Written evidence submitted by Daniel Allington, Reader in Social Analytics, King’s College London (COM0038)

Table of Contents

Terminological note

Introduction

Trends in British extremism

Anti-blasphemy extremism

Antisemitism across multiple forms of extremism

Anti-Israel extremism

The Prevent programme

The anti-Prevent lobby

Prevent’s alleged and real double standards

Systematic mischaracterisation of the extreme right

The ‘Mixed, Unstable, and Unclear’ rabbit hole and the incel moral panic

Non-ideological violence, ‘com networks’, and the dangers of mission creep

The state of research on extremism in the United Kingdom

Conclusion

References

Terminological note

For the purposes of this report, ‘extremism’ is defined as in the United Kingdom’s official definition since 2024,[1] while ‘terrorism’ is defined as in the Terrorism Act 2000.[2]

Introduction

This submission of written evidence for the Home Affairs Select Committee addresses the emergence of troubling new forms of extremism centred around opposition to Israel and perceived blasphemy, as well as the longstanding but largely neglected antisemitic thread which runs across multiple forms of extremism as manifest in the United Kingdom today.

In addition, this submission addresses what appears to be an ingrained institutional tendency to mis-classify mainstream political views, non-extremist forms of criminality, and psychological problems as extremist, and discusses apparent problems with the research on extremism. It is argued that not only the implementation of counter-extremism policy, but also the evidence base for policy, are compromised by politicisation, and that a policy response is required.

Much of what I have to say in this submission is of direct relevance to the Prevent programme: a key instrument of British counter-extremism policy. In discussions of Prevent, both here and elsewhere, it is vitally important to remember that ‘[t]he aim of Prevent is to stop people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism’.[3]

Evidence suggests that this aim is easily forgotten, but I would urge my readers to bear it in mind throughout.

Trends in British extremism

A think tank report published in 2020 found that ‘Far Right terrorism is increasing when measured by the rate of attacks, plots, and prisoners holding such ideologies’, but that ‘Islamist extremism remains the dominant terrorism threat, with approximately 10% of counter-terrorism policing caseloads relating to the Far Right’.[4] Four years later, the Independent Reviewer of Prevent reported that ‘80% of the Counter Terrorism Police network’s live investigations are Islamist while 10% are Extreme Right-Wing’.[5]

Thus, the overall picture remains much as it has for many years. However, I would encourage public servants to acknowledge the rise of new forms of extremism focused around blasphemy and the State of Israel. In addition, I would argue that there has been insufficient recognition of antisemitism as a theme which has long been common to multiple forms of extremist ideology in the United Kingdom.

Anti-blasphemy extremism

The problem of harassment and violence against the Ahmadi Muslim minority in the United Kingdom was highlighted in the Casey Review,[6] as well as in the report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.[7] Although the latter report is primarily focused on the more grievous situation which exists in Pakistan, it highlights the extremist interchange between the two countries through cases such as that of Tanveer Ahmed, who murdered Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah for having (in the words of a statement issued by his lawyer) ‘disrespected … the Prophet Muhammad’:

[Ahmed] was reported to have had several visits in prison from people praising his murder of Asad Shah. He has also appeared to have signed photos and posters behind bars for those who idolise him as a ‘celebrity’ and regularly receives letters from supporters. …

Such status is fuelled by the praise Tanveer Ahmed receives from Pakistani hate preachers, which is viewed by British Pakistanis, thereby feeding … the cycle of extremism and hate.[8]

A groundbreaking academic study of this phenomenon defines anti-blasphemy extremism as ‘any form of anti-blasphemy activism which targets specific groups or individuals with accusations of blasphemy while presenting them as a threatening out-group subject to “hostile acts”’.[9] Its author notes that anti-blasphemy extremism is primarily a Pakistani development associated with Barelvi political parties such as Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan and their support networks overseas (including in the United Kingdom), but explains that ‘Jihadist groups have [also] for years made explicit calls for Westerners to undertake terrorist attacks in their home countries against people and groups deemed to have insulted Islam or Muhammed’.[10]

As well as listing a number of serious crimes over the last eight years, including two murders (both of Muslims by other Muslims) in addition to a non-fatal stabbing attack and a planned firearms attack (both against the same former Muslim),[11] the study examines three recent anti-blasphemy flashpoints: the Batley Grammar School incident, the Wakefield School incident, and the Birmingham screening of the Shi’a religious film, Lady of Heaven. As the author explains, ‘reactions to each incident have been orchestrated by anti-blasphemy activists in the UK, some of whom have associations to violent anti-blasphemy extremists in Pakistan’.[12]

Antisemitism across multiple forms of extremism

The prevalence of antisemitic beliefs — as well as of fantasies of, justications for, and intentions to commit violence against Jews — among individuals of both Islamist and Extreme Right-Wing concern, as well as on the Extreme Left, was noted by the Independent Reviewer of Prevent.[13] The Independent Reviewer also highlighted a number of disrupted terror plots against Jewish targets, as well as the taking of hostages at a synagogue by a British citizen.[14] The antisemitism of many extremists is not a new trend, but it has been given insufficient recognition at an official level, as the Independent Reviewer of Prevent has emphasised.

