This down-at-heel cosmopolitan community, home to immigrants, artists and students, had always been poor but peaceful. Yet on that afternoon 20 years ago, something had changed. The atmosphere was tense: the familiar sounds of Asian music, reverberating from youthful sound systems, had been replaced by a chorus of police sirens, and the colorful aura of the storefronts was lit up by flashing blue lights.

It was 12 July, and earlier that morning residents had been forced to evacuate their homes following the discovery of a bomb factory in a nearby flat at Alexandra Grove. The unkept hovel in question could have been any student digs. But instead of alcohol and pizza boxes, the rooms contained enough explosive material to devastate this entire neighborhood. The rudimentary devices which had brutally torn through the lives of 52 victims in London the week before had been made here.

The strong police presence was met with mixed emotions. You could sense the hostility as both Makkah Masjid and the local Leeds Grand Mosque were ransacked by investigators seeking to understand the teachings and instruction which had radicalized four men from this city. This, in turn, was met by the fear of reprisals against local Muslims.

Like many of my generation, I had watched the televised violence of 9/11 in horror. Yet while that act of terrorism marked all our lives, it was still a tragedy that had played out over there. What was taking place in Leeds on that summer morning for years later, was the “War on Terror” coming home. As Zygmunt Bauman put it, that which was global, was truly local — especially the new forms of violence it was creating.

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Acts of terror have always been about communication. The images of destruction carry a powerful message, and the acts rely heavily on symbolism. If the abiding image of 9/11 was that of the planes striking the Twin Towers, in London, it was the pictures of the ripped-apart bus which left an indelible scar on Britain’s collective consciousness.

Terrorism, as 7/7 showed us, wasn’t just about a fear of the unknown. It was about weaponizing the familiar and intimate — turning the everyday into the source of nightmares.

Even though this played out all those years ago, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it could all happen again. Similar forces and dynamics are still at work amid our communities, and are arguably more dangerous still. The processes required to prevent such violence are being lost within our divisive political landscape. The Prevent Strategy, for example, launched by Labour in response to the 9/11 attacks, has been met with criticism from all sides for failing to stop radicalization, instead alienating minority communities. And governments, from Tony Blair onward, have struggled to get to grips with community alienation and failure to integrate.

Blair, who was PM on 7/7, left office tainted by his entanglements in the Middle East. Today, the United Kingdom risks being ineluctably drawn into an even more fraught conflict with Iran, even as events in the region remain our most divisive political concern. We only have to look at the continuing protests in London to see how explosive the issue has become, with Keir Starmer struggling to deal in a constructive way the debate on Palestine.

Things were quite different at the turn of the 21st century. We were only just realizing we had entered into an age marked by the catastrophic actions of individuals, to say nothing of the worrying limits of liberal multiculturalism. It no longer took an army of millions to bring about a global security crisis, just a handful of radicalized individuals. Their ability to disrupt was amplified by the power of the media and the attention it permitted.

In some ways, we have learned how to address these acts of violence, seen again at Manchester Arena in 2017, and not treat it as a threat to our entire way of life, as Tony Blair did. In an article for Foreign Affairs, the then PM explicitly linked the “War on Terror” to a battle for global values. Today, we more readily see these as the acts of deranged individuals.

But is the focus on lone wolves naive? The radicalization of potentially dangerous individuals is arguably a deeper problem than ever before across the political spectrum. Back in 2006, don’t forget, mobile phones were still primitive, and Facebook had only just carried out its first pilot roll-out. Twitter was yet to be launched. Yet if the early years of the War on Terror fostered a “with-us-or-against-us” mentality, part of the official doctrine, the tribalism of our social media-enabled politics today is far more divisive, dogmatic and assured.

The subsequent penetration of smartphones and social media into our every day has enabled a politics of immediacy that exacerbates divisions and amplifies calls for violence, even as it further hampers social solidarity. The first decade of the War on Terror placed too much importance on simplistic “Clash of Civilizations” narratives — which ended up in the widespread demonization of Islam. But the calamitous corrective to this has been to insist there is no correlation between Islamic teachings and violence and oppression.

We have only to look at the disastrous response to the Southport attacks, and the catastrophic mishandling of the investigation into grooming gangs, to see how the politics of correctness fuels the rise of counter-parasitical movements feeding off similar feelings of anger and resentment. If it is ridiculous to claim, for instance, that all followers of any belief system fully advocate violence, it is equally absurd to claim it has no relation whatsoever to acts of slaughter and the quashing of basic rights. No political or religious project or identity should be immune from criticism: they can all become violent and oppressive.

The problem here is that when it comes to Islam, the Labour Party still doesn’t know how to deal with it, happily promoting social liberalism while also making criticism of the more violent strands of Islam still harder. All the while, cities such as Bradford and Leeds are becoming increasingly segregated, in terms of lives, religion and politics. All across Britain, meanwhile, identity politics is more divisive than ever. Battlelines have been drawn and are fought over by those who insist they are on the right side of history.

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Twenty years on, then, we have far less confidence in our leaders and a feeling of despair surrounds the idea of multiculturalism — a feeling that politicians on both sides of the political divide will be inclined to weaponize. Indeed, while the War on Terror simply withered away, we are none the wiser as to why youngsters are radicalized. This was spelled out in the Government’s official report into the attack. It stated: “What we know of previous extremists in the UK shows that there is not a consistent profile to help identify who may be vulnerable to radicalization”. This, too, has been borne out in Prevent’s continued failure to target and defuse potential suspects.

Today, then, political positions are hardening. We have a far more organized far-Right movement, and on the Left, we see the new divisions forming, as with the rise of the Independent Alliance, which will once again place identity and the question of foreign policy front and center. Meanwhile, the possibility of further terrorist attacks can’t be ruled out. It is amid such moments of political febrility that the idea of civil war doesn’t seem so fantastic. We should remember that, as we remember those who perished 20 years ago.

A few days ago, I found myself on Tavistock Square in London. There is no sense that such a horrific event took place on these sun baked streets. Nor, as I traveled through Edgware Road Station, did I suspect that others on the train would be remembering those images from within the blown out carriage, as the smoke billowed from a smoldering blackness. It is all too easy to forget such appalling horrors: the victims, their families, the rescue workers who had to confront the unimaginable.

If we are to do justice to the memory of 7/7, then, it is not only to follow a ritual of remembrance. It is to remember that the forces that led to the detonation of those bombs 20 years ago aren’t extinguished. And that Britain today is contending with rising disenchantment. We need political leaders who will defuse this dangerous moment, not light the touchpaper. We don’t want to become the unwitting authors of another catastrophe.

Jonathan Hall’s post-Southport review, published yesterday, essentially concurs with these experts, advising that it would be unhelpful to expand the legal definition of terrorism to include non-ideological rampages like Southport.

But Starmer wasn’t wrong to say that terrorism has changed — and those very changes have vastly complicated the business of demarcating between different forms of extreme violence.

