Yvette Cooper says Islamist referrals to Prevent are 'too low'. But critics disagree

British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has been widely criticised by rights groups after claiming that referrals for Islamist extremism to the controversial Prevent programme have been "too low".
Data suggests that Muslims are more likely than others to be wrongly reported and questioned under the government's counter-extremism strategy.
Cooper made the remarks in parliament on Tuesday after it was revealed that Alex Rudakubana, a teenager convicted of the high-profile killings of three young girls in a knife attack in Southport last year, was referred to Prevent three times as a schoolboy.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer had singled out Prevent for criticism on Tuesday morning, saying that the failure of state institutions to prevent the Southport attack "leaps off the page", and promising a review of the "entire counter-extremist system".
Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time of the attack, had first been referred to Prevent in 2019 when he was 13 after he used school computers to search for material related to school massacres in the US.
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But he was deemed not to be motivated by a terrorist ideology or to pose a terrorist threat.
He was referred to Prevent again on two further occasions in 2021. After one referral it was recommended that he receive support from mental health, special educational needs and other services.
Cooper told parliament that she had ordered her department to review the thresholds for Prevent referrals, and said that referrals for Islamist extremism have previously been "too low".
Middle East Eye has asked the Home Office for clarification on whether Cooper was speaking about referrals to the first stage of Prevent, or to Channel, the de-radicalisation programme offered to people assessed by Prevent to be vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism.
Jacob Smith of campaign group Rights and Security International criticised Cooper's statement, warning that "any lowering of the threshold for Islamist referrals will only exacerbate the existing discrimination Muslim communities have faced.
"Over the past decade, we have seen news reports of Prevent failing to stop violent acts," he added.
"The strategy ultimately does not stand up to scrutiny. Yet the government's solution appears to be expansion, not overhaul."
Muslims disproportionately targeted
Cooper's remarks echo the findings of a contentious review of Prevent carried out under the former Conservative government by William Shawcross. His review, published in 2023, was boycotted and then widely rejected by critics of the programme.
Shawcross criticised Prevent for putting too much emphasis on the far right - and called on the government to focus more on so-called Islamist extremism, suggesting that the threat was being downplayed for fear of causing offence.
This approach was adopted by Robin Simcox, who the previous government appointed to lead the Commission for Countering Extremism, a nominally independent body tasked with oversight of Prevent.
But the idea that Islamist extremism has been insufficiently targeted has been widely criticised by human rights groups.
In August 2024, a United Nations report strongly criticised Prevent and said it was "particularly concerned about the high number of interventions and referrals of persons belonging to Muslim communities, especially children".
A major study on Prevent in 2022, The People's Review of Prevent, highlighted that the programme relies on profiling to focus its efforts.
More than 70 percent of Muslims in England and Wales live in “Prevent Priority Areas”, compared with around 30 percent of the general population.
The most recent available data on Prevent referrals also challenge the home secretary's remarks.
In 2023-24, seven percent of people referred to Prevent ended up on the government's de-radicalisation programme, Channel.
While 19 percent of Prevent referrals related to right-wing extremism and 13 percent related to Islamist extremism, right-wing cases were significantly more likely to proceed to Channel - 45 percent, in contrast to only 23 percent for Islamist cases.
This indicates that a majority of Muslim referrals were judged to have been wrongly caught up in the programme, whereas nearly half of referrals in far-right cases were adopted onto Channel.
A 2023 study by Rights and Security International, based on data from 2015-2019, further found that "people recorded as Asian and cases recorded as ‘Islamist related’ were subject to comparatively greater scrutiny than other ethnic groups and types of concern".
Cases involving "right-wing extremism" were more likely to be "directed away from the Prevent and Channel process at the initial stage", either facing no further action or being referred to another service.
By contrast, Asians "faced tougher sanctions" - they were less likely to be directed away from Channel, despite being less likely to be ultimately adopted as a Channel case.
Against the evidence
Dr Layla Aitlhadj, director of Prevent Watch, told MEE that Cooper's assertion that "referrals for 'Islamist extremism' are too low" stands in opposition to "all the evidence" available.
"By pushing this narrative, political leaders appear to be using tragedies as a platform to amplify divisive rhetoric, rather than addressing the real and multifaceted failures that allow for such attacks to happen."
The government announced the appointment of Lord David Anderson to the new role of independent Prevent commissioner on Tuesday.
Anderson, a former independent reviewer of terror legislation, has previously called for "clarity and restraint" in Prevent's application, and his appointment appears to sideline Robin Simcox's role as commissioner for countering extremism.
Cooper said Anderson's first task will be conduct a thorough review of Rudakubana's case to establish what changes were needed to make sure that serious cases involving "mixed or unclear ideology" were not missed.
She revealed that a government review last year which examined Rudakubana's referrals to Prevent concluded that he should have been placed on the Channel de-radicalisation programme.
The home secretary appears to have adopted many components of the approach championed by Simcox, and recommended in Shawcross's 2023 review.
She said that the government had implemented 33 out of 34 recommendations made by Shawcross.
But she added that Shawcross's conclusion that the scope of Prevent should be narrowed to focus on cases of terrorism rather than non-violent extremism more broadly would "risk including fewer cases like this one, where ideology is less clear".
Ilyas Nagdee, Amnesty International UK’s racial justice director, said: "The Prevent strategy is now over twenty years old, and in that time, it has been strongly criticised in multiple reports and inquiries from civil society organisations, parliamentary committees and several UN Special Rapporteurs with concerns spanning children’s rights, data and privacy concerns, and of course racist discrimination.
"Successive governments have claimed that the only way for Prevent to work is to broaden its scope and those responsible for its delivery, but it is clearer than ever that this approach has not worked."
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