The author of this submission has carried out a number of studies which are centrally relevant in this regard. For example, research in which I have been involved has highlighted similarities and differences in antisemitic discourse on the British political left and right,[15] as well as showing how such discourse can operate as a lingua franca across the two, even enabling extreme right wing ideas to be expressed to little challenge in a left-wing context.[16] Moreover, my colleagues and I have found a statistical association between antisemitic attitudes and forms of political authoritarianism that transcend the left-right divide, such that highly antisemitic individuals (including those whose antisemitism is expressed in relation to Israel and its supporters as well as those whose antisemitism is expressed in relation to Jews as identified as Jews) tend to express higher than average levels of approval of — and even desire for — violence against political opponents and those seen as powerful or successful.[17]

However, despite extensive documentation of the historical importance of antisemitism to Islamism,[18] there is a severe lack of information on Islamist antisemitism in the United Kingdom, perhaps as a result of a perceived taboo against studying inter-minority prejudice.[19] A step towards correction of this problem is taken in my report, Islamist Antisemitism: A Neglected Hate, which combines historical and statistical analysis with expert interviews.[20] Amongst other things, the report finds an association between antisemitic attitudes and support for Islamist extremism,[21] with (for example) the small minority of Muslims expressing strong support for Islamic State being found to be substantially more antisemitic than the average for the sample.[22]

It is vitally important that the relationship between antisemitism and extremism be fully acknowledged, not only in relation to the extreme right, but also in relation to religious extremist movements — especially Islamism, and the growing phenomenon of anti-Israel extremism, which links movements and individuals operating within a political and a religious frame of reference.

Anti-Israel extremism

The rise of anti-Israel extremism appears to have been recognised in the Home Secretary’s recent announcement of the intention to proscribe the single-issue left-wing group, Palestine Action.[23] This new form of extremism must now be acknowledged within Prevent. However, it is vitally important to acknowledge that anti-Israel extremism is not only, nor indeed primarily, a left-wing phenomenon. Much of it is based in Muslim communities, with central involvement not only from Islamists but from non-Islamist organisations also involved in anti-blasphemy activism (see above). One of the expert interviewees to whom I spoke in the course of my research on Islamist antisemitism summarised the situation thus:

[T]en years ago, you would have seen a degree of interest [in demonstrations on the Israel-Palestine issue] but certainly no organisation from groups that we describe as Barelwi, so groups that are part of the Sufi rather than the Islamist or Deobandi or Salafi streams of [Sunni] Islamic religion and politics. … [But v]isits from clerics and virtual communications through social media … from Pakistan to British communities [have] resulted in, I would say, a radicalisation around the issue of the Prophet’s honour, and other sectarian related issues, particularly relating to Ahmadis, to a lesser extent to do with Shias. … And that’s created … a reservoir of people who are angry and excited[24]

As the same interviewee explained, the organisations involved are not technically Islamists, as they do not aim to re-establish the Caliphate, or any equivalent of the Caliphate. Another interviewee spoke of a new ‘grassroots’ form of Islamism focused around Israel, while a third spoke as follows:

After the last conflict in Gaza in 2021, I had some interesting conversations with people who were saying that … the antisemitism coming from Muslim communities wasn’t coming from the usual organisational networks, it wasn’t really coming from political Islamists, it wasn’t coming from Salafis and Deobandis and the kind of streams that — a decade ago, and after 9/11 and 7/7 this was where a lot of it was coming from — and [instead] it was coming from … Barelwi networks, from the kind of networks who were very big on the whole blasphemy issue as well, and that it was kind of a reflection of some of the political [and] religious streams in Pakistan who are very antisemitic kind of reflecting into this country in the same way as works with the whole blasphemy issue.[25]

The ever-increasing importance of what I might call anti-Israelism as a co-ordinating force across multiple forms of extremism must receive greater recognition on an official level. Israel is a close ally of the United Kingdom, and its terror-exporting principal adversary, i.e. the openly antisemitic Iranian regime, is also a strategic adversary of the United Kingdom, and an ally of its other adversaries, especially the current Russian regime. Yet when open war broke out between Israel and Iran in recent weeks, it became evident that there were many in this country whose sympathies lay with the latter.[26]

My view is that such sympathies are the product of decades of largely unopposed anti-Israeli and anti-Western propaganda, whose milder forms have come to seem entirely commonsensical to a substantial proportion of Britons. Because this ‘common sense’ view of the conflict (in fact a form of prejudice) provides the default interpretative frame for many people working in the media, a vicious cycle may now be active.

