The government’s “Prevent” programme to turn young Muslims away from Islamic extremism has failed so badly that it has become a toxic brand, a former senior Muslim police officer has warned.
Dal Babu, a chief superintendent with the Metropolitan police before he retired in 2013, told the BBC that most Muslims were suspicious of the anti-radicalisation scheme and saw it as a tool for spying on them.
Police counter-terrorism units were staffed mainly by white, non-Muslim officers who were often ill equipped to implement the strategy, Mr Babu said. He had spoken to one officer who was ignorant of basic Muslim principles like the distinction between Sunni and Shia.
“This lack of knowledge is amplified considerably with the more junior officers who perform the role of implementing the Prevent strategy,” Mr Babu told the BBC.
“Sadly, Prevent has become a toxic brand and most Muslims are suspicious of what Prevent is doing…
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“Many Muslims see Prevent as spying, and those Muslim organisations who have taken Prevent funding have a considerable credibility gap within the Muslim community.”
As a result, the authorities continued to be caught unaware by cases like those of the three schoolgirls from east London who went to Syria a fortnight ago, he added.
“We may need to look at identifying appropriate language to safeguard our children and avoid using a strategy which many Muslims see as being discredited,” said Mr Babu, who helped to found the National Association of Muslim Police.
Aminul Hoque, a lecturer and author on British Islamic identity at the University of London, agreed: “As a strategy, as a government policy document, it has not worked. The irony is that it has become counter-productive.
“If the idea was to understand the roots of extremism, the roots of radicalisation, by putting a magnifying glass across the Muslim communities of Great Britain, what has happened is that has widened the schism between the ‘Muslim’ us and the British ‘other’.”
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The £40m Prevent programme is one of the four strands of Contest, the acronym given to the government’s counter-terrorism strategy. The other strands are Pursue, Prepare and Protect.
Prevent’s aim is prevent Britons becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. It is the government’s main method of slowing the flow of impressionable young Britons travelling to Syria to join the 3,000 Europeans fighting alongside Islamic State (Isis).
There are Prevent initiatives across public life, in local government, health, education, prisons, immigration and charities.
Sir Peter Fahy, chief constable of Greater Manchester, today defended the Prevent scheme, though he admitted he had not always got everything right.
“The primary responsibility for stopping young people going to Syria and being attracted to [radical Islamism] and thinking about it is that of the parents, and perhaps we have made a mistake in creating the impression that it is the job of the police,” said Sir Peter.
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He thought the Muslim community had failed to understand the urgency of the need to denounce radical idealogues whose arguments about injustice and victimhood groomed young people to join terror groups.
“I think there has been a recognition that Muslim leaders have allowed too many extremists to take the ground,” said Sir Peter.
He pointed to continuing high levels of confidence in the police among the Muslim community as evidence that they had not been alienated by Prevent.
Sir Peter said that it was difficult to assess the success of a programme whose job was prevention, but said: “We have had a lower incidence of travel to Syria than other neighbouring countries.”
Last year it was revealed that UK counter-terror officers had received 77 reports from families through the programme, some of which enabled police to catch aspiring terrorists.
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The Home Office also defended Prevent, saying that 130,000 people had been trained to help to identify and prevent extremism.
This morning it emerged that pperhaps the youngest western fighter recruited by Islamic State, a 13-year-old Strasbourg schoolboy known by the nom-de-guerre Abu Bakr al-Faransi who travelled to Syria with his entire family, was killed in combat several weeks ago.