Today, Thursday 2 April, the Guardian ran an exclusive based on comments from the Prevent assistant commissioner, Laurence Taylor. He claimed that counter-terrorism scheme was being overwhelmed by a massive influx of referrals.
Trends indicate that Prevent will receive over 10,000 referrals in 2026. That represents a 33% increase compared to 2024. However, Taylor asserts that this doesn’t necessarily represent an uptick in the radical ideologies that Prevent was (nominally) set up to combat.
In fact, the majority of these referrals are apparently unrelated to extremist ideologies. Instead, they’re issued over concerns about people becoming interested in violence. As such, Taylor claims that Prevent’s time is being wasted, leaving it less able to deal with actual threats.
We at the Canary might phrase this another way. That is, the UK has invested so much in the very idea that (Muslim) terrorism is the greatest threat to our safety that we’ve actively started to damage the capacity to respond to non-terror threats.
‘Violence-fascinated individuals’
Back in July, interim independent Prevent reviewer David Anderson issued a report which responded, in part, to the scheme’s (mis)handling of the cases of Axel Rudakubana and Ali Harbi Ali.
The teenage Rudakubana murdered three young girls and wounded eight other people during his attack on a dance hall in Southport in 2022.
Ali was determined to have been motivated by Islamist ideology. However, Rudakubana displayed no clear motive, and was determined to have been driven by no fixed ideology. Anderson was appointed to:
identify remaining gaps or shortcomings that require further improvement and assure action to address them.
Released last July, the Anderson report stated that:
Several years before the attacks, both the perpetrators had been referred by their schools to Prevent … Prevent’s Channel programme for early interventions had the capacity to address concerns of the kind that were raised in these referrals. But in neither case did it do so.
In fact, Prevent declined to take on Rudakubana’s case three times. As such, Anderson recommended that Prevent’s remit be expanded radically to include non-terror threats. Alternatively, he also suggested that the government create a separate scheme to deal with non-ideological ‘violence-fascinated individuals’ (VFIs).
Prevent — ‘Overwhelmed with referrals’
Another report into the Southport attack is scheduled for release later this month. It’s expected to provide a damning indictment of local authorities, health services, and of course, Prevent itself.
After the attack, Prevent referrals started to rise dramatically. However, more than 50% of the individuals concerned had no clear ideological motivation. Assistant commissioner Taylor pinned this on the fact that there’s simply nowhere else to report these kinds of concerns.
However, he also claimed that this volume of non-terror referrals:
increases the risk of us not spotting somebody that is … because the system is overwhelmed with referrals.
He went on:
The challenge we have in the Prevent system is there is no triage that sits above it, so Prevent currently is the only bucket into which all of these referrals can sit.
We see people with material from Isis and neo-Nazis. We see people watching beheadings and school shootings. We see the gamification of that. So it’s people who are just absorbing horrible stuff that is creating concern for the people who refer them, but they’re not motivated by an ideology specifically, ie extreme rightwing or Islamist.
‘I wouldn’t like to say’
Taylor then rattled off increasing threat levels from states such as Iran and Russia, along with terror groups like Daesh. However, when faced with the question of whether Donald Trump and the American far-right was having a polarising effect, he suddenly became reticent to make a political statement.
Rather, per the Guardian, he characterised Trump as “one of several factors behind rising tensions”:
We’ve seen for a number of years an increasing polarisation, without doubt. You only need to look at the level of protest in London and the diversity of protest in London to see how many different views there are …. Whether you could directly attribute that to the US and Trump, I wouldn’t like to say.
I think there are many, many things at play here, of which that is but one.
If that isn’t the UK justice system’s attitude to ‘ideology’ in a nutshell, we don’t know what is. Is a fascist in the White House causing an uptick in radical ideology? Who’s to say? But look over there at the protesters!
Prevent, despite ostensibly being set up to target all extremist ideology, has disproportionately targeted Muslims from its outset. In fact, hundreds of babies and toddlers have been referred to the scheme, overwhelmingly due to “Islamist concerns”.
In 2022, the Shawcross review even had the nerve to call for a renewed focus on Islamic extremism, calling the definition of neo-Nazism has “expanded too widely”.
And now, we’re being told that non-ideological motivations are falling through the cracks precisely because of the state’s obsession with terrorist ideology? And, in fact, we have no real mechanisms in place for concerns of non-terrorist violence?
If the UK were any less Islamophobic, there’d be a lesson in all this. Pity, that.
Featured image via the Canary
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