The possibility that such a feedback loop may be in operation was raised by one of the expert interviewees to whom I spoke as part of my research. That particular interviewee illustrated the point with the example of the wildly misleading early reporting of the 17 October 2023 Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion:

I do think that a lot of the media framing … [has] a subtext … that Palestinian violence is understandable and Israeli violence is unjustifiable. Even in a story where it’s showing Hamas attacked first [and] Israel retaliated … . So, [in] the reporting of the hospital that wasn’t bombed by Israel, every media organisation jumped to accept that framing that Israel had bombed a hospital and 400 people had died. They were so quick to do that. And I think the reason why so many media organisations just accepted that at face value was because it fitted with what they think they know about how this conflict works, so basically they had no reason to question it. [27]

Such ‘common sense’ understandings may be contributing to a climate of tolerance for certain forms of extremism in the United Kingdom, as the narrative of Palestinian resistance and Israeli oppression becomes generalised to terrorism and counter-terrorism throughout the west. I would suggest that this has climate of tolerance has direct relevance to an analysis of the Prevent programme.

The Prevent programme

A number of remarks must now be made with regard to the Prevent programme. As I will argue, Prevent appears to cast its net too broadly in certain directions, whilst at the same time casting it too narrowly in others.

To some extent, this mis-targeting of attention appears to be tied to conceptual confusions which may in principle be easy to fix. However, I will suggest that the underlying causes may be plausibly located in a maladaptive cultural response to external activist pressure. To put it more precisely, I will argue that persistent false accusations of bias have been (ineffectually) countered through (probably unintentional) compensatory development of contrary bias. This will be much harder to address.

The ultimate effect of the developments I describe appears to have been the diversion of resources from Prevent’s core mission, which (as noted at the beginning of this submission) relates exclusively to reduction of terrorism and support for terrorism. If it is possible for a category of ‘extremist’ ideology presenting no known terror threat to account for a substantial proportion of Prevent caseloads, then something has gone terribly wrong.

Whether or not my readers accept this explanation for some of Prevent’s recently publicised failings, I hope that the mass of evidence which I bring together in this section of the report may serve to inform discussion of the programme.

The anti-Prevent lobby

The existence of a widespread campaign against Prevent can scarcely be doubted. In 2016, Baroness Casey found that ‘an anti-Prevent lobby has been successful in stirring up anxiety and concern without offering any constructive alternatives to protect communities’,[28] while in 2024, the Independent Reviewer of Prevent wrote as follows:

There is a concerted campaign by some, including a number of Islamist groups, to undermine and delegitimise Prevent through the spread of disinformation, misinformation, and half-truths. Accusations that have since been debunked continue to circulate in communities and on various online platforms. This suggests that certain criticisms of Prevent are being made by those naturally hostile to it. Some actors who oppose Prevent, such as Islamist groups and their sympathisers, are themselves radicalising influences.[29]

A substantial component of this campaign is academic in character. This is to say that much ‘research’ on Prevent is transparently written from a position of hostility.

Concerningly, a recent literature review concluded that the ‘most influential’ critiques of Prevent are ‘based on a conspiratorial view of both government and academic work on terrorism and counter-terrorism’, and ‘reject any connection between extremist ideology and violence’, instead viewing the idea of Islamist extremism as ‘little more than a smoke-screen for racism and discrimination against Muslims’ and presenting Islamist terrorism as ‘the result of Western foreign policies’.[30] This political agenda saturates a large part of the research literature.

Such bias is not difficult to recognise, and yet this does not appear to present an obstacle to publication. A senior political figure to whom I spoke as part of a recent research project recalled having commissioned an independent qualitative review of published research on Prevent, which found that only a small minority of papers presented empirical research in what appeared to be an even-handed way. This suggests that public servants should exercise extreme caution in drawing on research on Prevent, relying on their own critical faculties to assess the value of particular pieces of work, rather than accepting it on the basis of its authors’ credentials.

A good example of what may pass for research on Prevent within the academy is provided by ‘Islamophobia in the National Health Service: an ethnography of institutional racism in PREVENT’s counter-radicalisation policy’, which was funded by the British Academy and the Royal Society, and published in the peer-reviewed journal, Sociology of Health & Illness.[31] Although this paper purports to be an ethnography, its authors do little more than repeat complaints made by individuals who dislike the Prevent duty, contextualising these with allegations of institutional racism for which the only evidence is (incredibly) the Prevent programme’s overt anti-racist colour-blindness, and the manifestation of that colour-blindness in official training materials.[32] As for the data collection underlying the paper, this was arguably compromised in that the anti-Prevent agenda of the interviewer and lead author appear to have been known to research participants in advance of the interviews, and to have been the reason why at least some of those participants chose to engage with the project.[33] (The wider political stance of the academic in question may perhaps be inferred from his reported statement on social media that ‘our work isn’t done until all Zionists are removed from our institutions and shamed … into nothingness’, or from his reported self-description as ‘proud to have contributed’ to a legal application to de-proscribe Hamas.)[34]

Outside of the scholarly press, activist researchers appear still less constrained in their attempts to discredit Prevent. For example, Amnesty International’s report on Prevent, entitled This is the Thought Police, expresses concern that a faculty meeting at the University of Leeds should have raised potential concerns about a proposed module on the grounds that it was to be entitled ‘Global Jihad’,[35] but fails mention that an employment tribunal unanimously dismissed all charges of discrimination, harassment, and victimisation relating to the case in question.[36]

As this submission will now argue, the danger of the anti-Prevent lobby is not just that it may be discouraging compliance with the Prevent duty, but that it may have had an operational impact on Prevent itself.

