The Prevent strategy has been controversial for many years, some would argue since its introduction by the Labour government in 2003.
The objective - to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism, is one that no rational person could oppose. More and more across the West we have seen how terrorist attacks have been perpetrated by those who were born and raised in the countries that they then turned against. But, to tackle that by singling out a single community and treating everyone as suspect is likely to cause more division and in fact breed grievance that can be exploited by radical preachers.
The recent report by the Women and Equalities Committee of the House of Commons highlighted this problem. It revealed that in the course of their inquiry into Employment Opportunities for Muslims in the UK they “came across individual Muslims who were reluctant to engage with us for fear that our inquiry was part of the Prevent programme” and some Muslims “felt they were being treated as a suspect community.”
This was a view previously expressed by the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, David Anderson QC, who said “the lack of confidence in aspects of the Prevent programme…is clearly suffering from a widespread problem of perception.” How does the Government expect to stem radicalisation and counter-extremism if it cannot even properly engage with the most affected communities and rather than building bridges seems to be creating gulfs of distrust?
In 2011, Liberal Democrats in the coalition government attempted to reform Prevent, recognising the flaws that had been left to fester under Labour. We increased the monitoring and evaluation of projects to have a clearer idea of what works and what doesn’t. We attempted to be clearer about the purpose of prevent and the methods used. We did all of this to increase trust but now, five years on, we can clearly see it has not worked.
How many more reviews and reports need to be written before the Prime Minister has the courage to say Prevent has not worked and must be disbanded? We all know she is risk-averse but she must see that continuing down this road is more dangerous. We may be radicalising the next generation of home-grown terrorists if we do not act, and what could be riskier than that?
The Liberal Democrats have nailed our flag to the mast. A policy, to be endorsed by our party conference this September, calls for Prevent to be scrapped. It is so discredited that a simple rebrand won’t do. Instead the millions that have been wasted should be channelled into more community policing and projects run by grass-roots activists.
By removing absolute control from the Home Office and decentralising funding, we empower local communities and disassociate counter-narrative building and the promotion of integration from central government. Meanwhile, more community building builds trust and benefits communities as a whole. Concerns about extremism could then be communicated in the same way as concerns about involvement with gangs, child abuse or grooming.
This stops the targeting of specific communities and the perception that Prevent attempts to create neighbourhood spying networks.
These radical changes would not only help cohesion, one of the purported aims of this Government, but help keep us all safe and free. There are plenty of ideas out there, it is time that Theresa May stepped out of her control tower and listened to them.