To better understand how terrorism has changed and how best to classify opaque and liminal figures such as Rudakubana, I recently spoke to Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown professor and one of the world’s leading scholars on terrorism. “Like any phenomenon, terrorism is always changing and reflects the broader tensions and turbulence of society,” Hoffman told me.

Currently working on the 4th edition of his seminal book Inside Terrorism (1998), Hoffman has been tracing the changing face of terrorism for 27 years. “When I wrote the first edition, I argued that terrorism had to be an organizational phenomenon with an identifiable command and control structure,” he said. In that book he also made a firm distinction between a terrorist and a criminal, insisting that whereas the criminal is “acting primarily for selfish, personal motivations,” the terrorist’s goal is “ineluctably political (to change or fundamentally alter a political system through his violent act)”. Hoffman furthermore noted that the political nature of the terrorist’s motives is what distinguishes him from the “lunatic assassin”, whose “goal is more often intrinsically idiosyncratic, completely egocentric and deeply personal”.

His first order of business, when he started revising the 2nd edition published in 2006, was to soften the emphasis on the organizational structure of terrorism. This was because of the rise of al Qaeda: a group that encouraged lone individuals, with whom it had no direct connection, to undertake terrorist attacks. By the time ISIS came to prominence a decade later in 2016, the era of the “lone wolf” was in full swing. “And that’s when the lines began to blur,” Hoffman said.

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From the late Seventies until the blurring began in 2014, there was a broad consensus in terrorism studies, which was based on three assumptions. First, terrorism was rational: the calculated and discriminate use of violence to achieve a desired political end. Second, and connectedly, terrorists used violence not for its own sake but as a tool for drawing attention to their grievances and believed that excessive civilian casualties would generate the wrong kind of publicity and harm their cause in the long run. Third, terrorists, for the most part, were psychologically normal: they were bad, certainly, but not mad.

But when over 50,000 people from 80 different countries started leaving their homes to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq, that consensus began to fracture. “Right there you’re dealing with an enormous pool and you’re going to have a cross-section of society, including those who may have mental health issues,” Hoffman said. “Terrorism has become so much more egalitarian now,” he further explained, chiefly because “you don’t have to belong to a terrorist organization anymore — you can just show some sympathy or affinity to that organization”. Indeed, with no real bar to entry, other than a willingness to kill or die for a cause, anyone can claim to be a terrorist and have that claim validated both by the terrorist group whose name they invoke and the mass media which thrives on covering terrorism-related stories. Hoffman said that the conventional wisdom that terrorists are normal was “always an exaggeration”, but that in the age of self-ID terrorism it no longer holds.

In addition to becoming more egalitarian, terrorism has become less onerous as a “project of the self”: whereas at one time recruits to terrorist groups had to demonstrate loyalty, discipline and proficiency with weapons, now lone actor terrorists need show only the most superficial commitment to the causes they latch onto. By way of example, Hoffman cited Omar Mateen, who “at the last minute declared his allegiance to ISIS, probably with the assumption that if you can hitch your fortunes to a terrorist organization you’ll get much more attention”. In 2016, Mateen murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; less than half an hour into his attack he made a 9/11 call in which he pledged allegiance to ISIS. “How political is it if you’re leveraging on ISIS because you’ll know you’ll get a lot more attention by doing so?” Hoffman added.

The other major shift Hoffman observes is a new logic of barbarism, where terrorist violence has become more excessive and untethered from any civilizational restraint. Indeed, for many terrorist groups and actors, violence is an end in itself, where the overwhelming purpose isn’t to effect political change, but simply to terrorize and maximally harm a reviled enemy. Expanding on this, Hoffman said that he had just read Emmanuel Carrère’s new book V13: Chronicle of a Trial, which records the horrors of the November 2015 Paris attacks, where ISIS commandos murdered 130 people. Carrère quotes an investigator who, in response to an “odd question” about how he “felt about the killings”, said: “How I felt? I don’t know. I can only tell you that there were 30 holes in one victim, 22 in another, 14 in a third…” He also quotes one of the survivors who says that the terrorists “turned on all the lights and were shooting people, I’d say with a certain relish”. “I’d always argued that terrorism is altruistic, in the sense that it serves some collective goal the terrorist believes in,” Hoffman said, “but that’s now harder to maintain in the face of terrorism’s turn to ultra-violence.”

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So, do these shifts suggest that Starmer’s characterization of Axel Rudakubana was correct? Is the Southport killer a new kind of terrorist? “He may not have stated his allegiance to a terrorist group or done anything that situated his act of violence in a political context, but he was clearly animated by terrorism in the sense that he downloaded the al Qaeda manual and watched beheading videos,” Hoffman said. “This underscores the power of these organizations”, he went on, intimating at a distinction between the substance and style of atrocities. While Rudakubana may not have acted in fidelity to ISIS’s ideology, he certainly enacted the group’s ethos of sadistic and excessive violence; among the many harrowing details that surfaced after Rudakubana’s trial was the vast number of “sharp force injuries” he inflicted on the girls and how he had tried to decapitate one of them. “I’m glad to see those kids are dead, it makes me happy,” Rudakubana was heard to have said shortly after his arrest on the day of the massacre.

Hoffman acknowledged that Rudakubana’s extremist interests and extreme violence are not sufficient to make him a terrorist, but he suggested, convincingly in my view, that their toxic amalgamation foreshadows a newly emergent hinterland in which the sadistic mass killer and terrorist meet. This has been facilitated by what he called the “ubiquity” of terrorism as a mass-mediated global spectacle, subculture and aesthetics — and a seemingly limitless supply of anomic loners who develop a cathartic identification with it.

To further complicate the picture, Hoffman said that not only has it become more difficult to define terrorism, but that it has become increasingly challenging to determine what its motives are, “because they’re not as clear as they once were”. This is also emphasized in a leaked Department of Homeland Security assessment from last year. Hoffman attributes this to the proliferation of lone actor terrorism and the ideological promiscuity that post-organizational violence permits. Referring to Nicholas Cruz, who murdered 17 at a Florida high school in 2018, Hoffman asked, “Was he an incel or was he a neo-Nazi or neither?” For Hoffman, although Cruz outwardly evidenced an interest in both ideologies, it wasn’t clear that either one directly motivated his attack, although they couldn’t be discounted as an influence on him.

As our interview drew to a close, Hoffman confided that, despite studying terrorism for nearly five decades, he still wrestles with the conceptual challenges it continually throws up and that revising Inside Terrorism hasn’t exactly been plain sailing. This will be of scant comfort to the British authorities who must not only summon the clarity of thought to meet these challenges but also work out how to best contain extremist-fixated-non-extremists like Axel Rudakubana. More immediately, they will need to decide on whether Prevent, a counter-radicalization program which was originally envisaged to deal with al Qaeda and then expanded to focus on the far-Right and incels, is the best vehicle for leading this effort.