Prevent’s alleged and real double standards

One of the most frequently repeated claims made by anti-Prevent activists is that of Muslim over-representation among referrals to Prevent and its related voluntary interventions service (i.e. Channel or Prevent Multi-Agency Panels). For example, two contributors to the Runnymede Trust’s 2017 report, Islamophobia: still a challenge for us all, argue that ‘Muslims [are] consistently grossly over-represented among referrals to Channel’,[37] and that this alleged ‘consistent gross over-referral of Muslims … strongly reflects Islamophobic prejudice and stereotyping’.[38]

This claim is made on the grounds that ‘[p]ercentages of Muslims referred under Prevent are significantly out of line with [census] proportions’.[39] However, that is a false comparison: an unbiased system would see the demographic breakdown of referred individuals match not the general population but the population of terror offenders.

A demographic breakdown of the latter does not currently seem to be available. However, the Independent Reviewer of Prevent found that 80% of current Counter Terrorism Police investigations were in regard to Islamism, as compared to just 22% of Prevent referrals in the most recent year for which data were available,[40] which suggests that — if anything — the Prevent system has developed an institutional bias away from referrals relating to Islamist extremism.

It is clearly plausible to suggest that, in response to persistent false allegations of bias, Prevent might have adopted a genuine bias of precisely opposite character. As this submission will argue, there are multiple indications that such a bias may have developed, whether or not it was intended by any individual.

The Independent Reviewer continues as follows:

Prevent has a double standard when dealing with the Extreme Right-Wing and Islamism. Prevent takes an expansive approach to the Extreme Right-Wing, capturing a variety of influences that, at times, has been so broad [that] it has included mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, right-wing leaning commentary that have no meaningful connection to terrorism or radicalisation. However, with Islamism, Prevent tends to take a much narrower approach centred around proscribed organisations, ignoring the contribution of non-violent Islamist narratives and networks to terrorism.[41]

A share of the blame for this double standard may perhaps fall on the sometimes crude way in which the commendable colour-blindness at the heart of Prevent finds expression in training materials. As noted in the previous section, the overt anti-racism of these training materials fails to appease activist critics of Prevent, even being used by some as evidence of covert anti-Muslim bias. However, the deeper problem is that Prevent training materials at times appear to have been designed in such a way as to produce equality of outcomes – as measured by proxy, i.e. in proportions of Islamist and non-Islamist referrals – through inequality of treatment.

This is, unfortunately, the opposite of colour-blindness. As the Independent Reviewer finds,

one Prevent Education Officer course delivered one workshop a week for the three main Prevent referral categories: Islamist, Extreme Right-Wing, and Mixed, Unstable, and Unclear (MUU). The material on Islamist terrorism focused only on Salafi jihadist recruitment for overseas groups, whereas the resources for the MUU workshop focused on incels, and the third-party material on the Extreme Right-Wing included pro-Brexit and centre right commentators. These are clearly not like-for-like comparisons, are unhelpful, and should not be made.[42]

The same wrongheaded approach is unfortunately embedded in the evidence base on which individuals involved in Prevent (like those involved in other aspects of counter-extremism and counter-terrorism policy) must draw. My own published research (to which I shall be returning below) found as follows:

Two interviewees complained of an obligation among extremism researchers to create a false equivalence between Jihadism and right-wing extremism, with one scholar of right-wing extremism arguing that the appearance of equivalence is buttressed through ‘number acrobatics’, for example by counting incidents rather than fatalities. A researcher primarily focused on Jihadism argued as follows:

There’s like a conceptual, artificial manufacturing of equality … A few years ago, you’d have to do two slides on ISIS or something in your presentation and then two slides on the English Defence League. And it’s like, well, English Defence League, as unpalatable as you might find them, is not a terrorist group, and certainly not a genocidal group. So already, you’re kind of morally and intellectually muddying the water a little bit there.[43]

It is likely that the recognition of forms of extremism other than Islamism which are nonetheless associated with elements within the Muslim community will lead to further unfounded accusations of anti-Muslim bias. For this reason, tendencies such as these are likely to impede any attempt to address anti-blasphemy and anti-Israel extremism (see above). Recognising and countering such tendencies will therefore be of great importance. The aim of colour-blindness is not served through the creation of false equivalences.

More will be said about incels below, but first, this submission will turn to a conceptual confusion which appears to have played a role in facilitating the double standard of which the Independent Reviewer complains.

