A leaked review of a UK counterterrorism programme has found that it overlooked radical Islamists while targeting individuals espousing “mainstream” right-wing views as potential threats.
Ordinary right-wingers in the United Kingdom have been reportedly designated as potential terrorists as part of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy while radical Islamists were largely ignored, a leaked report has found.
Commissioned by the UK government, the leaked review of the multi-agency “Prevent” programme found that it disproportionally focused on threats on the right, using a definition of so-called “neo-nazism” that was allegedly so broad it encompassed “mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, rightwing-leaning commentary that have no meaningful connection to terrorism or radicalisation”.
According to journalists from The Guardian who have seen the leaked document, this has seemingly resulted in ordinary people being targeted by the program despite them showing zero evidence of any kind of extremism.
By contrast, the report found that radical Islamists were not focused on nearly as much, with The Guardian noting that right-wing threats being referred to Prevent outstripped that of Islamist threats in 2020.
What’s more, the report found that Prevent was even going so far as to fund groups that had promoted “extremist discourse”, up to and including support for the Taliban.
“As a core principle, the government must cease to engage with or fund those aligned with extremism,” the leaked document reportedly reads regarding the funding of questionable groups.
While the claims made by the leaked report must no doubt worry many of those on the right in the UK, its contents are not all that surprising, with a similar private report published in 2021 coming to similar conclusions regarding Prevent’s disproportionate focus on the far-right.
The claims by the leaked report also mimic the trend of right-wing extremism being disproportionally hyped up in Britain, with mass media outlets often latching on to narratives to do with “far-right” terror threats despite radical Islamism still overall being a greater potential source of attacks.
One example of this can be seen when in 2020, after the then-new boss of intelligence agency MI5 confirmed that Islamists still posed the greatest terror risk to the UK, mainstream media both at home and abroad instead focused on him saying that the risk of terror from the right was also “sadly rising”.
“[The right-wing terror] threat is not, today, on the same scale as Islamist extremist terrorism,” director-general Ken McCallum said at the time, while also noting that “Islamist extremist terrorism… by volume remains our largest threat”.
Despite this, outlets such as the BBC, the Independent, and infamous American broadcaster CNN all decided to focus on the threat posed by the far-right, with the UK state broadcaster only admitting that “jihadist plots form the bulk of UK [terror] investigations” in paragraph 20 of their article on the subject.