Yvette Cooper’s ridiculous war on ‘extremism’

Finally, another ‘review’ about extremism, to go with all the others. Even better, it’s going to be a ‘rapid analytical sprint on extremism’, as UK home secretary Yvette Cooper described it this week. I don’t know about you, but I’m already feeling a hell of a lot safer.

To dismiss Cooper’s review – sorry, rapid analytical sprint – merely as a displacement activity, as a technocratic dodge of a pressing social problem, isn’t quite right. It’s actually much worse than that. Rather than focus counter-extremism resources where they are most needed, Cooper seems intent on dragging all manner of different views into the state’s crosshairs.

Her officials will assess not only ‘the rise of Islamist and far-right extremism’, which you would hope they’d be on top of anyway, but also ‘ideological trends’ such as ‘extreme misogyny’. Naturally, Andrew Tate comes up in all the write-ups, given the supposedly hypnotic hold that misogynistic character act has over our young men.

Of course, we shouldn’t be complacent about misogyny. There’s certainly been an alarming rise in it in recent years. You’re even allowed to punch women at the Olympics now. But the notion that, say, incels – the Very Online community of toxic dateless wonders who have been linked to a few horrific mass shootings – are a coherent, let alone pressing, terror threat, as the great and good periodically like to argue, is clearly nonsense.

This new review is as much about downplaying issues the government would rather not talk about, as it is highlighting issues it is more comfortable talking about.

Indeed, the establishment is constantly expanding the definitions of extremism and terrorism, all while ignoring where the lion’s share of it comes from. Which isn’t ‘extreme misogynists’, or the far right for that matter. It’s Islamism. You know it. I know it. But the political and media elites seem desperate to pretend otherwise.

Take a piece that was in the Guardian this morning. ‘Almost three in four Britons worried about far right after riots’, screams the headline. Which is true, according to the Ipsos poll the piece refers to anyway, and understandably so: we just experienced awful race riots, which were clearly egged on by, if not actually organised by, the pathetic dregs of the racist right.

Buried in paragraph seven, however, is the fact that even after the month we’ve had, the public remain more worried about ‘religious extremism’, if only by a percentage point. And I dare say it isn’t militant Buddhists who are keeping the nation up at night.

Not for the first time, the public is right where the Guardian is wrong. Islamism remains our most lethal terror threat by a country mile. Since 2005, 95 people have been murdered in Britain in Islamist attacks, while the far right has slain three. Islamism also accounts for three-quarters of MI5’s caseload.

You wouldn’t get that impression from reading the newspapers. Worse still, the liberal-elite tendency to underestimate the scale of Islamist radicalism while seeing the far right everywhere appears to have trickled down to the public servants at the coal face of tackling extremism before it curdles into terroristic violence.

William Shawcross’s 2023 independent review into Prevent – the programme charged with stopping people from being drawn into terrorism – concluded that the boundaries around what is considered to be Islamist extremism are ‘drawn too narrowly’, while those around right-wing extremism are ‘too broad’. So much so that it now includes airing ‘mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, right-wing-leaning commentary’.

Incredibly, according to recent figures, just 11 per cent of referrals to Prevent are now for Islamist extremism, while 18 per cent are drawn from the extreme right-wing. Incidentally, those deemed ‘vulnerable’, but with no discernible ideology, top the charts – a sign, Shawcross suspects, that Prevent is ‘carrying the weight for mental-health services’, with troubled kids who pose no real threat being referred so as to access support.

Whatever else your feelings about Prevent, the answer to our already dysfunctional, illiberal system is clearly not to flood it with graduates of Hustler’s University. Creating ever-more categories of extremism, or pretending that all forms of extremism pose an equal threat, is a recipe not only for authoritarianism, for criminalising more forms of thought and speech, but also for deadly failure – for allowing dangerous, murderous people to slip through the authorities’ fingers.

Given those chilling words, ‘the killer was known to the authorities’, have followed Islamist terror attack after Islamist terror attack in recent years, you would think Cooper would want her officials and officers focussing their efforts, rather than casting the ‘extremism’ net so widely that it catches everyone and stops nothing.

But it seems she and her ilk are still gripped by the absurd, borderline racist conviction that to talk too much about Islamist extremism risks alienating law-abiding, integrated British Muslims. Perhaps she’s just terrified of being seen to agree with Suella Braverman about something, a fate worse than death in north London.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who will also be pleasantly surprised if the government’s new focus on opposing ‘extreme misogyny’ happens to extend beyond the All Bar One variety spouted by Mr Tate. Indeed, Islamists calling for the stoning of women, or trans activists telling ‘TERFs’ to ‘suck my lady dick’, are often curiously absent from today’s conceptions of woman hatred.

On this issue, as on so many others, our rulers are as cowardly as they are authoritarian – constitutionally incapable of tackling the violent threats in our midst while showing rampant disregard for freedom of speech. All the reviews in the world aren’t going to change that.

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