The government has no plans to expand the definition of extremism, a Home Office minister has said after a leaked review suggested the UK should focus on concerning behaviours and activity rather than ideologies.
Dan Jarvis told the Commons: “This work did not recommend an expansion in the definition of extremism, and they are not, and have never been, any plans to do so.
“To be clear, the leaked documents were not current or new government policy.”
He added that “many documents are produced” across government as part of work that is not implemented and “which do not constitute government policy”.
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The document was part of a rapid review on extremism commissioned by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in August and was revealed after it was leaked to the Policy Exchange thinktank.
It suggested the UK should be focusing on behaviours and activities such as spreading conspiracy theories, misogyny, influencing racism and involvement in “an online subculture called the manosphere”.
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Earlier on, Sir Keir Starmer said his government is “looking carefully where the key challenges” on extremism are, adding it is “very important” to focus on threats “so we can deploy our resource properly”.
“Obviously, that’s now informed with what I said last week in the aftermath of the Southport murders, where we’ve got the additional challenge, I think, of a cohort of loners who are extreme and they need to be factored in,” he said.
“So that’s the focus. In the end, what this comes down to is the safety and security of people across the United Kingdom, that’s my number one focus.”
The Home Office said Islamism and extreme right-wing ideologies are the “most prominent” issues they are tackling today.
In August, Ms Cooper said the Home Office was conducting a “rapid analytical spring on extremism” to map and monitor trends and inform the government’s approach to extremism.
Last week, Sir Keir Starmer said he would change the law if needed to recognise the new threat posed by extremists without specific ideologies ahead of the jailing of Axel Rudakubana for the stabbing to death of three young girls in Southport last summer.
The 18-year-old had been referred to the anti-terror Prevent programme three times but was not deemed as an extremist under the scheme’s criteria. And, although he pleaded guilty to murder, police were unable to identify Rudakubana’s motive, so his crimes fell outside the definition of terrorism.
Recommendations could be breach of freedom of speech
The leaked review, obtained by the Policy Exchange thinktank, recommends reversing the guidance, introduced by then Home Secretary Suella Braverman, for police to reduce dealing with non-hate crime incidents.
It says a new crime, making “harmful communications” online illegal, should be introduced instead. The Conservative government rejected this on freedom of speech grounds.
Policy Exchange’s Paul Stott and Andrew Gilligan said recommendations to class claims of two-tier policing as a “right-wing extremist narrative” will also raise concerns over freedom of speech.
Dangerous individuals could be missed
They said including “behaviours” such as violence against women and girls, spreading misinformation and an interest in gore or extreme violence in the definition of extremism could “swamp already stretched counter-extremism staff and counter-terror police with thousands of new cases”.
This could increase the risk “that genuinely dangerous individuals are missed – it risks addressing symptoms, not causes”, Policy Exchange said.
The review itself admits many who display such behaviours are not extremists.
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Review ‘downplays Islamism’
Following Rudakubana’s guilty plea last week, Sir Keir said the UK “faces a new threat” and the teenager represented a new kind of threat with “acts of extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom, accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety”.
He said he would change the law, if needed, “to recognise this new and dangerous threat” and said a review of “our entire counter-extremism system” would take place “to make sure we have what we need to defeat it”.
The review also “de-centres and downplays Islamism, by far the greatest threat to national security”, Policy Exchange said.
It said environmental extremism and Hindu extremism should be tackled, as well as “left-wing, anarchist and single issue extremism”.
And Policy Exchange said it has “ignored, even repudiated” recommendations by previous Prevent reviewer William Shawcross that the programme is the wrong place for dealing with the psychologically unstable.
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Government focused on Islamism and right-wing ideologies
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The counter-extremism sprint sought to comprehensively assess the challenge facing our country and lay the foundations for a new approach to tackling extremism – so we can stop people being drawn towards hateful ideologies.
“This includes tackling Islamism and extreme right-wing ideologies, which are the most prominent today.
“The findings from the sprint have not been formally agreed by ministers and we are considering a wide range of potential next steps arising from that work.”
Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp said: “By extending the definition of extremism so widely, the government risks losing focus on ideologically motivated terrorists who pose the most risk to life.
“In fact, the Shawcross Review of Prevent made clear that counter-extremism and the counterterrorism strategy should be more focused on terrorist ideology, not less.
“Prevent must be equipped to deal with the terrorist threats in our society, and we should not be dialling back efforts to confront this.
“What the government seems to be planning is a backwards step in the interests of the political correctness we know Keir Starmer loves.
“Starmer wants the thought police to stop anyone telling uncomfortable truths that he and his left-wing lawyer friends don’t like.”
