Last year marked 20 years since 9/11, making it an appropriate time to review and reflect on Britain’s counter-terrorism policy. The beginning of the 21st century saw the issue of terrorism and Islamic extremism become increasingly salient. Britain’s counter-terrorism officials claim that most of the country’s terror threats come from British-born extremists. The government has therefore introduced counter-extremism strategies, which seek to: stop terrorist attacks; stop radicalisation; strengthen protection for potential targets of terrorism, and ensure that there is a plan of action if an attack does occur.
The most well-known of these is The Prevent program, which aims to achieve the second of these objectives. Prevent requires that individuals perform their “civic duty” reporting individuals suspected of extremism to the local police. A Prevent committee subsequently decides whether the person should be referred to the programme, but participation is voluntary. Despite some successes, several reports highlight that Prevent has been ineffective.
Prevent is often rendered ineffectual because institutions are reluctant to intervene, and some student groups actively dispute counter-extremism measures. For instance, the National Union of Students has pledged to oppose counter-radicalisation work. The actions of these groups should be given greater attention by counter-terror policy makers and enforcers.
Sadly, there is more to the issue of extremism on British campuses. Over 30% of individuals involved in Islamist terrorism in Britain went to university in the UK, and there is strong evidence that some of them were radicalised during their studies. According to security sources, Kafeel Ahmed, the 2007 Glasgow airport suicide attacker, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, mastermind of the 2002 murder of Daniel Pearl and Omar Sharif, the 2003 Tel Aviv suicide attacker, were radicalised at university.
Students are therefore being exposed to an intolerant and sometimes violent interpretation of Islam. Extremist speakers are being welcomed on campuses and presented as mainstream representatives of Islam. For instance, speakers at UCL have included Abu Usama adh Dhahabee, an advocate for armed jihad who believes that apostasy and homosexuality are punishable by death, Abdur Raheem Green, who has defended domestic violence and Haitham al-Haddad, an open Hamas supporter.
Concerningly, there is evidence of discriminatory practices by some university Islamic Societies (ISOCs), such as mandatory gender segregation and sexist behaviour. Yet, these same student groups often label counter-extremism measures as “racist”, an accusation lacking hard evidence.
The underperformance of Prevent, in educational institutions, is exemplified by the infamous case of the Bethnal Green schoolgirls who were not identified as vulnerable to radicalisation. On top of this, when one of the girls was killed by an airstrike in 2016, the Labour MP Rushanara Ali called for a “full review of Prevent”, expressing concerns, not over the failure to halt radicalisation but the risk of stigmatisation of young Muslims. The risk of stigmatisation is a very real one, but is must not detract from the need to identify those responsible for, and vulnerable to radicalisation.
Douglas Murray argues the question of responsibility for radicalisation of young people is often ignored, partially due to the policies pursued by British governments since the 1970s – chiefly a lack of focus on integration. A lack of government focus in this area has led to fragmentation in our society through the creation of “parallel communities” that rarely interact with each other. This reinforces ‘a narrative of difference’ whereby minorities become solely defined by their ethnicity and religion and become viewed as homogenous units by the wider British population. In this context, some young British Muslims are recruited by radical Islamic groups where they seek to find a sense of identity and belonging.
Extremist figures often gain legitimacy through their ties to local organisations even becoming self-appointed community leaders, who often to not genuinely represent the voice of their community. Despite this, local authorities often communicate with minority communities via these gateway individuals, increasing the risk that authorities gain a distorted view of these communities which impedes efforts to promote and enforce counter-extremism measures.
The dangers of the closed nature of some communities and allowing “cultural sensitivity” fears to dominate is shown through the lack of investigation into cases of human rights abuse like female genital mutilation (FGM). Whilst FGM was criminalised in the UK in 1985, there were no convictions of FGM until 2017, although cases of FGM had been known. More shocking was the 2014 Rotherham Child Sexual Exploitation scandal where more than 1400 girls had been abused, threatened and raped between 1997 and 2013. Some council and police officials had known about it but felt nervous about highlighting the offenders’ ethnicity in fear of being labelled racist. Given this and the fact that such fringe practices still take place in 21st century Britain illustrates the failure of the government’s counter-extremism policies.
In short, Prevent has been unsuccessful in combating extremism. In higher education, student groups and universities have opposed counter-extremism initiatives, whilst the government has not been robust enough in their enforcement. This has permitted speakers with radical affiliations platforms on campuses and undermined Prevents’ efforts. The emergence of parallel communities has also allowed extremist cultural practices to be carried out. Without reform counter-extremism policies are likely to remain hard to enforce. The government should focus on promoting integration of minority communities, so that such groups can develop a sense of belonging that is not detached from wider British society.