When I asked Hoffman what he thought of Prevent, to which Rudakubana had been referred three times and which has come under intense fire for failing to thwart his path to violence, he was philosophical. “I’ll be Quranic or Talmudic and say that if it prevents just one act of terrorism then it’s a useful tool and as good as saving the whole world”. But he was also starkly realistic. “We’ve over-exaggerated the power of these programs,” he said. Referring to Shamima Begum and the more than 800 British citizens who joined ISIS, he asked, “where was Prevent?” The core problem, in Hoffman’s view, is that Prevent and other similar programs are based on the assumption that there are pathways to terrorism that can be readily identified. But this is a fiction: “The most serious terrorists aren’t going to evidence the warning signs that a mental health provider, teacher or police officer might pick up on.”

The other problem for Prevent is that there is no real consensus on what these warning signs are nor, in the aftermath of Southport and other recent atrocities, is there much public confidence in Prevent’s capacity to thwart those who are determined to commit mass violence, whatever the driving motivation.

Is there a difference between the rampage violence of a sadistic mass killer and that of the lone wolf terrorist? At the extremes, there assuredly is, but there is also an expanding grey line that makes it difficult to distinguish between the two and for which the authorities and their favored experts lack even the most basic map for navigating. Whether the 4th edition of Inside Terrorism will supply one is unclear, but the next time Starmer feels inclined to make any categorical statements about terrorism he could do worse than find his way to a copy once it’s published.

Prevent has become a well-covered — and, by extension, notorious — brand. But this celebrity leads people to overestimate its power. Prevent, frequently described as a counter-terrorism program but perhaps better understood as a funding stream covering several programs, is small beans compared to the cost of traditional parts of state infrastructure dedicated to counter-terrorism. Because of how Prevent is structured, it is difficult to find overall figures; but its budget for the whole of London is reported to be somewhere in the low millions — a fraction of the £9 million the Mayor of London spent advertising the Ulez expansion.

So, what does it do? Prevent has three objectives: to tackle the causes of radicalization, to safeguard those at risk of radicalization, and to rehabilitate anyone who has been radicalized. Any risk related to non-ideological threats, such as psychological problems and violence obsessions, should — in theory — be picked up by the likes of the NHS and social services. However, many end up with Prevent, while specific and impending threats are handled by the police and security services.

To meet its remit, Prevent trains public-sector workers — especially teachers — to identify signs of vulnerability to extremism. Any risky parties are then referred to the Channel program, where attempts are made to de-radicalize. To identify, triage and interact with those potential threats requires a high degree of cooperation between agencies, such as police, social workers, prisons, schools, local authorities, the NHS, and Government departments. Yet, as can be the case in complex systems, the lines of accountability can be blurred between agencies, and cases can be missed or closed prematurely.

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This was reportedly a factor which led to Ali Harbi Ali leaving Prevent too quickly. Failures were identified in other recent cases, such as Usman Khan (who killed two people near London Bridge in 2019), Khairi Saadallah (who killed three people in Reading in 2020), Ahmed Hassan (the 2017 Parsons Green tube bomber), and Rudakubana. Having observed the process by which people are referred to Channel, I suspect the number of people identified as potentially risky compared with the resources to assess and triage is also a challenge.

But even if the identification and referral process were to work perfectly, what Prevent is trying to achieve is a tall order. Consider for a moment the probable efficacy of an initiative with no ability to compel people to engage, with limited resources and limited opportunities to intervene, in the face of all the factors that might radicalize someone. Imagine a psychologically troubled outcast, for whom hatred dressed up as a moral crusade provides his very existence with meaning, surrounding himself with affirming narratives and dreams of glory, and then pit those against a voluntary initiative which you might have heard about from one of your teachers at the school you hate. It’s hardly an even match.

As a result, Prevent also operates further upstream, developing counter-radicalization narratives and providing grants to grassroots community groups to strengthen social cohesion. This creates opportunities for early intervention which might help to build resilience against radicalizing forces, but the strategy comes with its own challenges. Firstly, Prevent money has found its way to the wrong groups on more than one occasion, funding those who, rather than countering radicalization, were propagating it. Secondly, governments are most effective in shaping perspectives when their messages are ubiquitous and reinforced across all elements of the social and cultural fabric — as with “follow the science”. In practice, many Prevent initiatives will struggle to cut through the noise.

Given the obvious challenges, persistent threat and limited funding, why are policy officials trying to make an already unenviable task even harder by widening Prevent’s targets?

In 2023, William Shawcross’s “Independent Review into Prevent” recommended it refocus on the most acute threats to national security to maximize impact, along with some other sensible proposals which the Government mainly accepted. But, as a report from Policy Exchange last month notes, a leaked Home Office “Rapid Analytical Sprint” on extremism policy has since suggested taking the opposite approach. It proposed broadening the definition of extremism by conflating it with extreme violence and other forms of harm to society, while diluting the focus on the most pressing ideological threats. The same sprint appeared to equate Islamist extremism with more obscure ideologies that do not pose the same level of risk.

Perhaps officials are happy to broaden their definition of extremism because they overestimate the efficacy of their policies to overcome it. In my experience, many of those involved in social programs — and to a lesser extent in Government — assume that their well-intentioned efforts make a meaningful difference. This, however, is rarely the case. Many social programs concerned with influencing behavior, when evaluated robustly, show weak or no positive effects at all. This is because across the domain, there is little tradition of reliably establishing cause and effect. As a result, incorrect assumptions are made about what influences behavior, especially over the longer term. An often-quoted example is the “Scared Straight” intervention, which sought to deter young offenders from crime by exposing them to life inside prison. For many years, this was assumed to reduce offending — until proper assessment concluded it most likely increased it.

One of the few robust evaluations in this particular domain, conducted seven years ago, suggested that only a small handful of civil-society counter-radicalization programs had a positive effect. Given the average effectiveness of social programs and the complexity of countering radicalization, this is not surprising. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Prevent should give up, when it is still capable of playing an important part of our counter-terrorism strategy. But without good evaluation — something, incidentally, that is lacking across Government — there is no accountability, and overreach becomes a tempting way to inflate roles and egos. To systematically measure cause and effect and then adapt or cut programs that do not work demands certain technical skills which are rare in law enforcement and adjacent fields. But more importantly, and perhaps even rarer, this sort of evaluation requires the willingness of policy officials to disappoint the civil-society groups whose programs are failing.

Rigorous evaluation will tell officials if their programs are having the desired effect, but the government should also consider the effect of rhetoric. The fear is that authorities’ overuse of the label “far-Right” is likely to increase rather than reduce support for the actual far-Right. The broadening of the Overton window, and normalization of a term that should be reserved for genuine extremes, risks amplifying radical sentiments and undermining the credibility of the state at a time when trust in Government and national institutions has fallen to historic lows. In his report, Shawcross noted an imbalance between the narrowness with which Islamist extremism was defined by Prevent, and the breadth of definition applied to far-Right extremism, at times including mainstream Right-wing commentary with no connection to radicalization. Officials have even suggested that watching comedy series such as Yes, Minister or The Thick of It could be red flags for far-Right extremism.

