Responding to the Threat of Violent Extremism

Front matter

Responding to the Threat of Violent Extremism

Failing to Prevent

Paul Thomas

Contents

Acknowledgements vii Preface ix Glossary xi

Introduction: A New Threat of Violent Extremism? 1 The Threat of Violent Extremism 13

Community Cohesion: A Changed Policy Context 35 Preventing Violent Extremism 54

Preface

E many ways, this book is the product of my response, through research and writing, to a series of events, rather than pre-planning. My long-term research focus has been, and remains, one around multiculturalism, ethnic identity and young people. From shortly after the 2001 riots in northern England, I have been carrying out field research in Oldham, and neighbouring Rochdale, in Greater Manchester into how the apparently new race relations policy approach of ‘community cohesion’ has been understood and operationalised by professionals on the ground, and how the issues that it addresses are experienced and understood by young people. That research involvement informed my 2011 book Youth, Multiculturalism and Community Cohesion (Palgrave Macmillan), which used this grounded research evidence to suggest more nuanced and progressive understandings of what community cohesion has the potential to be than many academic critiques based solely on readings of national policy documents and accompanying political discourses largely have allowed.

However, events and governmental policy reactions to them have intervened to alter the landscape of ethnic relations and the promotion of community cohesion that I have been attempting to make sense of. The 7/7 London bombings of July 2005 occurred as I was carrying out field research with youth workers in Oldham, which had a significant impact on the tone and content of a number of those in-depth conversations. The impact grew as it became apparent that all four of the attackers were from West Yorkshire. Three attackers came from the city that I live in, Leeds, and the other came from the town, Huddersfield, that I work in. The ringleader, Mohammad Sidique Khan, had been a part-time youth worker and was known to a number of youth work professionals that I have trained, or liaised with, whilst another of the attackers was well known to friends of mine. Within a year of the 7/7 attacks, it was starting to be clear that, as a result of those events, government was determined to take the focus and content of policy relating to British Muslim communities in a significantly difficult direction. The Prevent agenda was announced in October 2006, and the ‘Preventing Violent Extremism Pathfinder’ initiative commenced in April 2007. From the moment it started to be implemented, experienced youth workers, community workers and other local authority officials who I knew, and whose judgement I trusted, were flagging Prevent up as not only highly problematic in itself but also flatly contradictory to the community cohesion agenda they were attempting to develop locally, often through highly imaginative pieces of work. To those workers, and me, Prevent seemed to have forgotten all the concerns that the 2001 riots had crystallised, and which the Cantle Report had identified, around both increasingly racialised community identities and relations, and policy’s failure to address that, as x PREFACE well as the well-documented problems of previous approaches to tackling racist extremism in white communities. In both cases, monocultural policy approaches that essentialised and reified ethnic or faith identity in the absence of focus on social class and identity complexity had proved counterproductive, as the community cohesion analysis so clearly identified, but Prevent seemed determined to ignore those lessons of history. Research involvements in and around the local implementation of Prevent in both Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire confirmed those feelings and provided evidence of community cohesion thinking and practice being sidelined by Prevent.

Such concerns were my motivations for writing journal articles on Prevent and making the evidence submission to the House of Commons Communities and Local Government Select Committee Inquiry that led to the invitation to present oral evidence to the Committee in December 2009. My argument there, and the main focus of this book, is not just that the government focus on Prevent and the resulting local implementation of it has sidelined, possibly even stalled, the developing progressive local practice around cohesion and integration, but that the design and implementation of Prevent has largely failed to consider the key analysis of community cohesion.

That cohesion analysis suggested that policy approaches of essentialising and focusing on separate and distinct ethnic identities and experiences, despite the increasingly complex diversity of real British life, are both problematic and potentially counterproductive. Such an essentialising approach will inevitably create ‘space’ for minorities within communities to espouse and grow towards extreme versions of such identities, and doctrines of violent extremism based on those identities, whether that is extreme white supremacist racism or jihadist Islamist violent extremism. That is not to suggest that real economic and social circumstances, and domestic and foreign policy actions, are not contributory to such violent extremism, but rather to argue that the only effective way to build real resilience against violent extremism within and between communities is not more focus on separate identities but actually less; real resilience will come from the building of stronger shared identities and experiences, and processes of meaningful citizenship and real democratic engagement for all British citizens, based on mutual respect and equality.

In arguing for that cohesion-based approach to preventing attraction towards violent extremism, the book is not seeking to deny the reality of either distinct ‘identifications’ in society or of specific and unequal experiences for some groups, but to argue that policy can only effectively address such realities, and win popular consent to do so, within a stronger framework of commonality. Similarly, the book is not naively suggesting that any inter-ethnic contact will inevitably be positive and productive — there is clear evidence that the opposite can often be true. Rather it argues that approaches to preventing violent extremism that aim to build strong and active democratic involvement by young people of all backgrounds, in a well-planned and appropriately resourced manner, offer the best hope of building that resilience against violent extremism.

ACPO APA BNP CLG CRE CTU DCLG EDL FOSIS HAC HMG HUT IRA IRR JTAC MCB MCU NCS NI OSCT PET PVE RICU RIEP SEU TPA UKYP YJB YOI YOS YOT

Glossary

Association of Chief Police Officers Association of Police Authorities

British National Party

Communities and Local Government Commission for Racial Equality Counter-Terrorism Unit

Department for Communities and Local Government English Defence League

Federation of Student Islamic Societies Home Affairs Committee

Her Majesty’s Government

Hizb ut-Tahrir

Irish Republican Army

Institute of Race Relations

Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre

Muslim Council of Britain

Muslim Contact Unit

National Citizen Service

National Indicator

Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism Preventing Extremism Together Preventing Violent Extremism

Research, Information and Communication Unit Regional Improvement and Effectiveness Partnership Social Exclusion Unit

Tax Payer’s Alliance

United Kingdom Youth Parliament

Youth Justice Board

Young Offenders Institution

Youth Offending Service

Youth Offending Team xi

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