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A government report has raised concerns about people being referred to the ‘Prevent’ counter-terrorism program, not because of genuine concerns about radicalisation, but to speed up access to the UK’s crumbling mental health services.

However, given the biases and bigotries rife in both the program and mental health services themselves, this tactic is likely to be extremely risky for any Muslim, Black, and Brown people it affects.

‘Badly twisted approach’ ends up with Prevent

Whilst the government’s report was internal and never intended for public scrutiny, the Financial Times stated that it has seen the document. It was submitted in evidence for an inquiry into teenager Axel Rudakubana’s murder of three children in Southport in 2024.

However, the Financial Times doesn’t go far enough in its article.

We’ve known for a long time now about the use of health professionals to surveil patients for Prevent. We know Prevent has a massive bias against Muslim, Black, and Brown people. And, of course, we know mental health services themselves have a bias against Black and Brown individuals and Muslims.

As such, this referral tactic is likely to have severe consequences for many of the people it was ostensibly intended to help. As highlighted by Sarah St Vincent of campaign group Rights and Security International, health professionals are:

so desperate to get help for their patients that they’re referring them to a secretive policing programme that could impact them for the rest of their lives.

If that’s not a sign of a badly twisted approach in Westminster to people’s welfare, I don’t know what is.

Crumbling system

This desperation, if not the approach, is fully understandable. The waiting list for mental health services in England includes more than half a million young people. According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, over half of them have been waiting over a year. For over a third, the wait has lasted two years or more.

For childhood autism diagnoses alone, NHS data places the median waiting time as 19 months. However, guidance states that people who are referred to mental health services through Prevent should be seen within a week.

Psychologists working within counter-terrorism programs like Prevent have previously suggested that autistic people make up around 13% of their caseloads. For comparison, autistic people make up around 1% of the population.

The leaked Home Office report states that:

sometimes practitioners made referrals to Prevent to try to expedite mental health and neurodiversity support and diagnosis.

Similarly, it also claimed that evidence suggests:

that the limited capacity of mental health resources has a notable impact on Prevent thresholds. Separately, waiting lists for neurodivergence assessments reportedly impact the support available to them.

Racism within mental health support

However, once referred to Prevent – with its accompanying stigma – outcomes are likely to be far from positive for Muslim or Black and Brown people.

Prevent itself is well-known for disregarding the mental health needs of the individuals referred to it. Research from health work campaign group Medact highlighted the intertwined biases of Prevent and mental health ‘support’:

Racism is highly significant to both mental health and policing, especially ‘pre-crime’ areas such as Prevent, and the hubs stand at the intersection of these two fields.

A racialised Muslim is at least 23 times more likely to be referred to a mental health hub for ‘Islamism’ than a white British individual is for ‘Far Right extremism’

Likewise, with regard to combined policing/mental health ‘support hubs’, Medact highlighted the reciprocity between the two sectors:

A high proportion of patients referred to each hub were already in contact with NHS mental health services and many were actually referred into Prevent from the health sector, underlining the circularity and duplication the
hubs create

Even regardless of the Prevent element, racist treatment is rife within mental health and neurodiversity services themselves. For example, Black children face 3-year delays for autism diagnoses.

Black people are also  four times more likely to be restrained or sectioned by mental health services than their white counterparts, and are more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The disconnect

A Home Office spokesperson told the Financial Times that there was no link between radicalisation and neurodivergence or mental health needs. They stated that:

We understand that people referred to Prevent may have a range of vulnerabilities, and we take our safeguarding responsibilities extremely seriously. That is why we continue to strengthen Prevent’s approach to mental health and neurodiversity.

However, this somebody apparently forget to tell Prevent itself. 2025 Prevent Duty guidance from Ofsted states that:

Children and young people with Autism are at increased risk of being susceptible to extremism. This is because they are more likely to develop special interests. […C]hildren with autism are more likely to experience social isolation and so use the internet to find friends. They trust the information they read and the “friends” that they find online and so can be drawn into extremism.

