An overhaul of the government’s key counter-radicalism programme was put back until after the election amid rows over cash.
Amber Rudd, the home secretary, faced resistance from the Ministry of Defence and some in the security and intelligence services over moves to divert more resources to Prevent. The MoD was said to have complained that other elements of the counterterrorism strategy would miss out.
Senior officials said that Ms Rudd had prevailed but that extra cash would come with greater pressure on people to co-operate with the programme, which is designed to keep mainly young people safe from the terrorist groomers.
The £40 million programme was first postponed after the Westminster terrorism attack on March 22 and has now been put off until after the election.
In her statement yesterday Theresa May said there had been too much tolerance of extremism. “Enough is enough . . . We need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out across the public sector and across society,” she said. “That will require some difficult, and often embarrassing, conversations.”
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Sajid Javid, the communities secretary, expands on that theme today, writing in The Times that there is a “special, unique burden on the Muslim community” to set young people on the “path to peace rather than the road to war”.
Mr Javid, 47, who acknowledges an Islamic heritage but is not practising, adds: “As British Muslims, we rightly condemn terror attacks. But we must go further. It is not enough to condemn. Muslims must challenge too. This will take courage.
“All communities must feel confident in calling out extremism where they see it. It may be uncomfortable, people may feel embarrassed about making judgments but we can no longer shy away from those difficult conversations.”
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, has said that the Prevent programme had been seen to “target the Muslim community”. Baroness Warsi, the former Tory party chairwoman, has said that it was “broken” and should be paused.
However, Dame Louise Casey, the former integration tsar, told the government to be more robust in taking on “false perceptions” about the programme and to do more to promote its successes.
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In her report, to which the government has yet to respond officially, she raises the case of a boy who was falsely claimed to have been referred to Prevent in July last year because through a misspelling of “terraced” he had written that he lived in a “terrorist house”.
In fact, Dame Louise said, the boy had been referred to social services, not Prevent, because he had also written: “I hate it when my uncle hits me.”
Nazir Afzal, the former chief executive of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, who criticised the “industry” attacking Prevent in an interview with The Times on Saturday, stepped up his attack on prominent figures in Muslim communities who, he said, were in their roles “for all sorts of wrong reasons”.
Mr Afzal, who as chief crown prosecutor for the northwest was instrumental in bringing the Rochdale sex-grooming gang to justice, told the BBC that he had spent 25 years meeting “so-called community leaders who represent no one but themselves”.
The majority of British Muslims were female, under 25 and from low-income backgrounds, Mr Afzal said, yet most community leaders were middle-class men over 50. He asked why minority communities were thought to have community leaders when white communities did not.
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New laws to tackle hate speech and a commission for countering extremism are promised in the Tory manifesto. The commission will “identify examples of extremism and expose them, to support the public sector and civil society, and help the government to identify policies to defeat extremism and promote pluralistic values”, it says.
“To defeat extremism, we need to learn from how civil society and the state took on racism in the 20th century. We will consider what new criminal offences might need to be created, and what new aggravated offences might need to be established, to defeat the extremists.”