Systematic mischaracterisation of the extreme right

It may be noted that the attempted manufacturing of equality between Islamism and far right views has — at the very least — gone hand in hand with a misuse of academic analysis of the extreme right, which has enabled the misclassification of non-extreme views as extremist. It is highly plausible that this misclassification will have led to inflation of the numbers of individuals treated as being of right wing ideological concern.

The official glossary of terms for the Prevent duty (last updated under the previous government) specifies the three ideologies of the extreme right as white nationalism, white supremacism, and cultural nationalism.[44] This taxonomy appears to be a misreading of one proposed in a think tank report by Tore Bjørgo and Jacob Aasland Ravndal,[45] which was in turn built on that developed in a PhD thesis by Lars Erik Berntzen,[46] and subsequently republished in book form by the same author.[47]

Like many other scholars working in the field, all three of these Norway-based researchers make a distinction between the ‘radical right’ and the ‘extreme right’ — a distinction lost in the corrupted version of this typology which has been adopted by the British state. Moreover, all three of these scholars situate cultural nationalism within the radical right — that is, as non-extremist. This is to say that the same academic research which supports the current official British typology of extreme right wing ideologies also explicitly refutes that typology.

As Bjørgo and Ravndal write, the ‘radical right’ seeks to maintain democracy but replace currently dominant ‘liberal elites’ through democratic means, while the ‘extreme right’ seeks to end democracy and regards political violence as justified.[48] Moreover, the same authors go on to explain that cultural nationalists ‘are usually not preoccupied with racial differences but … [with] cultural differences’, and see cultural assimilation, rather than expulsion or genocide, as the solution for minorities.[49] These two points should be sufficient to demonstrate that cultural nationalism, so defined, does not satisfy the official British definition of extremism.

Furthermore, Berntzen argues that, because it ‘incorporates liberal and progressive perspectives on gender and minority rights’[50] — and indeed opposes continued Muslim immigration precisely on the grounds of a perceived incompatibility between these values and an Islam which it views as primarily political, indeed ‘totalitarian’[51] — the cultural nationalist radical right can best be analysed as a ‘liberal turn of the far right’.[52] Viewed in this way, cultural nationalism is therefore a rejection of extremism — albeit one which incorrectly identifies the entire religion of Islam as politically extreme, failing to recognise that the religion manifests in a wide range of forms, only some of which can legitimately be regarded as extremist.

To make matters worse, official online training materials on the United Kingdom government website exacerbate the erroneous identification of cultural nationalism as extremist by defining cultural nationalism far more broadly than it is in the above works of scholarship. In 2025, the Prevent Duty Refresher Course was reported to identify cultural nationalism with the narrative that ‘Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups’.[53] This narrative cannot credibly be identified with cultural nationalism as defined by the above-quoted scholars. It is indeed a mainstream view which free speech campaigners have argued to be shared by politicians across the ideological spectrum, including the current Prime Minister and Home Secretary, as well as the Shadow Justice Secretary.[54]

There is a gulf between the conceptualisation of right-wing extremism within in the Prevent system and the work of the Norwegian scholars on whom that conceptualisation is superficially based. For example, in a more recent paper, Lars Erik Berntzen and Sveinung Sandberg write that ‘[t]he various organisations forming the anti-Islamic movement in Norway are on a continuum from populist to radical’, clarifying that the ideology even of the latter is clearly distinguishable from that of the anti-Islamic terrorist Anders Breivik, whose ‘prognostic framing and solutions are fundamentally different from the collective action framing of the anti-Islamic social movement’ in that ‘[h]is political means are terrorism and violence, whereas the political strategy of the anti-Islamic movement is to counter [perceived] Islamisation by non-violent and democratic means’.[55] This is precisely the sort of analysis that is required in order to understand the British extreme right, but, instead, we have seen a blurring of conceptual boundaries which (whether or not it was intentional) could almost have been designed to inflate the number of right wing referrals to Prevent.

If right wing extremism is to be successfully opposed, these conceptual confusions must end. The view that immigration without integration is a threat to social cohesion is mainstream, indeed politically centrist. It must be distinguished from genuine cultural nationalism, and its incorrect view of Muslims as a homogeneous bloc and of Islam as identical with Islamism.[56] Furthermore, cultural nationalist advocates of this view must in turn be distinguished from white nationalist and white supremacist members of those right-wing movements which meet the official British definition of extremism.

Making these distinctions will inevitably reduce the number of non-Islamist Prevent referrals, and thus increase the proportion of Prevent referrals accounted for by individuals of Islamist concern. This is likely to be seized on as evidence of ‘bias’. In reality, however, it will be a reduction in bias.

