Memorandum from the Institute of Race Relations (PVE 10)

Summary

Our research has shown that there are strong concerns among community organisations that the Preventing Violent Extremism programme may be seen as:

· constructing the whole Muslim population as a 'suspect community';

· lacking transparency and local accountability;

· fostering social divisions;

· inducing corruption and tokenism;

· facilitating violations of privacy and undermining professional norms of confidentiality;

· degrading local democracy;

· potentially counter-productive in reducing the risk of violent extremism.

 

We recommend a radical rethink of the government's 'communities-led' approach to preventing violent extremism towards one that focuses on democratic engagement across communities.

 

Main text

1. The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) was established as an independent educational charity in 1958 to carry out research, publish and collect resources on race relations throughout the world. Today, the IRR is at the cutting edge of research and analysis on issues such as community cohesion, multiculturalism, the impact of anti-terrorist legislation on human rights, deaths in the custody of the police and prisons, racial violence and the human rights of those detained or removed under immigration laws. Its work covers Britain, Europe and race relations internationally.

2. Over the last six months, the IRR has been carrying out a research project on the government's Preventing Violent Extremism programme (hereafter 'Prevent'). The research project draws on existing policy and academic work, freedom of information requests, a programme of interviews and a roundtable discussion. During the course of the project, thirty-two interviews were conducted with Prevent programme managers in local authorities, members of local Prevent boards, local authority workers working on Prevent-funded projects, voluntary sector workers engaged in Prevent work and community workers familiar with local Prevent work. Half of these interviews were conducted face to face, with the rest done over the telephone. Respondents were guaranteed confidentiality in order to encourage a frank expression of views. The interviewees were spread across the following towns, cities and areas of England: Birmingham, Bradford, Brent, Enfield, Islington, Leicester, Newcastle, Oldham, Preston, Reading, Rochdale, Walsall, Wakefield, Wellingborough and Wycombe. In July, a roundtable discussion event with twenty-four participants was held in Bradford to explore in more detail some of the issues that had been raised in the interviews. This submission is informed by the material collected in the course of this research project. It focuses solely on the Prevent programme in England. The IRR will be publishing a major report based on its research on Prevent in October 2009.

3. The largest funding stream which the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has made available to carry out Prevent work is its area-based grants, totalling £45 million over three years. The IRR has correlated the allocation of Prevent funding through these grants with data from the 2001 Census. This shows that funding has been allocated to every local authority area with more than 2,000 Muslim residents. Moreover, the size of the grant is closely proportional to the numbers of Muslims in the area. This indicates that, rather than targeting Prevent funding on areas according to identifiable risks, it has simply been imposed in direct proportion to the numbers of Muslims in an area. Moreover, it implies that the allocation of Prevent funding has not been driven by a local decision-making process in which local agencies identify their own needs and access central government funds accordingly. This blanket approach to funding creates an impression that the Muslim population as a whole needs to be the focus of work to prevent violent extremism, rather than specific groups or localities, and irrespective of the views of local stakeholders.

4. In our research, a number of interviewees noted that, far from being 'communities-led', as the government claims, Prevent decision-making lacks transparency and accountability. It is likely to be driven by the demands of the police and central government rather than the views of local people. Decisions were seen as taking place 'behind closed doors' rather than in consultation with the voluntary and community sector. Despite the statutory 'duty to involve' local people in the setting of priorities for Local Area Agreements, many of our interviewees felt that NI35, the national indicator on 'building communities resilient to violent extremism', had been imposed on communities without a proper discussion or awareness of the issues involved. Rather than engaging local people democratically, many local authorities seem to take the view that decisions over Prevent are best made away from public scrutiny. Some local authorities were reluctant to share with us details of what their Prevent programme involved. A number of youth workers on Prevent-funded projects are reluctant to let the young people they work with know that their project is Prevent-funded.

5. Our research into what work local authorities are actually carrying out with Prevent funding suggests that, in its early stages, most of it has been 'targeted capacity building of Muslim communities', focusing particularly on young people, women and mosques. There is no doubt that the need for community development among Muslim populations is great. But serious problems arise when deprived communities with many needs are told that their voluntary sector organisations can only access the resources to meet these needs if they are willing to sign up to a counter-terrorism policing agenda. Moreover, if organisations are forced to accept Prevent money to survive, in spite of the concerns of the communities they work with, then there is a danger of alienating the very people that need to be won over and the whole exercise may become counter-productive.

6. Community cohesion has had a number of meanings since it was introduced as a policy programme following the riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the summer of 2001. The government rhetoric with which it was associated at birth indicated that it was a declaration of the end of multiculturalism and an assertion that Asians, Muslims in particular, would have to develop 'a greater acceptance of the principal national institutions' and assimilate to 'core British values'. At a local level, however, the language of community cohesion has occasionally been used for more progressive projects that united across communities to address shared issues of deprivation.

