Time to renew the fight against extremism

Ashocking and senseless act of violence like the killing of my colleague Sir David Amess raises many questions. How do we protect elected representatives and their staff while maintaining the accessibility we cherish in our system? How do we raise the quality and civility of public discourse, particularly in online communities? And how and with what intensity do we confront extremism and hateful ideologies in our society?

The latter requires our urgent attention as it asks us to confront the sort of country we are, and what we want it to be like. From the far-right to Islamist extremism, we’ve failed to tackle the hate and violence which exists, because contesting it is hard, requires honesty about the problems we face, and consistency and dedication to resolving them. We need to reset and renew this neglected area of policy.

We are winners of life’s lottery, the citizens of a free and pluralistic society. To live here is to accept responsibilities as well as rights, to respect our values, including democracy, equality, the position of minorities, free speech and freedom of religion. We must support those who share these values and challenge those who seek to undermine them. If we don’t, what binds society together fragments, rights are eroded, intolerance is normalised, communities are separated from the mainstream and, occasionally, we experience its most destructive consequences in the form of appalling acts of violence.

Fortunately, we do not need to reinvent the wheel in looking for ways to act on this problem, as we have been deluged by recommendations and reports in recent years. We can take down from our shelves the largely unimplemented work of Baroness Casey in 2016 on social integration or the work of Sara Khan on challenging hateful extremism in 2019. Under the Commission for Combating Extremism, established after the Manchester Arena bombing, Sir Mark Rowley has proposed changes to the law to stop hateful groups operating with impunity. As far back as 2011, David Cameron set the right tone in a speech in Munich: a brilliant but unrealised vision of a country less passively tolerant and more muscularly liberal. Much has been said, less put into practice. That must change. Action is required on multiple fronts and it will be a partnership between the government and all those individuals, groups and communities who want to see extremism defeated.

Facebook, Twitter and other Big Tech firms need to step up. There will need to be robust action against companies that fail to take down the extremist and hate-filled material found too freely online or that refuse to co-operate with the security services to identify its authors. The Online Harms Bill is an opportunity to do so. Institutions, from government departments to local councils, schools and charities, must also be firm in which groups they engage with and thereby lend legitimacy to. They should be building resilience and cohesion against extremism, where all too frequently they turn a blind eye. And we should protect the victims of extremism, often living in fear and isolation.

The Home Secretary will shortly receive William Shawcross’s review on the counter-radicalisation Prevent strategy. Prevent needs reform. It has been unfairly vilified, often by those who don’t want it to succeed. But at times it is too passive, co-ordination between services is insufficient and the decision-making process ineffective. Those with experience of countering extremism, like the police and security services, need to be more clearly in the driving seat. Extremism of the far-right or Islamism is equally despicable, but the balance of the programme must reflect how counter-terrorism is being conducted in reality as opposed to how those with politically correct agendas might believe it should be. Islamist extremists make up three quarters of offenders in prison for terror-related offences and the vast majority of suspects on MI5’S terror watchlist, but only 24 per cent of all Prevent referrals and 30 per cent of Channel cases – those taken to the next level of intervention.

There will be questions of resourcing if we increase our domestic counterterrorism activities, and we will have to balance this threat with efforts to counter the hostility we face from states like Russia and China. None the less, MI5 and the security services have expanded enormously since 9/11. And we will need to return to the questions of integration and opportunity and place them at the heart of levelling-up.

There are no simple answers, but Britain has never been cowed by fear, hatred or terror and we should not be now. That means a renewed effort to defeat extremists and build a stronger and more cohesive country, for our children and grandchildren.