Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has rejected calls by civil servants at the Home Office to broaden the definition of “extremism”. But what does the internal review recommend, and why has Cooper rejected its findings?
The review was commissioned by the Home Office as part of the counter-extremism “sprint” the Home Secretary launched on taking office. It advises the widening of the focus of counter-extremism policies to incorporate “conspiracy theorists” and extreme misogynists, as well as some environmental and single-issue campaigners. The focus of counter-extremism efforts, it suggests, should be less on ideologies and more on harm. It also reaches the conclusion that claims of “two-tier policing” are an extreme Right-wing theory which has wormed its way into mainstream debates.
In the aftermath of last year’s Southport stabbings and consequent riots, false claims about the perpetrator’s background were proliferated on social media platforms. This included one account originating from Pakistan reporting that British born-and-raised Axel Rudakubana — of Rwandan Christian heritage — was an illegal Middle Eastern Muslim migrant who had recently arrived in the UK on a small boat. There is no denying that creating and spreading conspiracy theories which risk inciting violence against specific groups in society can be categorised as extremism. This should be a lesson learnt from last summer’s riots, which saw the deliberate targeting of mosques, Muslim-owned businesses, and hotels housing small-boat migrants.
However, the civil servants’ advice to treat accusations of “two-tier policing” as a form of far-Right activity demonstrates the deep ideological rot within the Home Office. This ignores the legitimate criticism of local councils and police forces which covered up sexual abuse gangs made up of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men for fear of being accused of racism or Islamophobia. For example, Greater Manchester Police’s Operation Augusta review into child sexual abuse was prematurely closed down in 2005 just a year after it was launched.
In 2023, long before Elon Musk’s recent commentary pushed the grooming gang scandal back to the top of the news agenda, Rochdale whistleblower and former constable Maggie Oliver blamed the “paralysing inaction” of the authorities on “cultural sensitivities about the backgrounds of the perpetrators, who were mainly British-Pakistani men”. It is, therefore, surely not “far-Right” or “extremist” to merely broach the topic of double standards in the criminal justice system.
What emerged in the trial and conviction of Rudakubana for his murder of three young girls — the worst attack on children in Britain since the Dunblane massacre in 1996 — is that he had a morbid fascination with the Rwandan genocide, the 2017 London Bridge terror attack, and various school shootings. He was reportedly planning a killing spree at the school where he had threatened and attacked teachers and fellow pupils. His violent history was well documented. Yet the system did not act to take him off the streets.
Is it possible that Rudakubana — the teenage son of asylum seekers from Rwanda, a country not too long ago ravaged by civil war and genocide — was repeatedly excused because of his background? Would Prevent have handled the danger he posed more robustly if he had been a white British working-class boy with a depraved interest in neo-Nazism and white supremacy? To ask such questions is not extreme Right-wing postulating. On the contrary, it is exactly the kind of questions the Home Office must ask itself during the upcoming national inquiry.
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SubscribeI was stunned when I read that home office report that accusations of two-tier policing are a far right trope.
It is plain to anyone with eyes that we do have two-tier policing in the UK.
We are being gas-lit to an astonishing degree.
Ah yes, and the accusation that bears shit in the woods is another far right trope and the fact that the Pope is a Catholic is a conspiracy theory. Well I suppose there might be some argument over the latter.
There are none so blind as will not see.
It isn’t just policing. This two-tier mentality infects every policy and law from legal “protected characteristics” to the National Curriculum to Armed Forces recruitment. Everywhere you look immigrants are privileged over natives, blacks and browns over whites, Muslims over Christians, women over men, transvestites (God help us!) over women, homosexuals over heterosexuals, foreign perspectives over British ones, or – the worst-of-the-worst – English ones. It is hard-wired into Labour activists and their fellow-travellers in the civil service, BBC etc.
We live in a county where the mother of a 14 year old boy mother is filmed , with a police officer present, pleading for her son’s life at the local mosque after he was accused of damaging a copy of the Koran,
where a teacher is forced to go into hiding after showing a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad,
where white people are given lengthy custodial sentences within a few weeks or even days of committing minor offences at anti-immigration protests,
but where Pakistani rape gangs are protected and even aided by the authorities and where others of the same ethnicity are reluctantly charged for assaulting a police woman and breaking her nose only because Nigel Farage kicked up a fuss and threatened to bring a private prosecution.
