The Daily Telegraph - Features
‘Growing up in Bradford, I saw Islamic extremists target children as young as 13’
Dame Sara Khan, the Government’s adviser on social cohesion, warned this week of alarming disillusionment with democracy. Lizzie Dearden meets her
The hatred, extremism and division coursing through the UK as a result of the Israel-Gaza conflict did not come as a shock to Dame Sara Khan, the Government’s independent adviser for social cohesion. She saw the consequences coming as soon as Hamas launched its bloody rampage on October 7, and thinks ministers should have too.
“It was pretty obvious that it would have a radicalising effect, that it would feed hate crime and growing levels of extremism in our society,” she says. “And when it did there was no infrastructure in place to deal with it.”
I meet Dame Sara in a small, glass-walled meeting room inside the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, where, in a wine-coloured trouser suit and pink blouse, she is by far the most colourful person in sight.
It is just days after the release of her official report – Threats to Social Cohesion and Democratic Resilience – the 150-page culmination of three years of work, and she says her “brain is mush”. But she is unflinching in her assessment of the toxic soup of issues causing what she fears is the “internal fragmentation” of democracy, not just in Britain but around the world. She found the dangerous climate of threats and intimidation towards MPs to be part of a wider picture of harassment affecting local councils, academics, journalists and even artists.
The Israel-Gaza conflict is assessed to be just one contributing factor, alongside anger over the cost of living crisis, polarisation on social media, disinformation, conspiracy theories and the “mainstreaming of extremism”.
This is not the first time conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has reverberated on Britain’s streets. Weeks after Dame Sara took up her role as social cohesion adviser in early 2021, tasked with examining extremism across the UK and drawing up plans to combat it, violence broke out in Jerusalem and spiralled into a war between Israel and Hamas. In under two weeks, monitoring groups had recorded a 500 per cent increase in anti-Semitic incidents and a 430 per cent rise in reports of anti-Muslim hatred in Britain. When Dame Sara spoke to Jewish and Muslim groups at that time, she recalls that “everyone was saying that it was inevitable”.
The current war is longer, bloodier and more destructive than ever before, and threaten to become what counter-terror police call a “generational radicalising moment”. Khan says the Government should have learned from the fallout of these previous conflicts and is now battling to put “sticking plasters” on worsening hatred and radicalisation as a result.
“We knew these tensions were there, we knew something like this was going to happen and the Government was behind the curve,” she says. “They should have got ahead of this, thinking: ‘What can we do now to ensure that we mitigate against a potential conflict that will cause serious disruption on our own streets?’ There is no adequate infrastructure to deal with this issue.”
Khan rejects former home secretary Suella Braverman’s labelling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations demanding a ceasefire as “hate marches”.
“It’s just not true,” she says. “Overwhelmingly, these are largely peaceful marches that are being attended by a whole range of different people from different backgrounds, different faiths, and for all kinds of different reasons.”
She agrees that the police should step in where there is anti-Semitic chanting, incitement of hatred or other criminal offences being committed, but believes it is “simplistic” to tar thousands of demonstrators with the same brush.
“There’s got to be a space where we can allow people to come together and find a constructive way of coming to some kind of common ground,” she says. “That requires leadership from all sides.”
The issue currently giving her sleepless nights is the worsening “serious disillusionment with democracy among the British people”, with polling showing trust in government and core institutions plummeting, as fewer people participate in elections and wider politics.
Such trends make people “more likely to turn to authoritarian or anti-democratic worldviews”, she says. “It means that extremists are able to infiltrate the mainstream, and we could lose precious democratic rights and freedoms.
“That’s something I really worry about, especially when I see that there isn’t a strategic approach to deal with it. It seems like we can see it all happening – we can see the car crash, but we’re not putting our foot down on the brake and doing something about it.”
Khan has been trying to put the brakes on hatred and division within British society for a long time. As a young Muslim, growing up in Bradford, she was shocked by the way the recently banned Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir tried to radicalise girls and boys as young as 13.