The ‘Mixed, Unstable, and Unclear’ rabbit hole and the incel moral panic

The conceptual expansion of the extreme right to include non-violent holders of mainstream views has been accompanied by the emergence of an entirely new category of extremism, i.e. that represented by holders of so-called ‘Mixed, Unstable, and Unclear’ (MUU) ideologies. By 2021, individuals of Mixed, Unstable, and Unclear ideological concern accounted for the majority of Prevent referrals.[57]

Given the purpose of Prevent, this should only have been possible if such individuals represented a substantial terror threat. However, there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case – and it is, moreover, quite hard to see why anyone might have imagined that it could be the case. While some individuals espousing an incoherent blend of ‘radical’ ideas may — for related or unrelated psychological reasons — present a risk of violent offending, it is entirely unclear how such individuals could collectively constitute a terror threat, because (by definition) their beliefs do not provide a shared basis for coordinated action.

Indeed, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation has argued that such beliefs ‘may be little more than window dressing for personal grudges or personal inadequacy’,[58] while the Independent Reviewer of Prevent has warned that ‘the MUU category is facilitating large numbers of individuals being unnecessarily referred to Prevent’.[59] These expressions of alarm from both Independent Reviewers should inspire deep reflection.

Simply expunging the category of Mixed, Unstable, and Unclear ideology from the Prevent programme and its associated training materials will not in itself be a sufficient answer to the concerns raised. If confidence is to be restored, the evidently necessary burial of the Mixed, Unstable, and Unclear category must surely be accompanied by a soul-searching enquiry into the question of how this nonsensical fiction ever came to be given bureaucratic reality.

It is highly concerning that new categories of extremism should have been proposed – and never mind accepted – in the absence of any evidence of a terror threat. And yet the impulse to do so remains, as we see from official endorsement of the idea that the United Kingdom faces a terror threat from incels.

An incel is a heterosexual male who defines his identity in relation to the idea that he is ‘involuntarily celibate’, i.e. unable to form sexual or romantic relationships with women.[60] Mass shootings were carried out in 2014 in the United States by Elliot Rodger, who espoused recognisable elements of incel ideology, and in 2018 in Canada by Alek Minassian, who identified as an incel and who venerated Rodger.[61]

These crimes were appalling and resulted in substantial loss of innocent life. However, it must be remembered that Canada and the United States are both countries in which mass shootings are sadly common, and are perpetrated with a range of ideological and non-ideological motives. In the United Kingdom, mass shootings are highly uncommon, and there have been no confirmed incidents of incel-related violence.

Attempts to brand Jake Davison — one of the United Kingdom’s thankfully rare mass shooters — as an ‘incel’ and an ‘extremist’, and to identify the murders he committed as ‘terrorism’, were made in the absence of any indication that his succession of murders — the first, evidently personal in motive, and carried out in private, the others apparently random — had a political or ideological motive.[62] Although efforts to associate Davison with incel culture continued for some time,[63] the eventual findings of the inquest appear to have made absolutely no reference to any supposed ‘incel’ or extremist beliefs, focusing instead on Davison’s mental health issues and history of violence, which ought to have precluded his being granted a firearms licence.[64]

Research shows that ‘there does not seem to be compelling evidence, despite a small number of highly florid cases that received tremendous news attention, that incels are particularly prone to violence’.[65] As the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation has cautioned, ‘[e]nthusiastic conclusions drawn from disparate online actors across the world can imply a risk of actual violence in the UK which is not justified by the facts, stoke fears about rising levels of terrorism, and lead to demands for the inclusion of new categories of terrorist ideology, such as inceldom, because they are visible online’.[66]

It should go without saying that such demands ought to be resisted. Although it has been argued that incel men and boys might benefit from other sorts of intervention in order to address their deeply flawed understanding of women and relationships,[67] this does not imply that society would benefit by treating them as extremists. Indeed, the author of this submission takes the view that the idea of an incel-based extremist threat to the United Kingdom might best be understood as a moral panic.

Whether or not it was the conscious intention of any specific individual, it is likely that the Prevent system’s institutional embrace of that moral panic has acted to facilitate an increase in non-Islamist referrals. Some may see that as a win. But, as this report has repeatedly observed, driving down the percentage of referrals accounted for by Islamists is not a legitimate goal for a colour-blind counter-extremism system.

Non-ideological violence, ‘com networks’, and the dangers of mission creep

As I noted in the introduction to this submission, Prevent exists only in order to reduce support for and engagement in terrorism. Whether or not it does so successfully, it cannot be repurposed to serve other goals without fundamental changes on an institutional level. Any such changes would be likely to have far-reaching consequences, and as such should be made only under explicit direction from the government, and not introduced through the back door.

Under British law, violence and property damage is only terrorism if it is carried out ‘for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial, or ideological cause’.[68] This condition is not met by non-ideological criminality, even if violent. In a British context, non-ideological violence is therefore not terrorism. This means that it is irrelevant to Prevent as currently constituted.