Lasting consequences of Prevent referrals

The massive underfunding of mental health support by the UK government is making some health workers reliant on Prevent as a workaround for referral and diagnosis.

However, contact with Prevent can have a lasting impact and stigma attached to it – particularly for Muslims and Black and Brown individuals. Research, like Medact’s landmark study, has shown the level of reciprocity within mental health ‘care’ and Prevent – with both serving to create a web of surveillance.

Meanwhile, neurodivergence is being targeted by Prevent as a cause and indicator of radicalisation. Making Prevent referals in order to expedite diagnosis can only serve to entrench this view.

Whatever the intentions of the clinicians passing kids off to Prevent, their actions could have severe and lasting consequences for the vulnerable children they purport to protect.

Featured image via the Canary

US president Donald Trump doesn’t appear to have any idea what he is doing over the Iran war. Trump has claimed victory several times, while also pledging to keep bombing. He’s told reporters that the war will end with or without a deal now.

Trump cannot tell the truth that this war is lost. The US has been humiliated. Pointing this out must be at the centre of any anti-war politics going forward.

Trump is finished

The Financial Times reported on 31 March that Trump told journalists:

We’ll leave whether we have a deal or not. It’s irrelevant.

The US and Israel attacked Iran first on 28 February without provocation. Iran was offering unprecedented concessions in negotiations at the time. The Pentagon has since stated there was no imminent threat from Iran. And the UN’s atomic watchdog, the IAEA, has said there is no evidence Iran was developing a nuclear weapon.

The Iranian government remains intact after over a month of intensive US and Israeli attacks. The US-Israeli attack’s main achievement seems to be a global energy crisis after Iran predictably closed the straits of Hormuz, a vital oil channel.

The FT also reported on 31 March that Trump indicated he wanted to:

knock out every single thing there.

Adding:

They don’t have to make a deal with me when we feel that they are . . . put into the Stone Ages” without being able to “come up with a nuclear weapon”.

Despite this erratic and belligerent rhetoric, there’s a strong sense that the war is lost in everything but name.

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It’s over

Author and journalist Spencer Ackerman wrote on 31 March:

IT’S WEEK FIVE of the Iran War—past the point Donald Trump initially forecasted it would be over—and the Trump administration has a new line: The Strait of Hormuz doesn’t matter.

He referred to an interview on 30 March in which secretary of state Marco Rubio tried vaguely to save face for the US. Rubio did this by, among other things, trying to:

convince an audience that the aims of the war were limited, achievable and consistent.

Ackerman went on:

Here we have the foreign minister of a belligerent power—the regnant superpower, no less—insisting that if the U.S. ceases fighting with the Strait of Hormuz closed, it’s still victory by the original terms the U.S. set out, no matter how thoroughly Iran has obviated those terms.

Adding:

That’s not just a lost war. That’s a humiliation.

The warmongers can’t be allowed to get away with their ridiculous assertion that the US, which has achieved none of its goals, has in any way won:

A narrative that the 2026 War was a success will hasten both that return and to the deeper catastrophes it will unlock.

He warned that we must tell the truth of the US defeat or:

We will be right back here if the architects, the profiteers, the propagandists and the forerunners of this war get away with their evasions once again.

One of the reasons we still got an Iran war after the disasters of Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and others is that no proverbial heads rolled. On Iran, they have to. Failure in this area guarantees the next war – and the one after that.

Featured image via the Canary

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) announced its flagship new “Youth Jobs Grant” scheme in March. It did so alongside a package of new policies to tackle the so-called rise in young people “not in education, employment, or training” (NEET). But now, it has admitted that all is not what it seems.

DWP Youth Jobs Grant

The grant scheme offers employers £3,000 for every young person aged 18-24 they hire who has been claiming universal credit for over six months.

