No, opposing mass migration doesn’t make you a terrorist

According to Prevent, the British government’s counter-extremism programme, expressing concern about high levels of immigration is to be treated as a mark of terrorist ideology.

The terrorist ideology in question is defined by government documents as ‘cultural nationalism’. This, apparently, is the belief that ‘Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups’. In other words, if you express worries about the social and cultural impact on Britain of a huge influx of people from around the world, you could find yourself being referred to the government’s deradicalisation scheme.

This is further evidence – if any were needed – that Prevent is not fit for purpose. This is a critical part of the UK’s counter-terrorism architecture. Yet instead of being used to identify potential threats to the public, it is now focussed on demonising perfectly legitimate views as symptoms of a so-called terrorist ideology.

Perhaps Prevent should refer the UK prime minister to a deradicalisation programme. After all, Keir Starmer presented the government’s new white paper on cutting immigration last month by articulating what sounded very much like ‘cultural nationalism’. He promised to end the UK’s ‘open-borders experiment’ and said that a lack of integration risked turning us into ‘an island of strangers’.

Categorising concern about mass migration as a sign of radicalisation is really not a good use of the UK’s counter-terror infrastructure. It effectively turns Prevent into another vehicle of state censorship.

People ought to be free to question the negative social and cultural impacts of mass immigration – which has reached record levels in recent years. While it’s important not to generalise about the hundreds of thousands of people who have arrived in the UK over the past few years, many are from countries such as India, Pakistan and Nigeria – all of which have serious problems with religious fundamentalism and ethnic violence. Should someone really be considered a radicalisation risk if they express concerns about the effect of large inward flows from such countries? This is not an unreasonable fear, given that the UK has long been struggling to integrate newcomers into a shared national culture – not least because its political and cultural elites have spent years waging war on any shared national traditions and history.

There are also legitimate concerns about the threat to public safety posed by mass migration. Indeed, it’s worth noting that Britain’s lax borders are putting British women, in particular, at risk, with foreign nationals being vastly overrepresented among those convicted of sex crimes. When compared with British citizens, Afghans and Eritreans are more than 20 times more likely to account for convictions connected to sex crimes. This is not to cast aspersions on everyone from Afghanistan or Eritrea. But when so little effort is made to identify who is entering the UK – especially via illegal-migration routes – is it any surprise that some unsavoury characters are taking advantage? Yet, according to Prevent, just raising questions about any of this could have you marked out as some sort of far-right terrorist sympathiser.

The Prevent scheme was originally designed with a clear aim in mind – to stop people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. But it has clearly been ideologically compromised. This is not a new development. Sir William Shawcross’s independent review of Prevent, published in 2023, exposed the fundamental mismatch between the ideological composition of cases referred to Prevent and the true nature of the terrorist threat in the UK.

Indeed, in the year ending 31 March 2022, the percentage of cases referred to Prevent following concerns over Islamist-related radicalisation was just 16 per cent. Meanwhile, the percentage of cases referred to Prevent involving concerns over extreme right-wing radicalisation stood at 20 per cent. This is completely at odds with the relative threats posed by Islamist and extreme right-wing terrorism. Indeed, 80 per cent of the Counter Terrorism Policing network’s live investigations are Islamist-related, while only 10 per cent of the investigations are associated with far-right extremism. It now looks as if Prevent will also be going after so-called cultural nationalists, too, further distracting attention from the Islamist threat.

Part of the blame for this warping of Prevent’s priorities lies with the public bodies responsible for identifying potential radicalisation risks. These bodies, from education to healthcare, suffer from a left-leaning, progressive bias. This means they’re more than happy to adopt a negative, fear-mongering view of those with right-leaning views, such as scepticism towards migration, while ignoring the real terror threats in our midst.

Prevent needs a radical overhaul if it’s to serve a useful purpose. It needs to better reflect the landscape inhabited by our security services and counter-terror police. It ought to be focussing on combatting the ever-evolving threats to British citizens, not delegitimising those same citizens’ perfectly reasonable concerns over immigration, integration and national identity.

Just about the only thing Prevent is preventing at the moment is free and open debate.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.