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Since the Shawcross review, these more contentious perspectives may have been reconsidered. But more recently, Home Office officials have proposed that accusations of “two-tier policing” are examples of far-Right narratives. No doubt, malign actors would seek to capitalize on perceived grievances, but two-tier policing is not a myth: a YouGov survey last year showed that large proportions of the public see discrepancy in police treatment of different causes. The details of individual cases make comparisons difficult, but it is legitimate and a necessary component of policing by consent for the public to question inconsistencies in law enforcement decision-making.

This disconnect between officials and the public on two-tier policing is yet another symptom of the groupthink that has permeated much of the arts, academia, media, Government, and social and charitable sectors in recent years. It derives from a culture that has fundamentally degraded some of our most important national institutions.

In Britain, absent any political leadership prioritizing cultural change within the public sector, mandarins may be tempted to wait out the eventual demise of a culture which prioritizes ideological consistency over objective evaluation, intellectual rigor, and the effective function of public service. But the longer it takes, the longer tough policy areas such as counter-terrorism will continue to struggle.

Prevent plays an important role in Britain’s strategy against terrorism. Like in so many other areas of policy, we need to do it better. Understandably, the Government’s focus will be on improving visible outcomes in health, public safety, immigration and the economy. Yet to have any hope of its policies succeeding, it must also focus on that which is less visible: the culture of those institutions tasked with delivering them.

As a young special branch officer, I worked on the Admiral Duncan bombing, a gay pub blown up by the neo-Nazi David Copeland. Towards the end of my service as a counterterrorism investigator, I worked online, tracking offenders and investigating extremist content. I’m painfully aware how the troubled, deranged and just plain dangerous walk among us. Those tasked with intercepting such offenders face possibly one of law enforcement’s most difficult challenges: we can’t predict where and when lone wolf offenders will strike. The challenge is complicated by the politics swirling around violence linked to terrorism, extremism or what’s known as “Individualized Extreme Violence” (IEV) a term you can expect to hear much, much more of.

Loosely translated, IEV means “violent, mentally-ill young men we can’t pin an ideology on”. And, at first glance, Rudakubana is a classic case study. Yet his possession of Al-Qaeda manuals is problematic for the Government. Merseyside police and counterterrorist officers initially chose not to link the killings to terror, allegedly on the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service. Rudakubana, they said, left no manifesto, made no confession: though they surely wouldn’t have been so nervous about a suspect with Mein Kampf by his bedside.

But if that hints to Britain’s grim squeamishness over the politics of race, the real problem here is with the police itself. Given vast incentives to box-tick, and constrained by unfit laws and a looming army of bureaucrats, officers are increasingly unable to spot the monsters in our midst. Rather than announcing yet another knife ban, then, Labour should instead focus on sending counterextremist police out into the community.

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I was only ever interested in politics inasmuch as it related to motive, profiling, identifying and predicting suspect activity. As well as routine public order intelligence, I’ve worked on operations against the IRA, Loyalist paramilitaries, neo-Nazis, the Animal Liberation Front, al-Qaeda, and a dozen other groups you might never have heard of. Ultimately, each posed an actionable threat to the public. Then, after 9/11, everything changed. We entered an era of suicide terrorism, one that made the IRA’s pre-bombing warnings seem quaint.

In response, the Government introduced a strategy called CONTEST. This approach is built on four ‘Ps’: Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Prepare. It sparked the single most comprehensive restructuring in the history of British internal security. Like most wide-ranging government strategies, it was also extremely complicated, which brings me to Prevent. It’s already being blamed for the Southport stabbings, not least given officers reportedly identified Axel Rudakubana as a person of interest on three separate occasions.

Prevent has a troubled history. Embedding multi-agency working into counterextremism, it was meant to flag people of concern before diverting them from violence. Soon enough though, the usual cultural sensitivities shone through. “Prevent had become a safeguarding crèche for unhappy teenagers who were unlikely ever to take up arms,” Professor Ian Acheson of the Counter Extremism Project has noted. “This distraction and mission creep — fuelled by an unjustifiable focus on far-right extremism — made it more likely highly dangerous people would fall through the cracks.”

The practical workings of Prevent were just as woolly. To some in law enforcement, Prevent became little more than an attempt to turn counterterrorism into an adjunct of social work. I remember colleagues viewing it as a punishment posting, one involving the usual police chicanery around performance figures. Metrics were based on a nebulous concept of “interventions” — with predictably facile results.

Consider, for instance, a meeting between “faith leaders” and police at a place of worship. That counted as an intervention. Taking down a beheading video from YouTube? An intervention. Submitting a report on a child whose teacher thinks they might be a racist? An intervention, one which I imagine would be familiar to any retired Stasi officer. Points mean prizes, and in the difficult-to-quantify world of counterterrorist performance, prizes mean promotion. I think the only prize worth winning is an absence of violence, but that’s probably why I left at the rank I did.

Perhaps it was inevitable that a performance-based system would concentrate on low-level extremists, those presenting a negligible level of risk. Yet if genuine “lone wolf” attackers are notoriously difficult to track, let alone prosecute, they can clearly sow chaos. Consider people such as David Copeland, the Admiral Duncan bomber, or else the self-starting Islamists who committed the Westminster and London Bridge attacks. Did the sheer quantity of Prevent subjects, caught up in the “safeguarding crèche” Acheson describes, create too much extraneous work for investigators? I suspect it did.

In the end, though, to blame Prevent for Rudakubana is only half right. The law, after all, has been subsumed by a thoroughgoing counterextremism industry, one supporting a coterie of academics, researchers, think tanks and quangos. That’s turned it into a hydra, too many of its heads consisting of beard-stroking academics, identity-politics experts and serial conference attendees. In a similar vein, Prevent’s approach is overly shaped “by committee” — unduly impacting how officers deal with risky subjects. That is if subjects wish even to cooperate: Prevent referrals are wholly voluntary. I’d argue the program’s real value lies in intelligence-gathering, but without action, intelligence is meaningless.

It should be clear, in short, that success comes on the ground, with police given the time and incentives to deal with genuine threats. To be fair, the situation isn’t hopeless, even somewhere like Parliament. Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, is one of the few experienced operators in Keir Starmer’s otherwise dismal cabinet. I remember how, as a young MP, she was entrusted with a place on the prestigious intelligence and security committee. If anyone in the cabinet knows what’s needed, it’s her. At the same time, Cooper could also do worse than listen to Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation. Well-respected and astute, Hall has a proven record in counterterrorism. He’s already made helpful suggestions around the release of post-attack material to the public and argued officers need extra resources to tackle IEV.

What should the police do? In response to the rape gang scandal, Cooper advocated covert internet operations against suspects. The right answer — but probably the wrong target. Unlike many pedophiles, the modus operandi of Rotherham’s sex offenders didn’t involve the dark web. But what, then, of lone wolves like Axel Rudakubana? They’re often internet-fixated, along with the terminally online edge-lords who inspire them.

I’d therefore say Cooper is onto something, though my solution would involve sending counter-extremism investigators into local police teams, and monitor suspects in the community. When I served in the Met, the officers focused on pedophiles were known as “Jigsaw Teams” — so-named because they used a multidisciplinary approach to piece together solutions and keep the public safe. The Jigsaw officers I met did an impressive but terrifying job, charged with keeping tabs on dangerous sexual predators upon their release from prison. I would add “IEV” to their list of duties, beefing them up with covert online monitoring, intelligence support, surveillance capability and counterterrorism liaison.

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I’d also look across the water, to the former Royal Ulster Constabulary. I’m reluctantly coming to the view that an increasingly balkanized Britain would benefit from the model which served the RUC well during the Troubles: keeping an occasionally intrusive eye on subjects of local interest. I’m biased, but we could even call it Special Branch. Rather than squatting in faraway headquarters, small, dedicated teams would work where suspects actually live. Just as important, these groups would be composed of officers who intimately knew their patch: and potential troublemakers like Rudakubana. Their interventions would be operational, designed to disrupt, deter and prosecute would-be lone wolves.

Naturally, such a revolution would involve the devolution of money, resources and personnel to local forces. It would also mean organizational risk, and upset the domestic extremism industry, as Home Office funds were shifted from university lectures to police stations. Yet whenever there’s a government emergency — one where “something must be done” — there are bound to be winners and losers. And political leadership, if it means anything, must involve hammering out these rivalries for the common good.

For the moment, at least, progress looks unlikely, with the Government soothing itself with working groups and committees. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: troubled individuals like Axel Rudakubana require intrusive policing. That means accepting trade-offs between individual rights and collective safety, exercised by experienced, well-resourced officers capable of demonstrating moral courage in the face of politically motivated criticism. Until then, where are we? Too scared of political shibboleths. Too worried by legal challenges. All the while, people organizing dance classes for schoolgirls wonder if they should book stab-vested bouncers. You know, to stand outside. Just in case. It’s not like the police can protect them, can they?

Many of them had travelled to the capital from the coastal towns where al-Shabaab was most active, and where all the structural “push” factors one could imagine are present: poverty, boredom, marginalisation, corruption — and extrajudicial killings. Perhaps that’s what enabled them to diagnose one of the central shortcomings of the policies generally known as Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), of which Britain’s Prevent Strategy is a part. In his independent review of Prevent, published last week, William Shawcross came to the same conclusion: the overemphasis on vulnerability in the process of radicalisation strips individuals of their agency, obscures reality and sucks the politics out of political violence.

This framing is inadvertently written into the policy from its birth in 2011: according to Prevent’s foreword, one of its core objectives is to “prevent people from being drawn into terrorism” (emphasis mine). In this model, the individual is a passive participant in their own descent into terrorism, sometimes manipulated by mysterious online recruiters or pushed by socioeconomic circumstances beyond their control. Over time, the strategy moved into more and more safeguarding settings, and this notion evolved further. As one practitioner told me: “radicalisation is just another form of grooming”.

Such thinking has seeped into broader counterterrorism discourse, but perhaps worst of all it has allowed now-stranded jihadists in Syria to play back Western tropes for domestic consumption. In their versions of events, they were groomed, manipulated or brainwashed into joining Isis, just as they were only ever cooks or engineers in the Caliphate. It’s “only following orders”, updated for the therapy era. The type of people Prevent interacts with has helped to crystallise this notion. No doubt many of those referred to Prevent have various sources of instability in their lives, but this should not be surprising for a policy which relies on local authority services such as mental healthcare as some of its main vectors of delivery. Drawing conclusions about radicalisation based on Prevent referrals and interventions tells us about the type of people referred to Prevent, not necessarily those joining terrorist movements.

Likewise for the increasing concern over the radicalisation risk to children and young people, particularly online. Of course children make up large numbers of referrals for a strategy which is a legal duty for schools. But the involvement of children in political violence is exceptionally rare: the majority of Isis recruits were in their 20s (many much older), and most terror attacks in Western countries to further a racist worldview are being perpetrated by, as Naama Kates puts it, “grown-ass men”.

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Prevent may well be doing a fine job of diverting genuinely vulnerable people away from extremism, but it should be just one part of the strategy’s function. What of the people unlikely to appear on the radar of local services — those who are stable and confident enough in their convictions to justify violence? The man considering killing a human being for eternal reward or the survival of his race is not simply misled or a walking checklist of needs and vulnerabilities; he has never been more assured. It’s not clear Prevent has an answer.

Another concern identified by the review has proven the most controversial — and already the most mischaracterised. Shawcross found that there is a disproportionate focus on the far-Right, and that while Islamist extremism is defined so narrowly as to only take in the likes of Isis, far-Right extremism is defined so loosely as to sometimes include Brexit, populism and garden-variety conservatism. To explain this, it’s necessary to describe the Prevent sector as a whole, which extends well beyond the civil servants, local coordinators or police officers it employs. It includes Prevent-funded civil society organisations, academic centres, NGOs and think tanks (one of which I belong to). Not all of them have a formal connection to Prevent, but all of them help to shape and guide the discourse on extremism and terror. And where the discourse goes, policy praxis follows.

It’s easy for a headline to blame “woke civil servants” for not wanting to talk about Islamist extremism, but the reality is: delivery is bent out of shape by parts of the Prevent sector which have nothing to do with government at all. These are the institutions which churn out paper after paper on the video game-extremism nexus or the trauma of their own work, but which are deafeningly silent when a schoolteacher is decapitated across the Channel and another is forced into hiding closer to home. Some of the organisations which influence thinking are based in North America, which has an entirely different threat picture, but the online discourse flattens this distinction. The effect is clear in Shawcross’s observation that, inside Prevent, resources are distributed concerning organisations with no actual presence in Britain.

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Those delivering Prevent are also subject to external pressures which help pull the strategy “out of kilter” with Britain’s counterterrorism apparatus, as one senior official put it. On one school visit, I was anxiously informed by the concerned headteacher that some of his students’ parents are Daily Mail readers. I have seen third-sector organisations show slides of Mail headlines immediately after Dabiq — Islamic State’s blood-soaked propaganda rag. Others I worked with had slides counted by audiences to ensure equal time was given to the EDL as to ISIS. This was in 2014-15 when hundreds of Brits were travelling to the Caliphate, and in parts of London with no far-Right presence whatsoever. These are the external pressures, but in other cases the call is coming from inside the house, such as the suspicion and accusations identified by Shawcross against those who focus or specialise on Islamism. I’ve seen this for myself, and it’s not clear the strategy can ever function properly while this persists.

