Quilliam: Government understanding of extremism weak

Tuesday, 7 June 2011 12:00 AM

James Brandon, head of research and communications at Quilliam Foundation, highlights negative effect of disputes over Prevent strategy:

"There are good points and bad points to the Prevent strategy. Schools, universities, prisons and the internet are key areas where radicalisation needs to be tackled. Whilst some of the details on those are good I think at a big picture level it leaves something to be desired.

"The government are not very good at explaining how terrorism happens; they're very weak on their understanding of what extremism is and why that should be tackled. The definition of Islamism is very weak so a lot of these intellectual failures at a macro level are going to affect the success of the strategy.

"The shape of the final strategy shows that there were a lot of disputes during the writing process, which explains why it was six months late.

"All these disputes are reflected in the final report; disputes on whether the government should be tackling extremism and whether they should be tackling Islamism. The result of is a lot of muddled thinking in the final version and that is going to impact the effectiveness of the strategy when they put it into practice.

"The main issue wasn't actually between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives. Instead it was between elected politicians and the unelected civil service who had a completely different vision of what they wanted the strategy to do. This is where the tension has mainly come from.

"At the end of the day the strategy is just a piece of paper; what really matters is how it is put into practice, the challenge now is to tackle extremism and terrorism on the ground."

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