The DWP will issue the grant irrespective of the claimant’s conditionality regime. It means that this could also apply to young disabled people claiming limited capability for work-related activity (LCWRA), who the DWP has assessed as not fit for work.

Alongside its new Youth Jobs Grant, the DWP is also introducing a £2,000 “Apprenticeship Incentive” to encourage small and medium-sized businesses to employ 16-24 year-olds into new apprenticeship roles.

It also announced an expansion to its so-called “Jobs Guarantee“. This will now make the fully funded six-month wage subsidy available to employers hiring young people aged 18 to 24.

However, the Canary’s Rachel Charlton-Dailey has highlighted how the government’s raft of youth employment policies risks coercing young chronically ill and disabled claimants into low-waged and unsuitable work.

Cat out of the bag

Now, in response to a series of parliamentary written questions, the DWP has admitted that the Youth Jobs Grant will “not require employers to demonstrate” that they have hired young people into any roles that wouldn’t have already existed without the new incentive funding.

Independent MP James McMurdock asked “what steps” the DWP “plans to take to help ensure that jobs created through the Youth Jobs Grant are additional to existing positions”.

The answer came amid a lengthy response addressing 14 separate written questions McMurdock had tabled probing the government’s youth employment plans.

On 27 March, DWP minister Andrew Western wrote:

The scheme will not require employers to demonstrate that roles are additional.

Meanwhile, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has separately said:

Offering £3,000 to all employers without checking for additionality would result in substantial dead weight.

In particular, it has highlighted how “DWP statistics from 2022–25 show that only 19% of 16- to 24-year-olds on UC who have been unemployed for 6 months are still on the benefit 18 months later”.

It said this “implies that the majority are likely to find work even in the absence of wage subsidies”.

Barriers to employment

Disabled young people face significantly greater barriers to employment, so the grant’s lack of an additionality requirement could fail to ensure employers offer accessible roles for 18-24 year-olds well enough to work and/or not in the LCWRA group.

Western told McMurdock that the DWP would pay the grant in “staged instalments”. The department has yet to specify what these will be. It also hasn’t confirmed the length of time these instalments will span in total.

But Western admitted that the government isn’t planning to place any minimum retention requirements on employers for the grant.

He said that the staged instalments would “encourage sustained employment during the early months without requiring a formal retention period”.

Elsewhere in the response, he stated that the scheme’s “purpose is to reduce the barriers young people face when entering the labour market”.

According to Western, the grant aims to do that “by helping employers with the early costs of recruitment and training, rather than placing conditions on wider staffing decisions and how long an employer must retain someone”.

The revelations call into question the government’s claims that its new package of employment policies will create 200,000 new jobs for young people.

More DWP nonsense?

The DWP anticipates that the Jobs Guarantee and the Youth Jobs Grant will create 30,000 and 20,000 new job roles for young people respectively. However, the IFS has said that in tandem, even if these are additional, the policies will “directly benefit a small percentage of the almost 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds who are NEET”.

Now, Western’s response has confirmed that the DWP can’t guarantee these will be genuinely additional.

The government has been citing its programme of employment support, including these employer incentives, to justify widespread cuts to welfare.

From 6 April, DWP will slash the universal credit health element in half for new claimants.

The cut exempts existing claimants, those who meet the department’s “severe conditions criteria”, and those who are terminally ill.

In its Pathways to Work green paper, the government also floated plans to restrict the health element of universal credit to over 22s. It has yet to make a decision on the proposal.

However, in November work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden referred to former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn’s “independent” investigation into Young People and Work.

He said that he did not “want to make a decision” on the minimum age requirement proposal until Milburn had looked at “the whole issue of young people, sickness, unemployment and work”.

The inquiry’s terms of reference show that it will solely target chronically ill and disabled claimants.

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After a long, dreary winter, it’s finally spring, which means one very important thing – that’s right, it’s time to cycle out our cold-weather wardrobes at last.

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