William Shawcross’s review of Prevent has been a long time coming. It was not only four years, but also four prime ministers ago that Theresa May’s government committed to an independent review. That had been championed by former counter-terror reviewer Lord Anderson as a way to defuse the polarised debates about the role of Prevent, and encourage more focus on the evidence of what worked in tackling extremism. But the Shawcross review will disappoint those hopes. It is already reheating and repolarising the debate around Prevent, engaging in a stale tug-of-war about which threats from extremism really matter.
The review concludes that Prevent’s definition of Islamist ideology has been “too narrow”, while the parameters of extreme right views have been “too broad”. Shawcross argues that “the most lethal threat in the last 20 years has come from Islamism, and this threat continues”. Pitting the two against each other in this way risks simply relitigating old arguments, as though efforts to contain one of these threats necessarily undermines the other. Brendan Cox, whose wife Jo Cox MP was murdered by a far-right terrorist, tells me that he has little doubt that Islamist-inspired terrorism is currently the most serious threat. “The question is whether in five or 10 years that will still be the case. Are increasing far-right referrals a sign of a growing problem or a temporary issue? Will the ‘incel’ movement become a bigger thing? We don’t know all the answers,” he says. It undermines legitimacy and trust if choices about which threat really matters sound like a fixed ideological position, rather than a response to the shifting intelligence.