Where Sam Melia gets sent down for 2 years for putting stickers with unpalatable messages on lampposts, and is the first person ever to be prosecuted for putting sticker on lampposts.
Nothing at all two tier about any of that
This is an interesting video from Callum Darrah about his treatment by the anti-terror police. I did not know this could happen in the UK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=991kRp8KUmo
I watched that. Shocking but also not that much. No one would be shocked if the North Korean police picked up their citizens and interrogated them for four hours, with no right to silence, no right to a lawyer…
Well it’s now happening in UK… it’s shocking but it’s also Starmer’s Brtain…
In reality policing is multi-layered, with a range of priorities set by who-knows-who. Priorities change with ideology and the institutional imperative of self-protection.
Not to forget that there isn’t just one police force. The Home Office doles out its targets and the forces do their own thing, in theory to follow these targets.
Spreading false tales of the Southport killer’s Muslim background wouldn’t have incited any violence if there hadn’t already been so many other instances of violent Muslim extremism.
I class myself as Islamoprudent. When the terrorist statistics change, my mind may change after a sustained period of non-violence. Until then, noli me tangere.
Civil Servants are mostly recruited directly from university. They lead suburban lives of great privilege and comfort and little pressure. They are virtually unsackable, very well paid, given generous pensions and have no problem getting mortgages. They have the thing that everyone else in the country has lost: security.
It’s unrealistic to expect them to make policy recommendations that reflect the needs of those outside the bubble. They have no idea what those needs are.
Not all of them.
Maybe. But those at the top of the tree have their own privileged lives.
Yes, the top of the tree, not the vast majority trying to cope like everyone else
Reminds me of Tony Benn’s diary telling of his fights with civil servants, when he became Chief Postman. According to him, the CS’s ignored him and he implied strongly that they were anti – Labour. More likely was that he knew absolutely nothing about the job but they knew a lot more. He was like the Junior Doctor and they saw themselves as the Consultants.
You do at least have to see that the elected politicians know zero/zilch about their jobs, especially the Ministers. So the CS’s trot out the same old, same old, rubbish but perhaps with a little spin so that the Ministers respect their opinions. For one government the report might be off-breaks, for the other leg-breaks. Anyway, after the report the Minister has only one job – to rewrite it so that it meets with Party requirements but doesn’t upset the other lot too much. A game in fact. A game to them but not to us, perhaps.
Lies, lies and more lies from the Home Office.
StarmerLies.
“deep ideological rot within the Home Office”…Oh Yes indeed. And getting ever more rotten for over 30 years.
If only the British public had wised up years ago to just how completely the UK Civil Service (together with the UK’s parasitic Lefty lawyer class) subverts and effectively countermands anything non-‘Progressive’ that the electors have voted for, Britain wouldn’t be in the desperate mess that we now endure. (Plenty of instances here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing)
If we ever got a Trump-type leader, their first action would need to be to clear out its vast ranks of university sheep-dipped aparatchiks… and basically start again.
Unherd participates in the lies. Far Right, carefully left undefined, is the problem.
Tommy Robinson, smeared by Unherd as Far Right, is the problem.
Get a writer to put the other side of the argument Unherd.
To post a comment on UnHerd one needs a motive: your only motivation appears either, to get yourself in the Guinness book for the most posts on UnHerd or, for the most downvotes on UnHerd: give us a break.
I am pointing out that Unherd is part of the problem.
And keep doing it Mr Littlewood. Everywhere you can. I see that it earns you a lot of criticism here from those who consider themselves more reasonable and balanced. But reasonable and balanced hasn’t been getting the job done. I’m an old woman now and life will soon dispense with me, so perhaps I shouldn’t be too bothered about the future. Yet, the most extreme emotions I have are the rage and pain I feel when I think that what has been happening to our country is fast becoming irreversible. My ancestry is not distinguished – too many border reivers in there for a start – but it is traceably very long going back through Welsh steelworkers and Durham miners – people who did all the hard graft and were rewarded with a 50 pence piece which told them that Diversity Built Britain. My husband did 22 years in the army – final years on the General Staff trying to stop the MOD from handing every pleasant trade it could to SERCO and stripping the soldiers of every incidental perk that made their families more comfortable. And now we are involved in something else that, I would like to think, honours our British heritage and talents.
Don’t be deterred. Thank you.