Given these pressures, it is not hard to see why some will opt for the easy life or go along with the mantra that the far-Right and jihadists are simply two sides of the same coin. They are of course worthy of a response, but the street hooligans of Britain First or the EDL (let alone the Daily Mail) simply do not exist in the same tactical or moral universe as the present-day génocidaires of Isis — in that they are not orchestrating the mass killing of civilians or exterminating minorities in the Middle East. Since my own experiences some years ago, this trend of equivalence has accelerated and entirely new categories of extremism have come into the Prevent sector’s purview, in what one insider described as the “Andrew Tate-ification of counterterrorism”. Any strategy which concerns itself as much with the EDL as with Isis is probably suffering a lack of conceptual clarity, but any strategy which concerns itself as much with adolescents watching Andrew Tate’s videos as Anwar al-Awlaki’s is probably so broad as to be rendered meaningless.

It means, for instance, that in the past week, violent demonstrations in Knowsley have been used to discredit the Shawcross review and its alleged dismissal of the far-Right threat. Having slugged through all 188 pages, I can confirm no such dismissal is made. In fact, this narrative rather makes the review’s point: that there is a clear difference between unrest — even law-breaking and violent unrest — and the bombing of children at a pop concert or the assassination of an MP. After all, if there is no such distinction, then to remain ideologically fair, Prevent must consider the frequent law-breaking and unrest perpetrated by Left-wing environmentalists. But it largely doesn’t, and nor do I think it should.

While some of the findings of the review will be shocking to many on the outside, the actual demands made of those delivering Prevent are hardly earth-shattering. In fact, amid years of controversy, the review is potentially a lifeline. Shawcross’s only demand is that it returns to its core purpose: preventing the next Thomas Mair or Salman Abedi, not the next online shitposter or Andrew Tate.

For many, the ethnicity and heritage of the only person facing charges in this case, Ali Harbi Ali, were wholly irrelevant to his alleged behaviour. Acknowledging that Ali is of Somali background, we were told, is racist and xenophobic. He must only be identified as British.

As someone who was born in Somalia, I find this absurd. Of course a suspect is not a murderer because he has a Somali background — and Ali is not a murderer until proven as such. But denouncing facts as racist — especially when the person in question was referred to Prevent, and police and security services believe he may have been inspired by al-Shabaab in Somalia — forces a dangerous ignorance on the public.

Yet it is just one of a number of fallacies that continue to dominate almost every discussion about Islamist-driven terrorism — fallacies that are promoted by both the media and British authorities. Indeed, it strikes me that our efforts to counter Islamist attacks are hindered by at least three other misconceptions: our insistence on describing a perpetrator as a “lone wolf”, our obsession with online self-radicalisation, and the idea that “all extremisms are created equal”.

Take that first fallacy. As unpleasant as it may be to acknowledge, I suspect numerous victims of Islamist extremism might be alive today, if those in charge of preventing terrorism recognised that Islamist extremists are anything but lone wolves.

In a liberal society, it is appealing to think of suspects of Islamist terror as solitary actors. As a matter of principle, we uphold the importance of individual freedoms, rights, and responsibilities, while our judicial system assumes that individuals are responsible for their actions. We also recognise the importance of not maligning an entire community because of the extremist views of a few of their fellow believers. This is particularly crucial when the historical relationship between a particular minority and their new country is fraught with memories of colonialism.

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But while individuals responsible for terrorist attacks may conduct their attacks alone, they still emerge out of communities or networks of like-minded individuals, whether in-person or online. They learn from teachers, imams or instructors the radical ideas that inspire their violence. This is not to say that their entire family or community is extremist — only that these individuals find and are exposed to people who are. Little is known about the background of the murder suspect, Ali, but we can be certain that if found guilty, he would not have plunged a knife into a total stranger, possibly picked at random, wholly of his own accord. Someone or some group would have inspired these actions.

Since last Friday, we’ve heard from a number of people who reportedly knew Ali, all of whom have expressed shock at his alleged crime. Yet it seems hugely unlikely that no one in his immediate circle would have picked up on any extremist tendencies. After all, the Somalian communities are very social. Unlike in traditional Western families, where individuals live an atomised life within an atomised society, a Somali family typically lives together in one household, where everyone is involved in everyone else’s business.

Gossip is a way of life. Solitude is not an option, even more so during the pandemic when families not only lived together but were home more often. It is likely, therefore, that key signs of radicalisation — a shift in language, withdrawal from society, increased frequency of praying and attending mosque — would be noticed by various family members.

When that does happen, you might expect a person’s family to become more involved, to pull them back into their community. But that isn’t always the case. Imagine, for example, that you are a family member of a potentially radicalised individual from a highly tight-knit community. You notice something of concern — but might it be best to keep quiet? Are you a sinner if you report your brother to a programme led by non-Muslims? What does it mean for your relationship with God and the afterlife? What kind of traitor would report their own blood to the authorities?

Or perhaps you are just a non-Muslim colleague or friend of the individual. You may notice a change in behaviour, but are you really going to go forward and report them, with the possibility of being labelled a racist or an Islamophobe? Who would report a potentially innocent person, just for observing their religion?

Lone wolves, then, do not come out of nowhere. They are inspired by other radicals and they are noticed by their community. The problem is that the community then keeps quiet.

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A similar fallacy looms over our understanding of online radicalisation, which does not occur in a silo, between the individual and their computer screen. The individual has to be susceptible, in a place of vulnerability, where Islamic radicalism can easily set in.

Though there is much about Ali that we are yet to learn, we do know that his father was Harbi Ali Kullane, a former government official in Somalia. Since the attack, reports have presented Kullane’s Twitter profile as a testament to assimilation, displaying his support for Captain Tom and the England football team. It has also been reported that, while working in Somalia, he faced threats from al-Shabaab.

And yet I suspect his attitude to his new country is more nuanced than has been presented. It is striking, for example, that not a single news outlet has flagged a tweet by Kullane from 2017, in which he suggests: “the 5-pointed star [on the Somali flag] represents the aspiration of a nation and the misery inflicted by British colonialism. Let’s not sugar coat this #Somalia.” Given that Kullane moved to the UK in the Nineties, his comment suggests an antipathy to Britain that has so far been ignored.

The last fallacy that must be confronted is the belief that all forms of extremism are created equal and should be treated as such. Under the British counter-terrorism Prevent programme, Islamism is lumped together with other forms of extremism, such as far-Right extremism, and handled with a similar approach. But while Right-wing extremism is a threat that should not be downplayed, its causes and motivations are totally unrelated to radical Islamists. They should be distinct and handled separately.

