Prevent secrecy feeds suspicion

I gave my two minute presentation on Prevent at Scrutiny Committee  earlier this week but not until the lead person on Prevent, Kibibi Octave link person had  given a Powerpoint Presentation and lead member for Stronger communities Cllr Tom Miller had put forward his views.

I had enough time to  ask 9 questions from my list  LINK pointing out that secrecy rules means that none of them could be answered and thus proper scrutiny and transparency was not possible.  I suggested this reinforced suspicion and lack of confidence in the Prevent Strategy.  Octave and Miller admitted this was a problem. In the discussion the former said that there was ‘interest' in the strategy from Brent Muslim groups rather than they ‘bought into’ the strategy. Groups wanted to do things their way rather than be directly aligned with the strategy. Playing Devil's advocate Miller said that if the referral figures were to be published for each borough extremist groups could then focus on the weaker areas.

Muslim groups wanted to do things their way rather than be directly aligned with the strategy.  Responding to a question from a councillor Kibibi Octave said that they'd had less success speaking to Muslim women. I pointed out that a well established Muslim women's group, group An-Nisa had asked for dialogue with the Council - so far unsuccessfully.

Cllr Miller said he had a critical approach to the Prevent duty and was sensitive to the concerns of the Muslim community. He said that the duty was mandatory but he tried to follow key principles that centred on safeguarding victims from grooming etc.  During the discussion there was much emphasis on  avoiding crass referrals and a claim that better training had reduced the number of these. Kibibi Octave said that across London there had been a reduced number of referrals from the education sector in the last year.

Brent Council meeting on 'extremism' leaves community voices off the platform

Invitation from Brent Council:

As a respected community and voluntary sector organisation doing valuable work in the borough, we are writing to you to make you aware of the second of a series of events called It’s Time to Talk - focussing on important matters affecting our local community. The event will take place at Brent Civic Centre on the 3^rd of October 2016 at 6pm, discussing the challenging issue of extremism in all its forms.  We would like to take this opportunity to invite all members of the community and voluntary sector in Brent to the event.  

There will be a number of high-profile speakers attending including Alex Krasodomski-Jones of the think-tank Demos, Dr Sara Silvestri of City University London and a number of other speakers who will participate in a ‘question time’ style event on this challenging but important issue. Attendees will be asked to submit their questions online prior to the event.

This event is part of the Council’s wider It’s Time to Talk campaign which aims to empower residents and community leaders to talk about difficult issues like this one and work together with partners to tackle them. If you would like to have your say on the issues, please come along to this FREE event and help us create a stronger, safer Brent.

Since the above invitation was sent to me a further speaker has been added: Dr Varun Uberoi of Brunel Univsity. The meeting will be chaired by Cllr  Michael Pavey, Brent Council  lead member for Stronger Communities.

It strikes me as insulting that there is not a single member of the local community, or a local community voluntary organisation on the platform.  They are just there as audience to hear from the experts. Surely these grassroots organisations are experts on how the government's approach to extremism is affecting people locally?

Local organisations have challenged Cllr Butt, the leader of the Council, on its implementation of the Prevent programme, without success and were unable to elicit any information from him about which local organisations he had consulted on the issue. A request to him from An-Nisa, a group working in  Brent for more than 30 years, to facilitate a meeting with Brent headteachers on the extremism issue, and particularly the implementation of Prevent in schools, has also met with no response.

Prevent itself has been criticised by Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham who said:

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. 

  That single event  (9/11) shocked us out of the optimism and unity that had been so tangible just five years before. That is exactly what it was designed to do, just like the Manchester bomb, but this time, instead of building bridges, we seem to have slipped back into the language of division, suspicion and alienation.