7. Prevent has undermined any progressive element within community cohesion and absorbed from the cohesion agenda those parts which are most problematic. Initially, Prevent funding allowed some projects to continue doing progressive cross-community work. But, more recently, Prevent, with its focus on a single group, has undermined this aspect of the cohesion agenda. Often the relationship between a local authority and its Muslim citizens is conducted through the very same structures of 'community gatekeepers' which the community cohesion agenda had identified as being problematic and divisive. The developmental needs of Muslim communities are, it appears, being trumped by the need for 'reliable' partners in relation to Prevent. While cross-community work in the name of cohesion has suffered, the ideas of 'shared values' and Britishness - a powerful strand within the cohesion agenda - have been strengthened by Prevent. This has been especially the case since the publication in March 2009 of the government's revised counter-terrorism strategy, Contest 2. This aspect of the community cohesion agenda, which is seen as a one-sided demand to assimilate to ill-defined values of Britishness, has alienated many Muslims.

8. Many of our interviewees asked why there was not a wider programme of preventing extremism across all communities. In our research, we have been unable to document any evidence of practical Prevent work at community level that is not directed at Muslims. In August 2009, updated guidance for local Prevent partners was published by the government which seemed to signal a recognition that 'violent far right groups' should also be taken seriously. It remains unclear what form this shift in emphasis will take in practice. In a bid to gain acceptance, some local authorities already present their Prevent programmes as working across communities to create 'cohesion'. One local authority, for example, has rebranded its Prevent programme as 'Building a stronger and united West London: working with Muslim communities'. Whatever the wording, so long as the projects funded are actually directed at Muslims, with other communities involved only insofar as it is necessary to support the core objective of a 'hearts and minds' campaign among Muslims, the fundamental problem of a discriminatory agenda will remain.

9. There is strong evidence that Prevent-funded services are being used for information gathering by the police and that the line between the Prevent strand and the investigative 'Pursue' strand of the government's Contest counter-terrorism strategy is being blurred in a way that is counter-productive. In practice, a major part of the Prevent programme is the embedding of counter-terrorism police officers within the delivery of other local services. The primary motive for this is to facilitate the gathering of intelligence on Muslim communities, to identify areas, groups and individuals that are 'at risk', as well as more general police engagement with the Muslim community to manage perceptions of grievances. The extent to which counter-terrorism police officers are now embedded in local government is illustrated by the fact that a West Midlands Police counter-terrorism officer has been permanently seconded to the equalities department of Birmingham City Council to manage its Prevent work.

10. Prevent-funded voluntary sector organisations and workers in local authorities are becoming increasingly wary of the expectations on them to act as providers of information to the police. Many of our interviewees were unclear as to who had access to the data they collected in their Prevent work. A youth project manager we spoke to said: 'If there are specific individuals at risk you would support them anyway out of a duty of care. But the local Prevent Board is asking for a more general map of Muslim communities. I make confidentiality promises to young people, which I shouldn't break unless it is a matter of child protection or a criminal act.' As a number of interviewees pointed out, the imposition of information sharing requirements on teachers and youth, community and cultural workers undercuts professional norms of confidentiality. Moreover, it will be impossible to generate the trust that the government sees as one of the aims of Prevent if there is any suspicion that local services have a hidden agenda.

11. A key aspect of Prevent is the cultivation of 'moderate Muslims' through 'targeted capacity building' and government backing. The aim is to elevate 'moderate Muslims' to becoming the strongest voices in Muslim communities, able to lead a campaign of promoting 'shared values' and isolating the 'extremists'. For Muslim organisations that are able to present themselves as 'moderate', significant financial and symbolic resources are being offered by central and local government. The danger is that the distinction between 'moderate' and 'extremist' is flexible enough to be exploited, either by government, to castigate anyone who is critical of its policies, or by voluntary sector organisations, to access resources. In the former case, government, by designating critics of Prevent as themselves 'extremists', ends up counter-productively creating 'extremists' where previously there were none. In the latter case, opportunities for corruption and tokenism become rife. We found many examples of both problems in our research.

12. An additional problem arises from the perception that the government is sponsoring Muslim organisations on the basis of theological criteria - for example, holding Sufis to be intrinsically more moderate than Salafis. Such an approach violates the secular separation of 'church' and state, even though such a separation is itself upheld by the government as a marker of 'moderation' which Muslims should aspire to. The use of government funding to promote a 'correct interpretation' of religious texts is fraught with dangers, irrespective of the theological merits of any such interpretation. As Asma Jahangir, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, pointed out in her 2008 report on the UK, 'it is not the Government's role to look for the "true voices of Islam" or of any other religion or belief. ... The contents of a religion or belief should be defined by the worshippers themselves.'