The only way to prevent Islamist terrorist attacks is to understand the lexicon of the Islamists. It is vital to understand the historic heroes that inspire them, the hadiths that speak to them, the myths and legends that motivate them, and the materials that are put into their hands. It is important to know not just the history of Islam, but also the history of the nation that is connected to the radicalised individual.

This kind of specialisation is not possible when so many in the UK cry Islamophobia at every turn. The only way to ask family and community members to come forward and report potentially radicalised individuals is to win their confidence. Individuals have to feel that they can safely approach the authorities without repercussion. They also deserve to know that the situation will be handled by someone who deeply understands the issues at hand. As Nik Adams, a counter-terrorism police officer, explained brilliantly, we need people who can recognise “how significant the seemingly insignificant might be”.

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Given the ineffectiveness of Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy, and the blinkered approach to reporting since Sir David’s murder, that will be an uphill struggle. But it is not impossible: Prevent is undergoing an independent review, led by the capable William Shawcross, that will report in December and produce suggestions on how it can be improved.

More importantly, I believe that, by and large, the Islamic terrorist narrative is waning. al-Qaeda is a skeleton of what it was two decades ago, while the spectre of ISIS continues to serve as a real-life deterrent to what living under a caliphate requires. Even the Muslim Brotherhood narrative is stale and petering out. Yes, the Taliban may have taken control of Afghanistan, and the threat of Islamism in Africa remains deeply concerning and often ignored. But taken in its entirety, radical Islam does not have the same potency it once did.

So even if Sir David’s death is proven to be a terrorist incident, the defeat of radical Islam in Britain is still attainable. But achieving that requires us to bin the fallacies regurgitated after every attack. If we don’t, the pattern of seemingly random terrorist violence will persist.

Prevent is a much-mocked government counter-terrorism strategy, which looks out for warning signs that someone is at risk of being radicalised into some form of violent extremism. About 6,000 people are referred to it each year. 

Every high-profile murder or act of terrorism appears to be followed by a story like this. The Manchester Arena suicide bomber was known to the security services. Lee Rigby’s killers were known to the security services. At least one of the London Bridge attackers was known to the security services. It’s not just in cases of terrorism: the murderer of Alice Gross had a criminal record for sexual assault. Sarah Everard’s killer had a history of indecent exposure.

There is a further sense of inevitability over the fact that, three days after Sir David’s murder, Priti Patel, the home secretary, declared that Prevent is “under review” to ensure that it is “fit for purpose”. This is, in fact, an ongoing review that was launched in 2019 and due to report in December, rather than a response to the atrocity. Yet the announcement was clearly intended to suggest that the murder represented a failure on the part of the surveillance and deradicalisation system.

But is it? The sense of inevitability is real: these stories crop up a lot. But the truth is they will continue to keep cropping up, almost every time there is a terror attack, and almost no matter what we do with Prevent or whatever its successor is. Prevent may be failing — though I’ll happily defer judgment until the publication of the review — but even if it were successful, when terrorist attacks happen, it is likely that the perpetrators would be on its books, or known to the security services.

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And more than that: as callous as it sounds, that may be for the best. To give a sense of why that is, it’s helpful to look at another system for spotting future risks: cancer screening.

You screen for prostate cancer with a blood test, which looks for levels of something called “prostate-specific antigen”, or PSA. If you’re between 50 and 69 years old, the “normal” level of PSA is given as below three nanograms per millilitre (ng/ml). If your test comes back higher than that, you are flagged as at risk of having prostate cancer.

But according to the NHS, about 15% of men who do have prostate cancer actually have “normal” levels of PSA: that is, below 3ng/ml. If you run a screening test like this, you’ll falsely reassure about one cancer sufferer in six that they are cancer-free.

There’s a straightforward solution to that, of course. Instead of putting your cut-off at 3ng/ml, you could make it 2.5ng/ml. Then you’d miss fewer cancers.

You can probably guess the outcome, though. If you move the cut-off lower, you’ll miss fewer real cancers, but you’ll scare more men unnecessarily. If you move the cut-off higher, you’ll get fewer false positives — you won’t tell as many men that they have cancer when they don’t — but you’ll get more false negatives: you’ll miss more real cancers.

You might think that it’s a pretty straightforward decision. Telling people that they have cancer when they don’t is inconvenient and alarming; telling people that they don’t have cancer when they do might kill them. So you err on the side of caution.

But that’s not how it works. False positives on cancer screenings can literally kill. People can end up having unnecessary surgeries, X-rays, chemo or radiotherapy. Complications are sufficiently common that the NHS says that the benefits of prostate cancer screening do not outweigh the risks.

The cost of getting it wrong is real with terrorism, too. The process is somewhat different, though. When it comes to the risk of someone being radicalised, unlike a blood test, there isn’t a number that you can read off. That doesn’t mean there can’t be one: it could be that the people who are passed on to Prevent are given a quasi-objective score. We do exactly that for, say, suicidality risk or autism or happiness, or any one of a thousand psychological functions. You tick boxes on a questionnaire about someone’s isolation, their anger, their ideologies, and if the score on the questionnaire adds up to more than 40 or whatever you declare them a terrorism risk. That is precisely what goes on, in a less obvious and open way, with things like AI parole decisions. 

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But as it happens, there isn’t an explicit number. The Prevent guidance says: “There is no fixed profile of a terrorist, so there is no defined threshold to determine whether an individual is at risk of being drawn into terrorism.” So there’s no nice straightforward “Terrorism risk: 13.6” readout.

Nonetheless, the same process is going on. A person comes into contact with the counterterrorism services. Of the 6,000 or so who are referred to Prevent each year, about 500 or so are deemed “vulnerable” to radicalisation and are passed on to a subgroup called “Channel”. 

Since referral to Channel is not based on an objective score, it’s based on a subjective feeling (or “expert judgment”): people will be flagged up if the panel judging them feels sufficiently strongly that they’re a risk. They might not explicitly say “Terrorism risk: 13.6”, but still, there is a threshold of risk, over which someone is considered a threat.

And just like the PSA levels in the blood, that assessment will be imperfect. If you read some young man saying something disturbing online, is it harmless anger and braggadocio, or are they a terrorist? You can raise your implicit threshold and avoid harassing innocent people, at the cost of an increased risk of missing a genuine terrorist, or you can lower it and correctly identify more terrorists, but at the cost of labelling a lot of harmless people as potential terrorists.

It might seem, like the cancer test in reverse, that there’s an asymmetry here: a false positive annoys people; a false negative kills people. But also like the cancer test, it’s not as simple as that. The false positives will be a lot more common than the false negatives — simply put, there are more mouthy non-terrorists than actual terrorists in the world. As I said before, there were 6,000 people referred to Prevent every year, and 500 or so were judged to be of sufficiently high risk to be passed on to Channel. But there have been only four actual terror attacks in the last two years. 

