Last month, Yvette Cooper, the UK Home Secretary, announced that the government would increase funding for counter-terrorism police by 14% to almost £1.2 billion. This, inevitably, has prompted a lot of interest on the part of the extremism subject-specialist-class who are vying for a piece of that sizeable pie.

According to The Observer yesterday, Neil Basu and Dame Sara Khan are concerned that the government’s plans, which centre on reforming Prevent, the counter-radicalisation programme, don’t go far enough. This, apparently, is because they fail to “address a toxic pool of hatred, conspiracy theories and ‘dangerous rhetoric’ from high-profile figures including Elon Musk.”

Basu, the former head of counter-terrorism policing, is particularly worried about what he calls “non-violent extremism” and the lack of a “coherent strategy” to tackle it. “Some people who are not terrorists are very good at creating terrorists, wittingly or unwittingly,” he told The Observer, elaborating: “When you’ve got people with very large online followings who are capable of generating extremism and the government isn’t doing anything, that is incredibly dangerous.” He was specifically referring to Elon Musk and his recent patter about Britain’s grooming gangs. “The people claiming there is a cover-up of mass rape may not be designing their language to create a race war or a riot, but it can – we know it can,” Basu said. “There are people out there who will take their message to commit violence… there will be another Darren Osborne out there.”

The bar for entry into becoming an extremism subject-specialist is pretty low these days, but the cretinous belief that Elon Musk is a “creator of terrorism” ought to be instantly disqualifying. Basu, for his part, provides no evidence to support his claim about the causal link between Musk’s rhetoric and what he calls “real-world effect”, by which he means violence. This is because there is none. Indeed, if Musk’s speech was dangerous, we would have seen a wave of Musk-inspired violence by now, given how prominent and far-reaching his speech is.

Of course speech that incites violence should be condemned and we have laws that indeed condemn and punish it. But Musk is not inciting violence; on the contrary, he is condemning one of the worst kinds of violence — the rape of children — and a wider religious-communal culture that excuses it.

It should be equally obvious that if some troglodyte decides to avenge such rapes by murdering innocent Muslims, the moral responsibility for such a despicable act lies solely with that individual and not with those who are doing the socially necessary job of condemning the rapes.

The selectivity of Basu’s concerns is particularly revealing. He is not warning about the inflamed rhetoric of activists claiming that there is a genocide against Palestinians or that of trans activists claiming there is a genocide against trans people or that of race-grifters claiming that all white people are demonic racists. (In fact on that last score, Basu has been sympathetic towards BLM protesters and their “legitimate anger”.) And I don’t recall him asking conservative Muslim figures to cool it, otherwise “there will be another Jihadi John out there.” For Basu, it seems, the only speech that is dangerous is that which has a Right-leaning valence.

There’s also an infantilising element implicit in Basu’s concerns, which is that the wider British populace (read: the white proles) isn’t grown up enough to deal with unpleasant facts and should thus be shielded from them by an enlightened clergy of right-thinking people. Moreover, by dismissing these grievances as far-Right talking points, Basu plays directly into the hands of the far-Right extremists he loathes and spends so much of his time warning against.

When Labour gets round to spending that £1.2 billion on counter-terrorism policing, it ought to be sensitive to the diversity of violent threats the UK currently faces, including the ones not on Basu’s radar.