UK counter-extremism agenda: ‘Safeguarding’ as routine punishment and collective self-policing
School interior. Wikicommons/Chris Dixon. Some rights reserved. The
UK’s New Labour government abandoned the ‘war on terror’ discourse under Prime
Minister Gordon Brown, yet its anti-democratic aims have been extended through
a ‘counter-extremism’ agenda. The government programme ‘Preventing Violent
Extremism’ was established a decade ago to identify individuals vulnerable to
extremist ideas, ostensibly to prevent ‘violent extremism’, i.e.
terrorism.
The
programme has had mounting criticism and widespread opposition, especially in
the run-up to becoming a statutory duty for public-sector institutions in 2015.
Amongst other objections, the key term ‘extremist’, triggered by an ever-widening
range of indicators, e.g. modest dress, religious observance and political
statements, especially by Muslims, has been queried. A vague definition of this
term has meant that more and more people are targeted for views which would otherwise
be regarded as normal political discourse. Targets have broadened to include potentially
any oppositional activity.
Despite
the growing opposition to the Prevent programme, its surveillance and ‘deradicalisation’
practices are being expanded, supposedly to safeguard vulnerable individuals. What
drives this agenda can only be inferred from its routine practises.
Operational effectivity
While
briefly the Labour Party’s Home Affairs spokesperson, Andy Burnham MP,
announcing the Labour Party’s intention to oppose the government’s Counter-Extremism
Bill, denounced Prevent as counter-productive and advocated
its abolition:
I do feel that the brand is so
toxic now that I think it’s got to go… The Prevent duty to report extremist
behaviour is today’s equivalent of internment in Northern Ireland – a policy
felt to be highly discriminatory against one section of the community.
His
successor Diane Abbott also criticised the programme.
Statistics
about the programme’s operational effectivity however yield contradictory
interpretations. Amongst individuals reported for suspected extremism, 80% lead
to no follow-up action by the police. This indicates a 5-fold over-reporting,
according to critics. Those defending the statistics, including the Home
Office, invert the problem, arguing that they demonstrate that the system
screens out those who were wrongly identified and so works well. Lost in such
arguments is the enormous damage done by making families fearful that their
children will be taken away, frightening children, targeting entire Muslim
communities, and undermining potential cooperation against terrorism.
Why are so many ‘wrongly’ identified? There are several
contributory factors. The Prevent programme creates pressure on professional
staff, especially their managers, who expect a regular flow of reporting and
referrals of suspect individuals. The programme’s operation depends on
collective self-policing through fear of punishment. These practices become yet
another bureaucratic performance indicator, necessary to demonstrate that an
institution is truly implementing the programme and so safeguarding those vulnerable
to extremist influence. Potentially everyone becomes police or policed or both.
Inadequate compliance may jeopardise professional careers or an institution’s standing
with its funders, for example the Ofsted inspections, universally dreaded by
staff in state schools.
The Prevent duty intersects with the Safeguarding Vulnerable
Groups Act 2006. Although meant to protect children from abuse, it triggers
intrusive Prevent measures which harass both children and adults. They are required
to obtain Criminal Records Bureau checks for the most mundane activities.
The ‘safeguarding’ (another
seemingly benign word) which it offers looks suspiciously like snooping and
spying, followed by snitching, and culminating in measures which are only
vaguely specified but seem to amount to some kind of ‘re-education’ process (Petley,
2015).
The definition
of extremism is similarly vague. As eventually
defined by the Prevent programme, this
means hostility to ‘British values’, which in turn are characterised as:
‘democracy, rule of law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and the
rights of all men and women to live free from persecution of any kind’ (HM Government, 2011).
The definition conflates universal human values with those of Britain, while
Britain’s foreign policy regularly contradicts them. In people’s
experience of the Prevent programme, an ‘extremist’ encompasses any Muslim in
particular who highlights this inconsistency, or who criticises particular
aspects of foreign policy, especially Israel’s Occupation and the UK’s support for
this.
One local authority
unintentionally parodied the programme as follows: ‘The Counter
Terrorism Local Profile for York and North Yorkshire highlights the key risks
to York as evidence of activity relating to Syria, presence of the Kurdistan
Worker's Party (PKK), anti-Israeli/pro-Palestinian activity, hunt saboteurs,
animal rights, anti-fracking and extreme right wing activity’ (BBC,
2016). As it further explained, ‘since 2010,
local authorities monitor any activities where there is potential for community
tension’. The ‘potential’ readily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy through
preventive measures and fear of being stigmatised.
Moreover, the reporting of suspected ‘extremists’ draws on
and reinforces Islamophobic stereotypes. And the entire procedure generates fear – that
individuals may be reported for anything they say, that students may be disciplined
for refusing ‘deradicalisation’, that people may be stigmatised over a lengthy
period, that parents may lose their children, etc. Given that many students
feel intimidated, there
is a danger that ‘people do not seek help when they are struggling with
their mental health (making them more unwell), or that those who do seek help
are made vulnerable to surveillance and punishment’. In short, punishing people
makes them more vulnerable.
Punishing
‘non-violent extremism’
A decade ago the Prevent programme was established within
the wider Contest programme to protect national security. This aims to ‘reduce the threat to the UK
from terrorism by stopping people becoming terrorists or supporting
terrorism’. It has sought to counter the
ideology of ‘violent extremism’ and the grievances which make it attractive (Cabinet
Office, 2008). In effect, this
targets those who might be seen as promoting such grievances, i.e. any political
dissent seen as threatening the state.
In 2009 this rationale was further explained by the Home
Office chief of Counter-Terrorism, Charles Farr: namely, the government has
targeted a large group of non-violent people who ‘create an environment in
which terrorists can operate’. This criterion was later incorporated into the
Prevent strategy and statutory duty (HM
Government, 2015: para 77).