An Early Day Motion has been tabled in the House of Commons reflecting community concerns over Prevent:

Early Day Motion 425

That this House welcomes the Government's strong commitment to keeping Britain safe from terrorist attacks; believes that the Prevent strategy is no longer fit for purpose to serve this agenda; notes that there is little evidence to support Prevent or the conveyor belt theory of radicalisation; further notes that no impact evaluations or indicators are available that show Prevent has been successful; further believes that the severe lack of transparency with the Prevent strategy strongly undermines it; notes that Prevent has had a worrying impact on freedom of expression at schools, colleges and universities; believes that the behavioural indicators of possible extremism are vague and unhelpful; believes that the rhetoric of British values is alienating to many who already believed in those values and encourages ministers to adopt a more inclusive approach and rebrand these as universal values; is strongly concerned that the British Muslim community has been particularly stigmatised by Prevent; encourages ministers to engage with affected communities and their relevant grievances, including around foreign policy issues; further encourages ministers to engage with community actors and organisations that have grassroots credibility; believes that ultimately extremism is best tackled by the Government working in partnership with communities and engendering genuine two-way trust, neither of which Prevent has enabled; and therefore calls on ministers to scrap the Prevent strategy in its entirety and replace it with a community-led programme that builds institutions and resilience for tackling social problems, has grassroots credibility and empowers communities rather than alienating them.

If the policy stigmatises and alienates the Muslim community it appears entirely wrong to leave them off a platform where there is a real danger of the presentations being academic and unconnected with the real issues on the ground - although of course I may be proved wrong.

These are notes on the panel:

Alex  Krasodomski-Jones (Demos):

Alex is a researcher of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media. His primary research interest is political extremism and its reportage on social media. He also manages CASM’s analytics capability, including data collection, analytics and visualisation. 

Alex is a frequent media commentator, and writes regularly for the Huffington Post and Spectator. He led Demos’ project mapping the political Twittersphere ahead of the 2015 General Election, which was launched on BBC Newsnight

Dr Sara Silvestri (City University):

Dr Silvestri has directed the Islam in Europe programme at the European Policy Centre (Brussels) and has been a research consultant to the British Council, Ethnobarometer, the European Commission, and the British Government. Prior to that, she had worked in the Cabinet of the European Commission President and had been an Associate Fellow with Chatham House (London).

As an expert on Islam in Europe, religion, and intercultural relations, Sara serves in the advisory board of the British Council's 'Our Shared Future' programme, the ESRC 'Radicalisation Research' portal, and the EuroMediterranean Foundation Anna Lindh (for which she contributed to the first Gallup opinion poll of the EuroMediterranean region).

She is also a member of the scientific committee of GIERFI (a network for the study of Islam and women in Europe) and is a member of the UN Alliance of Civilizations' Global Experts group.

Dr Varun Uberoi (Brunel University):

  I combine normative political theory and political science to examine the theory and practice of fostering unity amongst the culturally diversity citizens of modern polities. My theoretical work examines what unity amongst the citizens of a polity is, how it differs from similar ideas like loyalty and belonging, why such unity is important and how it can be fostered ethically. My empirical work utilises archival and elite interview data to examine how the governments of two parliamentary democracies, Britain and Canada, have attempted to foster such unity as well as the role that Muslims often play in contemporary debates about unity.

Michael Pavey, none the less, sees this event as involving the community, and reflects some of the approach recommendations of the EDM:

The issue of extremism, and how best to prevent it, is a complex, emotive, and highly debated one.

Here in Brent, our aim is to use this event to really involve the community and create real, community-led solutions to tackle the issue of extremism, in all its forms, in our Borough. I hope that residents from all backgrounds will come along and share their ideas.

I am far from convinced that this event, given the format, will fulfil Pavey's aim.

To attend you need a ticket available HERE

10 attempts by minister but still no consistent or coherent UK government definiton of extremism

From Peter Tatchell Foundation

“The government’s planned Extremism Disruption Orders (EDOs) are so vague and ill-defined that they are a potential threat to free speech and dissenting opinions. When questioned by the UK parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) on 29 June, the then counter extremism minister, Karen Bradley MP, offered ten different definitions of extremism in just over 60 minutes. The government wants to penalise extremism before it has even agreed what it is. This renders EDOs both anti-democratic and ineffectual. They are not consistent with human rights law,” said Anastasia Kyriacou, the advocacy officer of the Peter Tatchell Foundation.