There are good reasons for defining terrorism in the way that the British state does. In stating this, I make no judgement about the relative severity or importance of terrorist and non-terrorist forms of violence and property damage. Terrorist violence is not worse than other forms of violence, for example. However, investigation and prevention of terrorist violence involves recognising the specific nature of its methods and motives. An ideologically motivated murder is not worse than a murder carried out with more mundane motives, such as sexual jealousy. But only confusion could result from treating a suicide bombing as if it were a domestic assault, or (conversely) a domestic assault as if it were a suicide bombing.

This point ought to be obvious. It is often lost, however, because of an apparent desire to forestall occurrences of non-ideological violence in a manner analogous to that by which the state hopes to forestall terrorist violence, i.e. the prior identification of ‘at risk’ individuals and their subjection to interventions. If deradicalisation and other counter-extremist interventions can dissuade actual or potential terrorists from engaging (or returning to engagement in) terrorism, why should they not be used to set other kinds of actual or potential criminals on a better path?

Evidence for the effectiveness of deradicalisation interventions — even in their intended sphere of application — is very thin.[69] However, this submission expresses no opinion with regard to the likely effectiveness of different forms of intervention for different categories of offender or would-be offender. The point I wish to make is rather that, whatever the effectiveness of such interventions, it ought to be self-evident that interventions of a type designed to dissuade an Islamist or white supremacist from the view that violence is legitimate means to a valid religio- or ethno-political end are likely to be inappropriate when one is dealing with (say) a serial domestic abuser. Given that the interventions appropriate for individuals engaging in or at risk of engaging in these different categories of offending are likely to be quite radically different, I would suggest that bringing the recipients of such interventions into the same institutional structure or conceptual category cannot possibly help matters.

Further to this, it should be remembered that the bureaucracy of Prevent is already over-stretched, and that the service already appears to be ‘carrying the weight for mental health services’.[70] Given such circumstances, it is vitally important to avoid mission creep — as would result from the definitional creation of large numbers of new ‘terrorists’ or ‘extremists’ to be processed through the same system. Non-ideological violence is vastly more prevalent than terrorism, and any attempt to encompass it within the United Kingdom’s frameworks for dealing with terrorism and extremism would inevitably swamp the latter.

It is inevitable that further forms of extremism will be proposed – indeed, in the first part of this submission, I have argued for two such. It is vital that any such proposals, including those that I endorse, are evaluated with reference to empirical evidence of the specific terror threat posed to the United Kingdom. Resources should not be wasted on combating imaginary threats. And non-terror threats should not be dealt with through institutional frameworks specifically designed for the reduction of terrorism.

For example, if (as the Call for Evidence to which I respond suggests) there is pressure to classify ‘com networks’ as extremist, the temptation to yield to that pressure should be strenuously resisted. Com networks are the latest (digital) means by which young men engage in the age-old antisocial activity of encouraging one another to break the law. That this activity is banal does not imply that it should not be taken seriously by the authorities. But taking it seriously does not require categorising it as a form of extremism.

The state of research on extremism in the United Kingdom

Before concluding this report, I would like to draw attention to the poor state of the evidence base for extremism policy in the United Kingdom.

The ideologically-driven character of much research on extremism has already been alluded to in this submission’s discussion of the Prevent programme. However, the problem of researcher activism in extremism studies neither begins nor ends with the anti-Prevent campaign. As a former high-level counter terrorism police officer to whom I recently spoke put it, much scholarship on the subject on the subject of extremism is written by ‘activists who are laundering their views as research’.[71] Both inside and outside the university system, much research on the far right is conducted by individuals whose activist agendas are not necessarily compatible with dispassionate analysis of far right extremism as generally understood. While such individuals are typically opposed to what they regard as far right extremism, it is common to see studies of the far left whose authors explicitly identify with their research subjects,[72] and by no means unheard of for studies of Islamism to be written from a position of open sympathy with Islamist political goals.[73]

It should be possible for public servants to recognise such obvious sources of bias through critical reading. However, there may be a deeper problem which is potentially harder to spot. This is that, even where research on extremism is not biased, it is often written at a very high level of abstraction which obscures a chronic lack of empirical support.

The problem of excessive generality and abstraction was brought to the fore in two studies of research on extremism that were recently published by the Commission for Countering Extremism, one of which was carried out by the author of this submission. Although the studies were carried out in complete independence from one another and employed radically different methodologies, both came to similar conclusions in this regard.