By this rationale
of pre-empting violence, countering ‘non-violent extremism’ warrants not only
surveillance but also deterrence and prevention. Anti-terror legislation
encompass a broad range of executive powers, euphemistically called ‘non-prosecution
civil executive actions’ (HM Government, 2009).
Such punishments without due process include:
withdrawing passports, imposing travel bans, even revoking citizenship – which in
the most extreme cases over recent years, has
been a prelude to drone assassination.
Given that violent
acts and threats were already illegal, before the Terrorism Act 2000, such
‘anti-terror’ laws have stigmatised and even criminalised non-violent ones, as
a basis for authorising punishment without trial. Such measures include: longer detention
without trial, harassment for displaying symbols of banned organisations, long
detentions at ports under Schedule 7, etc.
Under its own statutory duty, the Charities Commission likewise has been
imposing punishments – e.g. disqualifying individuals from being a charity
officer, suspending an organisation’s activities during long investigations – in
turn making organisations more vulnerable to the denial or termination of bank
accounts.
In the updated Contest strategy, moreover, the government
will counter online ‘extremist ideology’ by monitoring websites and removing
‘propaganda’. It will set up alternative platforms to challenge extremism using
a network of credible commentators and groups to maintain appropriate content.
There will be robust intervention in all institutions – schools, further
education colleges, universities, hospitals, prisons – to ‘root out extremism’
along the same lines as the Prevent strategy (HM
Government, 2013).
In May 2015 (and
again May 2016) the government announced plans for a Counter-Extremism and
Safeguarding Bill, which would strengthen executive powers to counter any ‘extremist’
views or behaviours in the name of protecting vulnerable individuals or groups.
There would be three new types of civil orders: Banning Orders (to ban
extremist groups), Extremism Disruption Orders (to stop individuals engaging in
extremist behaviour), and Closure Orders (to close down premises used to
support extremism). Any breach would be a criminal offence; thus the CPS
would not need to present evidence to the requisite standard for a criminal
trial.
A new Extremism Trigger would guarantee that complaints
about local extremism are fully reviewed by the police and local authorities.
The Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) will be expanded so that employers
identify extremists and stop them working with vulnerable groups. The DBS will
notify employers of any new information about extremism relevant to an
employee, especially barring anyone with a criminal conviction or civil order
for extremist activity.
In practice, suspect extremists are now treated as suspect
terrorists. By targeting ‘pre-crime’, special measures punish potential crime
as if it were already crime. By authorising punishment without due process, such
powers have been criticised as not only unfair but also counter-productive on
pragmatic grounds. As one
Parliamentary committee warned, any new
legislation ‘must be informed by evidence as to what works and what simply
drives wedges between communities’.
Constructing
‘extremist’ threats
The large-scale reporting on suspected ‘extremists’ generates
its own evidence base, in turn justifying the programme. This circular logic is
integral to the entire ‘war on terror’.
When journalists questioned whether President George W. Bush was always
targeting real terrorist threats, his
advisor responded: You journalists are
living in ‘the reality-based community’. By contrast, 'We're an empire now.
And when we act, we create our own reality’. This self-fulfilling agenda bypasses sceptical
questions about whether counter-extremism measures are ‘workable’ or truly
target extremism – a flexibly expandable category.
Monitoring ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalisation’ establishes more
performance indicators, while also stigmatising the term ‘radical’. Once meaning
a critical inquiry into the source of societal problems, the term becomes pejorative.
Indeed, Arun
Kundnani argues, ‘the concept of radicalisation has become the master
signifier of the late “war on terror”’. Potentially everyone is drawn into
monitoring and policing each other, e.g. by avoiding any discussions or events
that might ‘trigger’ suspicion. Others argue that this serves a wider agenda of
reinforcing conformity within the educational system:
When radicalisation is
explicitly positioned and policed by schools and other educational institutions
as the equivalent to sexual exploitation, crime, drug abuse and child neglect,
then it is not surprising that both academic studies and media reports have
found that some students are becoming fearful of speaking out and being
labelled as radical. (Sukarieh
and Tannock, 2016: 34).
There has been scant official
response to these criticisms. As William Davies says
about neoliberalism more generally, punitive measures have ‘a relentless
form that acts in place of reasoned discourse, thus replacing the need for
hegemonic consensus formation’. Empty affirmations of good intent are repeated
ritualistically: ‘power now seeks to circumvent the public sphere, in order to
avoid the constraints of critical reason’.
Why? The state’s aims
cannot be explicitly acknowledged or justified: namely the counter-extremism
agenda conveniently undermines democratic rights, suppresses popular debate on
UK foreign policy and diverts blame elsewhere.
Safeguarding
resistance
For truly preventing terrorism and safeguarding vulnerable individuals,
many critics ask for an alternative means. These have been developed by many
Muslim groups, but their efforts are undermined by the state’s agenda. Official ‘counter-extremism’ incorporates just
a few groups (e.g. the Quilliam Foundation) which provide an echo chamber for
government policy, while excluding other voices.
Since the government announced plans for making Prevent
statutory, opposition campaigns have raised slogans such as ‘Educators, not
informants’, and ‘Students, not suspects’ (NUS, 2015). They aim to build support
for individuals who refuse complicity and contest the procedures. This resistance
needs safeguarding through visible, consistent solidarity, that can also help
to provide the basis for contesting the routine punishment which drives the
entire ‘counter-terror’ regime.
This article draws on
discussions within Campaign Against
Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC) and beyond over several years. It is based on a
talk at the 10 December 2016 IHRC conference, ‘Islamophobia: The
Environment of Hate and the Police State’.