I understand those.
Why excludeThe Troubles’? Those murders were carried out by the Irish and not by the British
The root problem is supremacism. In our day, Islamic supremacism seems to be even more extreme than the Christian supremacism of yesteryear. It may even out-extreme Marxist inevitability doctrine. As long as the idea of “one true religion” or “one true philosophy” absolutism persists, the problem of fanatics with an “ends justifies the means” attitude will persist.
For the avoidance of doubt, many people think that Judaism is supremacist, because of the “chosen people” idea. But this is not so. Judaism sets a limit, for example, on the territorial ambitions of a Jewish state. Nor does it posit that all all the world must become Jewish. Quite the opposite: Most of Judaism’s restrictions are deemed unnecessary for non-Jews.
That Abraham was promised that his descendants would “possess the gate of their enemies” is a defensive promise. It gives non-Jews an absolute defence against being “possessed” by Jews: be a friend and not an enemy.
If you examine history of the Arab-Israeli conflict you will see the pattern develop: Arab attacks and massacres of Jews in the 1920s led to the development of Jewish defence organisations such as Haganah. Continued Arab violence led to the British abandoning the mandate and the declaration of the State of Israel. Arab attempts to strangle the nascent State of Israel from the moment of the 1947 U.N. Partition vote led to a war which displaced hundreds of thousands and expanded Israel beyond the partition boundaries. Arab attempts to destroy Israel led to the 1967 expansion etc.
The absolute defence against being “possessed” by Jews is: be a friend and not an enemy.
Lone wolf terrorism has very little to do with ideology. Ideology is only the post-hoc rationalization used as justification by them after the fact.
The real reason these type of terrorist attacks happen is because people do not have an investment in society and they have no hope. At this point they are then open to ideologies that promise them a utopian future by rejecting the old world, often through violent means.
At the same time we have a society that is telling young men they are the cause of all problems, that evil men have controlled the world forever and caused all the problems, that white people people are the enemy, that you can’t get ahead in any way because the entire world is built on shadowy systems of oppression. In short the entire leftist wokery world view is one that breeds terrorism by removing all individual agency as irrelevant compared to “systemic” structures while at the same time still retaining the full burden of guilt, and hence justified anger, at individuals for immutable characteristics, with no chance at redemption. It’s basically the anti-christianity, all condemnation, no hope for redemption, and a supremacy of the material over the spiritual; no wonder it breeds violence and destruction in its wake.
John Galt said: “Lone wolf terrorism has very little to do with ideology. Ideology is only the post-hoc rationalization used as justification by them after the fact.”
What this ignores is the Islamic supremacist idea which provides a convenient pretext for violent zealous punishment of “society” as the alleged cause of disaffection.
What’s in an Al Qaeda terror manual?
Does anyone know? And why are we not told?
I suspect it’s akin to the anarchist cookbook – how to make IEDs, how to make ricin – with references to the capitalist state replaced with jihadi dogma.
Prevent had three opportunities to prevent the Southport atrocity and failed each time. Tweaking the organisation won’t work. Something much more radical is needed.
We are Told that the politicians instructed Prevent to focus on Far Right terrorism. So they seem to have done that to the excluding of Islamic terrorism? Why ? what proportion of these attacks are far right ? Virtually none. Politicians appear terrified of being honest about who is threatening folk in the UK .
They appear driven by an almost Maoist level of loathing for those who dare object to the threat of Islamic supremacy and terrorism and the rapid colonisation of their country by those who make their contempt for British culture and history clear. These are the people they like to lump in with the pathetically small number of seriously far right nut jobs because they are desperate to make out the threat from the “far right” is the biggest threat we actually face. It’s really quite ridiculous but also terrifying. Biden called the threat of the far right the biggest that faced the US. As if to prove it parents who complained at school board meetings about gender ideology being indoctrinated in elementary schools were denounced as “far right”. We see the EU is also bleating about the terrible threat of the “far right”.
It’s all very odd and deeply troubling.
Presumably Prevent was set up to prevent mass slaughter by unhinged individuals, however they were motivated? Can we have a breakdown of the number of deaths in the UK in the last couple of decades caused by Far Right, Far Left and Islamic? That should give us a clue where to look for the next atrocity.