The first of the two studies — a survey of the 50 most-cited scholarly papers on the topic of radicalisation — found that the great majority (74%) did not present any original research, while several of those that did used ‘extremely small samples’ or gave inadequate detail of their methodologies, and just one paper ‘dr[ew] on original interviews with terrorist offenders’.[74] As the author of the survey complained, the result is that much supposedly ‘evidence-based’ discourse on radicalisation currently consists only of ‘platitudes that are not particularly illuminating or directive from the perspective of policy-making’.[75]

The second of the two studies, conducted by the author of this submission, found that the bulk of publicly-funded studies of extremism as manifest in the post-1980 time period concerned no specific form of extremism, with very few focusing on Islamism (38% had no specific form of extremism as their focus, as opposed to 31% which focused on the far right and 21% which focused on Islamism), and that the same was true of studies of extremism in a British context (with 44% focusing on no specific form of extremism, as opposed to 33% focusing on the far right and 13% focusing on Islamism).[76]

This is to say that the study found both a lack of studies of specific forms of extremism, and a mismatch between the composition of those studies which did focus on specific forms of extremism and the threat landscape existing in the United Kingdom. Astonishingly, the study found that CREST — a body set up specifically in order to study security threats to the United Kingdom — had funded only a single research project on Islamism, which was not in fact focused on a British context.[77]

As well as identifying the above problem, the author’s study (which also incorporated a thematic analysis of expert interviews) was able to propose a number of factors which might plausibly explain the paucity of empirical studies of specific extremist phenomena in the United Kingdom. These included a wish to avoid being seen as politically controversial,[78] a lack of specialised expertise in many think tanks,[79] and a general academic tendency to value the general and the theoretical over the particular and the descriptive.[80] The same study further argued that such problems appeared to be compounded by lack of institutional willingness to stand up to ‘intimidation lawsuits’ (also known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs) issued by extremist and extremist-adjacent individuals and groups, suggesting that these create a strong disincentive to writing in specific terms.[81]

Synthesis, generalisation, and theorisation are all immensely valuable — but only when conducted on the basis of solid empirical research. In the field of extremism and terrorism studies, this is often lacking – especially with regard to a British context. Before the kinds of high level, abstract study evidently desired both by policymakers and by academics can be written without descent into platitudes, it will be necessary to remedy this lack.

Thus, both studies argued that measures be taken in order to ensure that research be carried out on specific empirical phenomena, with the survey of studies of radicalisation recommending as follows:

The UK government and public-funding bodies should encourage and prioritise research on radicalisation/deradicalisation that is empirically driven and focused on specific individuals, ideologies, networks, milieus and deradicalisation initiatives in specific places and time-periods. Projects that seek to understand, say, current far-right activism in Norwich or Islamic State networks in London between 2013–2015 should be prioritised over studies that seek to synthesise previous studies or develop abstract models for explaining the pushes and pulls of radicalisation. Research that seeks to interview violent extremists and their supporters should especially be encouraged.[82]

That plea is here reiterated. There certainly exists a great volume of academic and think tank literature on extremism, but that does not mean that we know very much about extremism as a real-world phenomenon in the United Kingdom today. It is sadly clear that, left to their own devices, the academic and think tank sectors are unlikely to solve this problem by themselves – whatever the merits of many individuals and organisations operating therein.

A policy solution is therefore likely to be required. Just as it is up to stakeholders in the policy community to read research critically and to determine for themselves whether that research is helpfully even-handed and empirical, or unhelpfully biased and divorced from reality, it is also up to those same stakeholders to request and reward research that can usefully inform their decisions, and to guarantee the conditions under which it may be carried out and disseminated. Anything short of this prolongs the status quo, in which useful research always threatens to disappear beneath a tide of platitudes and activism.

Conclusion

As this submission has endeavoured to show, there are at least two concerning new forms of extremism in the United Kingdom, with one centred around the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the other centred around perceived affronts to Islam. However, this submission has also argued that Prevent’s ability to address these and older forms of extremism – as well as the antisemitic thread that I have argued to run across multiple forms of extremism – may be compromised by a tendency to narrow or broaden the category of extremism on political lines. As I have argued, this tendency appears to be facilitated by a number of conceptual confusions, some of which appear quite deeply embedded on an institutional level, but the underlying problem is likely to be one of institutional culture.

This submission argues that more research will be necessary if new and existing forms of extremism are to be addressed in a meaningful way, but it also cautions that such research must be both empirical and even-handed, whilst maintaining a focus on the specific realities of the contemporary United Kingdom. To achieve this may in itself require policy interventions, in order to ensure both that concrete and specific empirical research is conducted and that it can be published without fear of intimidation – especially legal intimidation. The threat of a lawsuit should not be sufficient to silence legitimate reporting and research on extremist and extremist-adjacent groups and individuals.

However, the author of this submission also considers that the most urgent priority should be to de-politicise Prevent by rooting out what evidence suggests to have become an institutional culture of selective minimising and maximising of different forms of extremism, in response to activist criticism. The colour-blindness of the mission at the heart of Prevent is fundamentally compromised by what gives every appearance of being a (possibly unintentional, but no less real) imperative to create a false equality of outcomes, as measured in ideological breakdowns of referrals. It is here argued that the creeping politicisation of Prevent can only be addressed on a policy level, and suggested that the Home Affairs Select Committee might consider making recommendations accordingly.

The ideal towards which Prevent should strive is one in which appropriate interventions are received by all those individuals – and only those individuals – who are at risk of radicalising towards involvement in or support for terrorism. That this ideal is unlikely to be achievable in practice is no reason not to avoid measures whose effect will be directly contrary.

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June 2025