That’s kind of you to say Glynis. I don’t particularly want to spend all my time thinking about this but when I think about going back to reading and writing philosophy, which is what I normally concentrate on, I remember Tommy Robinson is in jail for standing up for the British people, not the elite, not the comfortable middle classes, but those who have no voice, and the bastards have put him in prison. And Unherd want to keep him in there. So I will keep going.
He made some interesting and useful comments earlier so there’s just no need for this constant trolling of the Unherd platform, which becomes counterproductive.
The sooner he realises that, the sooner he’ll be respected for his contributions.
He’s just creating the equivalent of dropped litter.
I take your point but perhaps it comes down to why this platform exists. Its name alone suggests something that was intended to be rather more revolutionary or iconoclastic in its choice of articles.
In Unherd’s own words :
‘our mission [is] to challenge herd mentality wherever we see it’
‘to speak for people who are otherwise dismissed’
‘to give a platform to the overlooked, the downtrodden and the traduced’
Is it really doing this? Nobody much more traduced than Tommy Robinson.
Perhaps Richard wouldn’t need to drop so much litter if the editors would pick a piece up, read it and give him a direct answer as per ‘discussion with the author’ in eg the Telegraph.
I agree with you. As I said on a post a while ago UnHerd started off well, but, particularly over the past 2 or 3 years, has gradually become more and more similar to the MSM in it’s approach, if more intellectual.
The old UnHerd had interesting interviews between Giles Fraser and all sorts of different people; as well as politics there were articles on books, film, art, farming, history, religion, refreshingly, from a small c conservative point of view. All gone.
Perhaps some of the regular commenters enjoy the forum so much they are less critical of UnHerd’s editorial direction of travel than they might be otherwise.
His motivation, as i’ve alluded to several times now, is to try to destroy one of the very few platforms where serious, intelligent discourse can occur – from any point of view.
He/it won’t succeed. No-one with any other agenda would do what you describe. Worst of all, he thinks he’s the only one who can see what’s happening in society – some kind of syndrome, probably.
What’s the back story here?
Is it that the Home Office staff who compiled this report agreed with Keir Starmer’s analysis (‘far-right thugs’) and put together this report in good faith that this was the line they were expected to follow?
Is it that Yvette Cooper gave them enough rope to hang themselves so that she could then say, this is the Home Office narrative that we have to deal with?
It all STILL feels like political manoeuvring. The latest problem to surface, of school heads and parents voicing their concern about men loitering outside school gates, has been going on for years, so the issue is not specific to one political party. I am so glad that these issues are now coming to the attention of the media. I wonder what will be next.
What is the function of the Home Office and the Home Secretary?
BULLSEYE!
Tommy Robinson is the living evidence of two tier policing. He has been callibg attention to the Pakistani rape gangs and ths failure of Muslim integration for 20 years. He has been smeared as Far Right and last year he was arrested under Terrorism charges and now is in prison again. Another abuse of the Justice system.
Tell his story. The whole corruption of the police, the media, the politicians and the judiciary will be exposed.
It will be humiliating for every Englishman, what has been covered up, what has been done. But everything now needs to be exposed so we can make amends and feel clean again.
Or do you just want more lies? More Home Office lies? More Starmer lies?
Why would there be downvotes for this?
Also, can anyone say categorically that the grooming gangs problem is solved, or are they still happening now?
Shouldn’t the headline be The Home Office has created two tier policing?
Shouldn’t the article be about how the Left needs Two tier policing to maintain its Ideology?
Marcuse laid down his theory of tolerance in his book Repressive Tolerance (1965). It is a classic text of the Left. Tolerance will be shown to any intolerant minority culture to purposefully break down the ruling culture. This will break down the justice system, which to Marcuse, oppresses the minority groups in their midst. If minority groups are treated equally that maintains and solidifies the power of the ruling majority. That power must be broken. How? Excuse any illegal behavior of the minority groups.
Two tier policing in the UK is the realisation of this aim. Pakistani rape gangs working untouchable for 40 years is the dirty secret of the Left.
It is the direct consequence of two tier policing.
Why doesn’t Unherd find a contributor to analyse what is happening from the point of view of the Right?
There is the rule of law. Absolutely necessary for civilisation and freedom. But if a law is not enforced or if law is applied selectively, where is the rule of law?
Moreover, what is the effect of recommending the rule of law to the majority who are not only law-abiding but think that law is applied equally? As a means of gaslighting them?
