Outraged by grooming gangs? You’re an extremist

I hear you’re a fascist now. Indeed, if the Home Office’s leaked review into extremism is anything to go by, the details of which are splashed across the newspapers today, potentially millions of Brits are falling for ‘right-wing extremist narratives’.

Home secretary Yvette Cooper commissioned this ‘rapid analytical sprint’ last summer, following the horrific Southport murders and the race riots that followed. True to form, the end product seems oddly preoccupied with smearing ordinary people, at the expense of tackling those who advocate genuine hatred, violence and terrorism.

The Policy Exchange think-tank got its hand on a copy of the review and was stunned to find – alongside the usual stuff about Islamists, neo-Nazis and the like – passages that portray even mainstream criticisms of the multicultural state as somehow dodgy and beyond-the-pale.

Apparently, complaints of ‘two-tier policing’ are one example of a ‘right-wing extremist narrative’. Far-rightists, we’re told, also ‘frequently exploit cases of alleged group-based sexual abuse’ (ie, grooming gangs). Remarkably, this is the primary reference to the rape-gangs scandal in the report, even though there is an entire section devoted to misogyny, looking at incels and pick-up artists.

I don’t know what’s worse: blithely casting suspicion on those outraged about grooming gangs – the industrial-scale rape of poor and vulnerable girls by groups of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men – or the use of the word ‘alleged’, even after thousands of victims and hundreds of perpetrators have been identified.

Of course the far right has long tried to exploit the grooming-gangs scandal to push its own racist, anti-migrant agenda. But that was only ever made possible by the refusal of the political class to take these atrocities seriously. An ignoble tradition, I’m afraid to say, that this latest review stands in.

The haughty dismissal of the notion of two-tier policing – the accusation that police are applying the law selectively because of bias, ideology or a desire to maintain ‘community relations’ – is also particularly grotesque here, given the authorities’ widely documented failure to investigate, arrest and prosecute the rape gangs, out of fear of being called racist and prejudice towards the victims, who were dismissed as ‘common prostitutes’.

In the wake of the Southport murders, there’s been renewed interest in broadening out the definition of extremism, in light of the fact that the killer, Axel Rudakubana, had no cause in mind when he slaughtered those defenceless little girls. Indeed, his lack of an overriding ideology is why his case with Prevent was closed, even after he was referred to the counter-extremism scheme three times. (Yvette Cooper almost certainly knew all of this at the time she launched her review, even if she didn’t trust the rest of us with this information.)

But the dog’s dinner the Home Office has made of this review reminds us why seeking to radically expand the scope of counter-extremism is a recipe for censorship and warped priorities. The review even calls for another crusade against ‘harmful’ online speech and more recording of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ – as if people calling each other names on X is the slippery slope to another 7/7.

That Rudakubana fell through the net is unforgivable. He was excluded from school for carrying knives. He was known to be obsessed with mass murder. He had a history of violence and said he wanted to kill people. Just because he wasn’t also an ideologue doesn’t mean it was fine for the state to send him on his merry way.

But the answer here is surely new powers and schemes to deal with – and, if it comes to it, detain – deranged, depraved and dangerous people. It’s not making counter-extremism practitioners pick up the slack left by the police and social services. Indeed, a 2023 review of Prevent indicated that the scheme is already overloaded with cases it was never intended to deal with. Those deemed to be ‘vulnerable’ but with ‘no ideology’ now account for the largest proportion of referrals.

The push to redefine extremism has become a thinly veiled pretext to crack down on freedom of speech – and to deflect attention away from where our biggest extremism problem lies. And to be clear, I don’t mean ‘the manosphere’ or even the racist right – which remains a mercifully small, if growing, threat. It’s Islamist extremism – which, despite being responsible for 94 per cent of all terrorism killings in Britain since 1999, only represents 11 per cent of current Prevent referrals.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the British state would rather accuse everyone of being extremists than go after actual extremists. That it would rather tone-police debates about multiculturalism than focus on those plotting to blow up kids at pop concerts. Ordinary people are being made to pay the price for the elites’ incurable cowardice.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater