HOPE not hate's disinformation on far right referrals

Its undercover reporter quoted Prevent - which doesn't even fulfil its namesake

Kudos to anyone who managed to sit through the HOPE not hate documentary on Monday night; you’re made of stronger stuff than me.

I couldn’t escape the commentary on Twitter, though, nor spotting Harry Shukman, a freelance reporter who went undercover among the Far Right for HOPE not hate, being interviewed on LBC. He offered what might best be deemed “disinformation” (to borrow a left-wing term) on the Far Right threat.

I don’t doubt that Shukman, who’s Jewish, would have had horrible and alarming experiences going undercover with Far Right individuals, as he recounted on LBC. To be clear, I’ve never said there isn’t a Far Right, or that they aren’t worthy of the strongest condemnation.

My position has always been that the UK’s Far Right is statistically tiny while the Far Left - whose identity politics mirrors tactics of the Far Right - is large, growing and dangerous. One of its chief tactics is lowering the threshold for what constitutes being “Far Right” - so as to cast a wider net of people to censor and clamp down on - to further its own ideological aims.

Shukman used a misleading statistic in his LBC interview, which, repeated enough, helps to exaggerate the size of the Far Right. He told LBC’s James O’Brien that the Far Right make up “the majority of referrals to the Prevent counter radicalisation programme”, as though this is one and the same with it actually being the largest threat.

The reality is that referrals reflect who the public thinks is dangerous, and that’s one constantly told that “the Far Right are on the march”, while getting signals that discussing Islamist extremism might make them “Islamophobic”. In psychological experiments, there is such a thing as “demand characteristics”, where a participant senses what a researcher wants to hear and gives them the “right” answer. I wonder if that could be true with referrals, where, say, teachers feel that the authorities would be happier with them reporting the boy who watched “Andrew Tate” versus one whose religious zealotry appears to be ramping up.

In 2021 the Home Office commissioned Sir William Shawcross to review Prevent, the report being released last year and coming to very different conclusions to Shukman (even though HOPE not hate has also been commissioned by the Home Office - so you’d think they’d be fairly aligned in their assessment of terror threats).

Shawcross warned that the “the Islamist threat is severely under-represented in Prevent referrals”, creating “an increasing disparity between the types of referrals and the UK’s current threat picture.” Moreover, Islamist terrorism is growing as a threat while we are encouraged to pay more attention to the Extreme Right.

In parts of the report Shawcross even schools Prevent (supposedly the experts when it comes to extremism) on Islamist narratives:

It’s clear that Shawcross was none too impressed with Prevent, and no wonder given its abysmal record of preventing.

The man pictured below was referred to its services four times - and never taken on - before he executed three men in Reading in 2020. Sir David Amess, the MP, was murdered in 2021 by a man who’d been in contact with Prevent. It’s clearly not fit for purpose - and cannot be relied on for snapshots of the UK extremism threat.

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Where HOPE not hate might find a Far Right insurgence…

Last week I watched a Netflix documentary titled The Man with 1000 Kids.

It’s thought-provoking and shocking, explaining how a Dutch man called Jonathan Meijer ended up donating his sperm all over the world.

During the course of the documentary, it becomes clear that Meijer and other super-donors are prolific for reasons other than altruism. They rather like distributing their genes as much as possible.

I won’t ruin it for you, but HOPE not hate reporters might find food for thought there…

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