Watch the video  above of the government minister trying but failing ten times to offer a clear and consistent definition of extremism:

The government has belatedly agreed with demands by the Defend Free Speech campaign for a public consultation on EDOs – although a date and timetable has not yet been set.

Below is a summary of the current state of play on EDOs by Simon Calvert, Campaign Director of the Defend Free Speech campaign.

The Defend Free Speech campaign website: http://defendfreespeech.org.uk

The campaign for free speech human rights is supported by a diverse cross-section of organisations, such as the National Secular Society, Christian Institute, Peter Tatchell Foundation, Big Brother Watch, Index On Censorship, Freedom Association, English Pen, Manifesto Club and Article 19.

Prominent individual supporters include: Caroline Lucas MP, Lord Dear, Mohammed Amin, David Davis MP, Secretary of State for Exiting the EU, Prof Timothy Garton Ash, Fiona Bruce MP and Baroness Jones of Moulescoomb.

Simon Calvert, Campaign Director of the Defend Free Speech campaign, writes:

It was with considerable alarm that we watched the recent evidence session of the then counter extremism minister, Karen Bradley, before Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR).

In a little over an hour, Mrs Bradley put forward no fewer than ten possible definitions of ‘extremism’, including: “The public promotion of an ideology that can lead to greater harms” and “publicly promoting an ideology where the activity they are undertaking is not criminal and does not go beyond reasonable doubt but we know that that activity leads to a hate crime, a terrorist activity, or maybe FGM” (female genital mutilation).

We wrote to the minister to set out our fears. Here’s what we said:

The Defend Free Speech campaign, and many of the groups associated with it, are greatly concerned that the proposed 'civil orders regime' will damage both security and civil liberties. They risk distracting the authorities away from terrorism and violence and into monitoring and punishing legitimate expressions of opinion.

Finding terrorists and their enablers is like finding a needle in a haystack. Forcing the police and security services to operate at the much lower threshold of 'non-violent extremism' will massively increase the range of people and ideas under investigation, thereby making the haystack considerably bigger. Placing millions more people under suspicion is more likely to mask the activities of terrorists than to highlight them.

Your difficulty in articulating a clear, consistent definition of the kind of activity the Government aims to punish via civil orders was very concerning. The Home Office has been working on the issue for well over a year and yet the impression was given that the Government still has no clear idea how to legislate for what it wants to achieve.

Harriet Harman summed up the situation accurately when she told the Committee:

‘Still we don’t know what civil orders are being talked about, we don’t know what the sanctions are likely to be, we don’t know what the definitions are, we have no specificity about the timetable in terms of when the consultation will start, how long it will be. We know there won’t be a draft Bill, but we really are none the wiser about anything else’.

We were grateful that you confirmed that there would be a public consultation. But for the consultation to have any value, and for stakeholders to have a meaningful opportunity to influence the outcome, it must include precise statutory definitions that can then be subjected to scrutiny.

As members of the Committee pointed out, a consultation will be worthless if it does not give the actual wording with which the Government intends to resolve the tension between security and liberty. As it is, the planned consultation looks more a fishing expedition, carried out in the hope that somebody somewhere has a good idea of how this legislation could be drafted.

We concluded our letter by requesting an urgent meeting with the minister, and reassurances of a further consultation when the Home Office can tell the public how it actually plans to legislate in this incredibly sensitive and important area.

As we said quite clearly to the minister, when the matters at stake include terrorism and the fundamental civil liberties of millions, the Home Office cannot simply shrug its shoulders and say ‘we’re not sure what we’re doing’.

The groups backing Defend Free speech wrote to the Home Office back in January requesting a consultation on Extremism Disruption Orders. Having failed to respond for five months, the Government finally conceded the need for such a consultation in the Queen’s Speech in May.