If you lower your threshold, raise the alarm on more borderline cases, then you will waste more police time, put more innocent people under needless scrutiny and stigmatise more communities. (It seems inevitable that a lowered threshold will mean more young Muslim men, in particular, being picked up by the security services.) That may be a price worth paying — but, let’s be clear, it will be a price that you pay. If you take in everybody suspicious for questioning — every misogynist loser on incel subreddits, every angry racist or radical Islamist on dark-web chatrooms — you may prevent one or two more attacks, but you will undoubtedly fill up your jails and enrage the populace.

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This doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. Moving your threshold is zero-sum. But you can change your test: if instead of testing for PSA you looked for some other marker, you might be able to tell whether someone had cancer with more accuracy. In the case of counter-terrorism, you could do things like increasing police funding for surveillance, rather than simply being more strict about your criteria — although of course that would mean less money elsewhere.

An alternative suggestion might be to abandon “expert judgment” and introduce something like I talked about above, an explicit algorithm: human judgment is famously terrible at predicting complex things like the likelihood of a criminal to reoffend, and algorithms consistently outperform us, as the psychologist Paul Meehl demonstrated way back in 1954. They beat humans at predicting the price of wine, how long a cancer patient will live, who will win a football match, how likely a business is to succeed and dozens of other subjects. It is likely that some fairly simple algorithm could do significantly better than the best experts at predicting who is a terror risk, as well.

But it could only ever be a partial improvement. Humans are stubbornly hard to predict. Part of the reason why algorithms can outperform human judgment in those fields is because human judgment is consistently terrible: we are very often wrong about who will reoffend, who will live and die, who will win a football match. It is not that algorithmic prediction is great; the future is still hard to know. However good we make our systems for detecting terrorists, they will never be very good. So terrible things will always happen, and when they do, we will assume our systems are too lax and need to be tightened.

It is tempting to think like that in the wake of an atrocity such as David Amess’s murder: to think that we ought to lower our thresholds of what counts as a risk. Perhaps it’s even true. But just as it is an unavoidable fact of reality that reducing false alarms means missing more real ones, a world in which Sir David’s murderer was caught ahead of time could be grimly authoritarian.

Prevent aims to “confront [the] extremist ideology” at the heart of terrorism. It is based on the idea that “radicalisation is driven by an ideology which sanctions the use of violence” and it explicitly makes a causal link between ideology, extremist thought, and extremist actions. Ipso facto if you solve the problem of extremist ideology, be it jihadi or far-Right, you reduce the levels of terrorist violence.

The Government’s approach relies upon identifying people at risk of being radicalised and countering the narrative of extremism. Those at risk of radicalisation, or who already have been radicalised, are identified through state institutions, like schools and healthcare providers, who have a statutory duty to report those, often minors, who they think display extremist thought. Remember the young child infamously referred to Prevent for talking about eco-terrorism in class, or the four-year-old who was referred for talking about a ‘cucumber’, misheard by the teacher as ‘cooker-bomber’?

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Prevent has long had its critics. Charities – such as Amnesty – were concerned about human rights implications. Muslim groups – such as the Muslim Council of Britain – reported that Muslim communities felt targeted by the scheme. And scholars have questioned the efficacy of the radicalisation narrative: that ideology creates extremist thought which leads to extremist action, meaning people need ‘protecting’ from extremist ideology if they are at risk of being ‘radicalised’.

But there is a deeper, philosophical problem with Prevent. The language of the entire strategy – and the comments by Ben Wallace – reflect the implicit assumption that ideology is like a sickness that infects people and causes them to do wrong. In fact, the initial 2003 Prevent programme drew upon the policy work that the government had done to protect vulnerable young people from paedophiles. These assumptions still pervade the programme, as demonstrated by Wallace’s recent reference to “grooming and exploitation by terrorists”.

This approach sees ‘radicalisation’ as something that comes from without, rather than something that is sought from within.

But can a collection of ideas, an ideology, really cause someone to blow themselves up? The answer to this disarmingly simple question – and the broader question of the role of ideas in all types of violence propagation – lies in cognitive science. Violence, after all, is a behaviour, like any other social behaviour.

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For sometime, psychologists and cognitive scientists have understood that decisions are made by the (faster) subconscious and emotional brain, rather than the (slower) conscious brain. The subconscious brain tends to work on evolutionarily-designed rules of thumb that get to the right answer most of the time (but not all of the time). The role of the conscious brain is to then justify those already-made decisions to other people – often rearranging ‘facts’ around the already-adopted position.

This is not obscure science: the initial ideas in this field led to a Nobel Prize for Daniel Kahneman, the brilliant psychologist who discovered them. And they have since revolutionised other fields such as economics, where they inspired the creation of behavioural economics, leading to other Nobel Prizes, notably for Richard Thaler in 2017. These ideas have also been applied elsewhere in the British government: the Behavioural Insights Team (previously the Nudge Unit) have driven improvements in social challenges ranging from organ donation through taxation to getting people back to work.

Applying this concept to violence, and specifically suicide terrorism, calls in to question the Government’s long-standing approach.

If correct, it means that violence must be caused by a subconscious, emotional decision that is later justified: that is, the ideology merely justifies a drive towards violence that already exists. This flies in the face of government narratives around radicalisation that treat ideology as a cause of violence. And it means that preventative action should be focusing less on the ideology, and more on the sub-conscious, emotional drives of those who might commit group violence.

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This sounds like an impossible task. But an increasing amount of evidence is identifying these emotional drives and highlighting the role of belonging in driving intergroup violence – including terrorism. That is, people are driven to commit these types of violent acts (as opposed to, say, murder or rape) in order to fulfill their evolutionary need to belong to a social group.

This understanding of the role of belonging should be considered alongside the facts that an overwhelming majority of those with extremist thoughts, far more than 99%, do not commit violent actions. What’s more, extremist thought, even were it adequately definable in a society that values free speech, is a very poor predictor of violent action. Defining extremism in this way lumps the supposed thinkers of extremism together with those targeted by the government for their criminal activity – actors of extremism.

This is why Prevent might be making things worse rather than better. By seeking to find and punish those who harbour extremist thought, the actions of the government cause people to question their place in British society, when they might not have done so before. In short, it creates or exacerbates a crisis of belonging, even where one might not have existed.

This is even recognised by senior officials working on the programme, who are privately very critical. A Home Office official working directly on Prevent told me that the best way to reduce terrorism was to fund local sports clubs and community centres – which foster belonging – rather than “criminalising an entire community”.

Terrorism reflects the world that we live in. Globalisation, and particularly immigration, has detached people from the groups they once belonged to: their families, their ethnicities, and their nations. The modern world can be a profoundly lonely place. If individuals feel that they don’t belong, they are more likely to reach out for extreme ideas that will fill that vacuum, offering them a sense of identity. Rather than making digs at Prevent’s critics, the Government should take the opportunity of an independent review to fix this fundamental flaw.