Public Safety

Referrals to the government’s terrorism prevention programme hit a record high last year – with concerns about extreme right-wing ideology accounting for a fifth of Prevent cases. Latest data showed a huge 39% jump in overall referrals to Prevent, with concerns raised about nearly 10,000 people in the 12 months to September 2025. This was up from 7,279 a year earlier. And alarmingly more than a third related to children aged between 11 and 15. Home Office figures showed 20% of all referrals were in relation to ‘extreme right-wing’ ideologies – more than double those linked to alleged Islamic extremism. The data shows 56% of cases had no fixed ideology attached, while more than 400 were flagged because of a ‘fascination with extreme violence or mass casualty attacks’. Read more on The Mirror.  Related… Press Statement: Home Office Prevent statistics show that a record year is a record failure

The Home Office has set up a cross-government taskforce to look at existing multi-agency and safeguarding arrangements, and how they interact with Prevent in the wake of 2024’s Southport killings and the murder of MP David Amess. Details of the taskforce emerged this week in the department’s formal response to peer David Anderson’s Lessons for Prevent report, which was submitted to ministers in July last year. Among his recommendations to government last year, Prevent reviewer Lord Anderson said a Cabinet Office task force should be established to lead exploratory work into the possibility of formally connecting the programme to a broader safeguarding and violence-prevention system. Anderson said the work “cannot be done by any single line department” and that the taskforce should be “answerable to a senior Cabinet Office minister and the cabinet secretary. In her formal response to the report, which was published yesterday, home secretary Shabana Mahmood says […]

The UK’s counter-terrorism scheme Prevent has been blighted by well-publicised failures and accusations of prejudice. Is it fit for purpose? Developed after 9/11 and during the Iraq War, Prevent is the first of four pillars of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy for England, Scotland and Wales (together, they make up the “four Ps”: Prevent, Pursue, Protect, Prepare). It has three main objectives: tackling the ideological causes of terrorism, intervening early to stop people becoming radicalised, and enabling those who have engaged with terrorism to “disengage and rehabilitate”. Prevent is, in theory, not about getting people “into trouble”, but about helping those “susceptible to radicalisation” with early intervention. Even so, the programme has faced repeated criticisms, from a range of perspectives: both that it stigmatises Muslims, and is too soft on them; that it chills free speech; and that, ultimately, it fails to prevent terrorism. Read more on The Week.  Related… The […]

Fulford’s report on the Southport killings – more than 750 pages long – found that the killer, referred to as AR, “could and should” have been stopped if his parents and various state agencies had acted sooner. It transpired during the inquiry that AR was referred to Prevent, the government’s counter-extremism programme, three times – beginning in October 2019 – with no further action taken. Fulford’s core finding was that no state agency took responsibility for managing AR and his needs. In response to a request for comment, the Home Office pointed us to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s response to the report on Monday. She said: “There was a failure by the agencies involved to take responsibility and nobody was clear who was in charge. “So the failure, because it belonged to everyone, belonged to no one.” But is this really true? In this piece, we examine Fulford’s report. We argue […]

Shabana Mahmood revealed that she wanted a state surveillance system where “the eyes of the state can be on you at all times” while invoking an enduringly controversial proposal by the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In comments reported on Monday by The Telegraph, Mahmood said she wanted to use artificial intelligence for surveillance, as she proposed “Minority Report-style” policing. Bentham’s most famous idea was for prisons to be based on the “Panopticon”, which meant that guards would be able to monitor all inmates constantly. This would be achieved by creating circular prisons with a central watchtower from which prisoners would be observed without the guard being visible. Read more on The National Related… Like Prevent, pre-crime policies used in the past created the notion of ‘thought crime’ – and didn’t work