13. The government has failed to adequately consider analyses of radicalisation which downplay the role of religion. For example, the leading French scholar of Islamism, Olivier Roy, has argued that violent radicalisation has little to do with religious practice, while radical theology does not of itself lead to violence. It is more productive, he says, to understand al Qaida in Europe as a modern youth movement that radicalises through a narrative of heroic violence and anti-imperialist politics rather than a religious ideology. On this view, it is irrelevant to counter radicalisation by providing an ideological or theological alternative. To promote a 'moderate' Islam against al Qaida's 'bad Islam' would be counter-productive as it elevates al Qaida's narrative to a religious phenomenon.

14. The Prevent agenda is tightly integrated with a policing agenda and so the allocation of the DCLG area-based grants to every area with more than 2,000 Muslims amounts to a form of religious profiling that is inconsistent with commitments to racial and religious equality. In focusing on all areas with more than 2,000 Muslims, because it wants to mobilise all these persons against 'extremism', the government is constructing the Muslim population as a 'suspect community'. The failure of Muslim individuals or organisations to comply with this mobilisation makes them suspicious in the eyes of the counter-terrorist system. In fact, Muslims may want to avoid participating in the government's Prevent programme for a number of reasons which have nothing to do with support for extremism - for example, concerns about surveillance, transparency, accountability or local democracy.

15. The atmosphere promoted by Prevent is one in which to make radical criticisms of the government is to risk losing funding and facing isolation as an 'extremist', while those organisations which echo back the government's own political line are rewarded with large sums of public money. A number of our interviewees argued that the problem with this state of affairs is that it undermines exactly the kind of radical discussions of political issues that would need to occur if young people are to be won over and support for illegitimate political violence diminished. The current emphasis of Prevent on depoliticising young people and restricting radical dissent is actually counter-productive because it strengthens the hands of the extremists who say democracy is pointless. What needs to happen is that young people feel that there are democratic spaces where radical criticisms can be productively made.

Recommendations

16. 'Extremism' is a vague concept that is easily exploited to demonise anyone whose opinions are radically different. The real issue is support for, or use of, illegitimate violence to achieve political ends. As a first step, there needs to be a recognition that this is a problem across all communities that takes many forms, including white racist violence.

17. Teachers, social, youth and cultural workers must have the integrity of their professional norms protected against the expectation that they become the ears and eyes of the counter-terrorist police. It is wholly counter-productive to turn public services into instruments of surveillance. Such an approach only serves to alienate young people from institutional settings that would otherwise be well-placed to give them a sense of trust and belonging.

18. The specific needs of different communities for local services and community development should be recognised as valid in their own right and met on their own terms. Muslim citizens should not be forced into accepting a discriminatory and divisive counter-terrorist programme as a condition for enjoying their rights to access basic services.

19. The government should refrain from any attempt to promote one particular interpretation of Islam. The interpretation of Islam is a matter for Muslims themselves and government should not promote particular sectarian or theological interests over any other through 'targeted capacity building'.

20. The focus of Prevent work on all areas with over 2,000 Muslims is discriminatory and counter-productive. Instead central government funding should be available to any local area which, through a genuine process of local decision-making, independently identifies a need to win individuals away from support for illegitimate political violence.

21. Al Qaida-type violence should not be arbitrarily separated from other problems of violence among young people. Solutions to the problem of youth violence/extremism will be most effective and fair if they meet the following conditions:

a. Young people need to be empowered to engage politically and contribute to society, not made to feel that their opinions have to meet with official approval. The creation of spaces for genuinely open discussion about difficult political issues is crucial.

b. The impact of racism, Islamophobia, social exclusion and everyday violence on the well-being of young people needs to be recognised. The terrors that young people experience in their everyday lives involve bullying, taunting, victimisation and harassment from peers at school, local gangs, police, community support workers, the media and, in some cases, members of their own families. The threat of 'international terrorism' is real. But to reduce terror and extremism to al Qaida alone, and to skew the whole status of Muslims in Britain into responding to it, is likely to be seen as an unwarranted and arbitrary choice of central government, rather than something that is democratically rooted, let alone 'community-led'.

c. The minutes of all decision-making meetings in the local authority, local strategic partnership or Prevent Board should be published along with exact details of what has been funded, which organisations are carrying out the work, what funds they have been allocated and how it will be evaluated.

22. The credibility of empowerment work with young people can only be ensured if there is a separation of activities of this kind from the police, including obligations to share information beyond the basic requirements of child protection and prevention of specific criminal acts.

September 2009