“My father used to come back with leaflets from the mosque from Hizb ut-Tahrir. He’d say: ‘This is a really toxic organisation – they’re completely the opposite of everything I’ve taught you about being patriotic and contributing positively to this country’.”
Her father had emigrated to the UK from Pakistan in the 1960s, initially working in a grocery shop before moving into insurance, and instilled in his four children “a real opposition to Islamist extremism and the dangers that it posed”.
When Khan was growing up, she saw teenage girls in her community being forced into marriage. “That just does something to you,” she says. Together with her sister and two brothers, she attended a private secondary school and went on to complete a pharmacy degree at the
She has released a wave of reports on extremism but the Goverment has not responded to any
University of Manchester, before gaining a master’s in human rights from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.
She was working as a hospital pharmacist when London was bombed by al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists on July 7 2005. That attack – the deadliest jihadist assault in British history – was a “defining moment” and she pledged to dedicate herself to countering Islamist extremism.
“The idea of young British Muslims carrying out a domestic attack and murdering fellow citizens was just absolutely horrific,” she says. “My professional life in this type of work started from that point.”
Now 44, she has been fighting extremism for almost two decades, having co-founded the women-led charity Inspire in 2008. Its mission, to combat Islamist radicalisation and gender inequality, appeared uncontroversial but drew hostility from extremists.
“We got an incredible amount of abuse,” she recalls. “I was living with daily threats and it was predominantly coming from Islamist extremists in this country, and people who are sympathetic to those narratives.” Khan, who had two young children at the time, was advised by police on security measures including changing her routes to work and school and coming off social media.
“There were Islamist extremist groups portraying me as a traitor to Islam,” she says. “People would spread crazy, ridiculous conspiracy theories just to try and damage my reputation and smear me to such an extent that nobody would listen to anything I said.”
Did she consider stopping her work? “The Yorkshire stubborn lass part of me wouldn’t. I just thought, ‘No one is going to tell me what to do. I’m not going to have anyone dictate to me. I won’t let those guys try and stop me from playing my part for our country’.”
With the support of her husband, a lawyer, she kept going, being appointed as the new Commissioner for Countering Extremism in 2018 and awarded a damehood for her services in the 2022 New Year Honours list.
Over her three-year tenure, the commission released a wave of reports examining different threats and calling for structural and legal changes to stop extremists of all kinds “operating with impunity”.
The Government did not respond to any of those reports, including a core 2019 review that formulated a new definition of “hateful extremism”, and Khan is frustrated that she has never been given an explanation for the silence.
She accuses the Government of having a “wider cultural problem”, where it repeatedly commissions independent reviews but then “leaves them to just gather dust on a shelf ”.
“I don’t think that’s acceptable at all,” Dame Sara says. “That’s not treating the British public with the respect that they deserve, where the Government is paying independent figures to deliver a piece of work and then ignoring all their recommendations.”
The controversial definition of extremism unveiled by Michael Gove this month was markedly different to her recommendations, and Khan claims that she has not been consulted on wider work that the Communities Secretary promised would “marginalise extremist groups and to support and strengthen the communities where extremists are most active and spreading division”.
As a general election approaches and tensions rise, Khan is pleading for MPs not to do extremists’ work for them by engaging in “culture wars” and using inflammatory and divisive language.
“Politicians have the power to bring people together, but they also have the power to inflame and divide people,” she warns. “We’ve got to be very careful that extremist narratives and ideologies don’t infiltrate the mainstream. We’ve got to be better than that.”
Khan also strongly disagrees with Braverman’s claim that multiculturalism has failed. She argues that the divisions currently dominating British society are “not because of migrants”.
“We’re a diverse democracy, there are going to be tensions across all backgrounds. There are tensions between people of different political opinions, there are people who have different opinions on a class basis. There are so many fault lines now.”
She is calling on politicians not to “coarsen political discourse” in ways that undermine cohesion and public trust further. “They’re looking at it in terms of gaining power in the short term, but it has long-term consequences in the rest of society,” she warns.
“This is not just about the election and who wins power. It has long-term ramifications on the rest of society.”
‘Politicians have the power to bring people together, but also to inflame and divide’