Fine words belie May’s past on extremism

The PM says there has been too much tolerance, but as home secretary she encouraged a lax approach

It was important that the Prime Minister reacted to Saturday night’s terrorist attack not with the usual platitudes but with a determination that “things need to change”.

As she rightly said: “There is – to be frank – far too much tolerance of extremism in our country.”

And she was spot-on in pointing out: “We need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out across the public sector and across society.”

But the question has to be asked: who was home secretary for the six years from 2010? Mrs May appears to have had a Damascene conversion on this, because as home secretary she acted as the most important blockage in Whitehall against a serious attempt to deal with that precise problem: the hold of Islamism across parts of the public sector and across society.

She was certainly firm in her support for Prevent. She did deport the likes of Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza. And she was incensed by the Human Rights Act functioning as a brake against further deportations.

But for all that, her record in understanding exactly the issue she raised yesterday – dealing with extremism before it develops into full-on plots – is lamentable.

Last month, disciplinary action against five teachers at the centre of the so-called Trojan Horse scandal collapsed after the catastrophically inept handling of the case by the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL). An exhaustive inquiry by Peter Clarke, the former head of the Met’s counter-terrorism unit, found that Islamist teachers had allegedly been imposing an “intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos” on secular state schools in Birmingham.

The case matters not simply because of the fundamental importance of ensuring, as Mrs May put it yesterday, that this area of the public sector – education – is free of Islamist influence, but because Mrs May’s own behaviour over it is deeply revealing.

In 2014, the then education secretary, Michael Gove, determined to act when allegations first surfaced. At a meeting of a Cabinet committee, the Extremism Task Force, Mr Gove is said to have argued that Whitehall had for years been institutionally soft on extremism and started dealing with Islamists only once they had embraced violence.

Mr Gove wanted Whitehall to adopt a wider definition of extremism that took in Islamism itself. Mrs May challenged this, arguing for a far narrower definition. Mrs May won – ensuring that the very attitude within Whitehall that the Prime Minister attacked yesterday continued.

Mrs May’s chief counter-terrorism adviser was the then director general of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism at the Home Office, Charles Farr. Some argue that he was a one-man obstacle to serious action against Whitehall’s links with Islamism. Mr Farr has had a new role since 2015. Remarkably, he is now chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

The row between Mr Gove and Mrs May became front-page news and, to keep the peace, Mr Gove was forced to apologise both to her and to Mr Farr for his criticisms. But he was right.

The briefings at the time from Mrs

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May’s Home Office were clear – it was outrageous of Mr Gove to allege there was any issue of Islamism being tolerated within Whitehall or the public sector and that he had a black-and-white attitude to an issue that was really shades of grey.

Which brings us to now. Mrs May is the prime minister, rather than home secretary, but almost nothing else has changed.

Quite rightly, she said yesterday that “we cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed”. But we do.

Look at another area of the public sector: prisons. The evidence is overwhelming that prisons are some of the most fertile breeding grounds for Islamists and radicalisation. And yet there is a huge block within Whitehall against serious action to tackle the issue. Within the Ministry of Justice there are officials who are said, at worst, actually to sympathise with Islamism and, at best, still maintain that the right approach is to engage with it – and fight any departure from that.

Mrs May delivering a fine speech is all well and good. But unless she is a very different prime minister from home secretary, it will be meaningless.