Any left-winger or former revolutionary should be thoroughly familiar with the Marcusian doctrine.
The officials dealing with these girl victims are reported to have been uncertain whether this was promiscuity or abuse? The poor confused things. Did the letter ‘M’ marked on one of the girl victims mean ‘misogyny’ or ‘male’?
The author’s last paragraph looks like it’s been introduced because it is supposed that is how right-wingers think. A whole shoal of red herrings.
These people (government, Home Office) have really lost the plot. They can’t even see plain facts staring them in the face. Two tier justice is literally hard-coded into the legal system – this is what protected characteristics means – that some groups get preferential treatment over others. Did these MPs not notice this when they passed these laws ?
I remember having to deal with the Home Office over 20 years ago and just how awful that was. It’s hard to believe they could have got any worse, but there you go.
The two people who drafted the 2010 Equality Act with its protected characteristics legislation were Harriet Harman and Trevor Phillips, both of them self confessed Marxists. Perhaps Mr Phillips has realised to some extent its flaws, I don’t know, occasionally his Times articles seem to indicate greater insight, I hope so anyway.
But Harriet Harman ? The woman seems lost to all decency and always has.
The establishment will do anything, absolutely anything, at this stage to avoid facing up to reality.
One day everything will be understood, everything exposed… I hope.
The nightmare for anyone living in UK is that none of this will happen. It will all be brushed under the carpet. There will be an unspoken agreement that no one will ever talk about it. A dirty rotten secret that everyone knows but no one will mention.
The links between Labour councils and how they fund mosques and how they get sheaves of postal votes in return, how they have media contacts to bury any criticism, how sex offenders are in positions of power in Labour councils and the mosques, how the police are implicated in it all, how far the corruption seeps up to the top of the Labour party, how the mainstream media have collaborated and continue to collaborate to ensure the story never gets out, how anyone who raises their head above the parapet, outraged, to reveal what is going on is silenced by the joint efforts of the media and the police, how Tommy Robinson is arrested as a terrorist, smeared as Far Right…
How long can all this cover up go? How far will the Labour party go to ensure they are never held to account?
Expand extremism to cover Unherd comments? Would they do that?
Surely most people in the real world would see gender ideology as a form of extremism, which even overturns basic widely held moral codes of children’s safe-guarding (essential in any morality in any culture in any world).
But how many in the Labour party even remotely consider it to be extremism?
There’s a problem when many of the people responsible for making the rules and definitions are really extremists themselves?
By this reading, wokeism itself is an extremist ideology that causes harm due to the extreme inaction of State authorities acting in accordance with the mores of wokeism.
Thus to say accusations of two tier policing is a form of far right extremism is another example of woke extremism in action.
In other words, we have an extremist Home Office policing nonextremist criticisms of its extremism.
Welcome to the world of doublethink.
Until last month, this person was Director General for Public Safety at the Home Office.Why should Britain tremble?
Jaee Samant – GOV.UK
Having completely failed to persuade an unknown (possibly quite large) number of Muslims resident in the UK (legally or otherwise) that it is not acceptable to hate the rest of us, to want to kill us, and to try to do so when they can…
…the Home Office have obviously decided it is easier to persuade the rest of us not to mind about their hatred…
…and possibly even to accept it as a just punishment of our wicked whiteness (or “white-adjacent” behaviour)…and to cheerfully accept the odd mass-murder by knife, car or bomb as being no more than we deserve.
I’d say it was Kafka-esque, but I’m not sure even he could do more with it than look on in stunned horror…
For me the most worrying thing is the Home Office are repeating the Errors of Rochdale Rotheram Oxford etc. By deflecting from the self evident truth – That most attacks have had an Islamic element -thery repeat the Official concealment of the truth and fail in their duty to address the cause.
One has to ask why ? Why does the Home Office repeatedly do this. It didnt do this to the IRA . It didnt pretend the IRA was “right wing” or “left wing”. They were dangerous people so they banned the organisation.
Why does the Hopme Office provide cover for Islamic extremists – whose side is Cooper On ?
She’s on the side of the state, they always are.
A black man complaining about two tier policing wrt stop and search will get a sympathetic hearing.
A white man complaining about two tier policing will get a referral to Prevent.
That’s what two tier policing looks like.
Why, oh why do my comments get deleted?
The Home Office appears to be spending too much time doing audits at Rampton.