Marina Barats is a Policy Fellow of The Pinsker Centre, a campus-based think tank which facilitates discussion on global affairs and free speech. The views in this article are the author’s own.
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Technology Is Synonymous With Civilisation
I am declaring a fatwa on anti-tech and anti-civilisational attitudes. In truth, there is no real distinction between the two positions: technology is synonymous with civilisation.
What made the Romans an empire and the Gauls a disorganised mass of tribals, united only by their reactionary fear of the march of civilisation at their doorstep, was technology. Where the Romans had minted currency, aqueducts, and concrete so effective we marvel on how to recreate it, the Gauls fought amongst one another about land they never developed beyond basic tribal living. They stayed small, separated, and never innovated, even with a whole world of innovation at their doorstep to copy.
There is always a temptation to look towards smaller-scale living, see its virtues, and argue that we can recreate the smaller-scale living within the larger scale societies we inhabit. This is as naïve as believing that one could retain all the heartfelt personalisation of a hand-written letter, and have it delivered as fast as a text message. The scale is the advantage. The speed is the advantage. The efficiency of new modes of organisation is the advantage.
Smaller scale living in the era of technology necessarily must go the way of the hand-written letter in the era of text messaging: something reserved for special occasions, and made all the more meaningful for it.
However, no-one would take seriously someone who tries to argue that written correspondence is a valid alternative to digital communication. Equally, there is no reason to take seriously someone who considers smaller-scale settlements a viable alternative to big cities.
Inevitably, there will be those who mistake this as going along with the modern trend of GDP maximalism, but the situation in modern Britain could not be closer to the opposite. There is only one place generating wealth currently: the South-East. Everywhere else in the country is a net negative to Britain’s economic prosperity. Devolution, levelling up, and ‘empowering local communities’ has been akin to Rome handing power over to the tribals to decide how to run the Republic: it has empowered tribal thinking over civilisational thinking.
The consequence of this has not been to return to smaller-scale ways of life, but instead to rest on the laurels of Britain’s last civilisational thinkers: the Victorians.
Go and visit Hammersmith, and see the bridge built by Joseph Bazalgette. It has been boarded up for four years, and the local council spends its time bickering with the central government over whose responsibility it is to fix the bridge for cars to cross it. This is, of course, not a pressing issue in London’s affairs, as the Vercingetorix of the tribals, Sadiq Khan, is hard at work making sure cars can’t go anywhere in London, let alone across a bridge.
Bazalgette, in contrast to Khan, is one of the few people keeping London running today. Alongside Hammersmith Bridge, Bazalgette designed the sewage system of London. Much of the brickward is marked with his initials, and he produced thousands of papers going over each junction, and pipe.
Bazalgette reportedly doubled the pipes diameters remarking “we are only going to do this once, and there is always the possibility of the unforeseen”. This decision prevented the sewers from overflowing in 1960.
Bazalgette’s genius saved countless lives from cholera, disease, and the general third-world condition of living among open excrement. There is no hope today of a Bazalgette. His plans to change the very structure of the Thames would be Illegal and Unworkable to those with power, and the headlines proposing such a feat (that ancient civilisations achieved) would be met with one million image macros declaring it a “manmade horror beyond their comprehension.”
This fundamentally is the issue: growth, positive development, and a future worth living in is simply outside the scope of their narrow comprehension.
This train of thought, having gone unopposed for too long, has even found its way into the minds of people who typically have thorough, coherent, and well-thought-out views. In speaking to one friend, they referred to the current ruling classes of this country as “tech-obsessed”.
Where is the tech-obsession in this country? Is it found in the current government buying 3000 GPUs for AI, which is less than some hedge funds have to calculate their potential stocks? Or is it found in the opposition, who believe we don’t need people learning to code because “AI will do it”?
The whole political establishment is anti-tech, whether crushing independent forums and communities via the Online Harms Bill, to our supposed commitment to be a ‘world leader in AI regulation’ – effectively declaring ourselves to be the worlds schoolmarm, nagging away as the US, China, and the rest of the world get to play with the good toys.
Cummings relays multiple horror stories about the tech in No. 10. Listening to COVID figures down the phone, getting more figures on scraps of paper, using the calculator on his iPhone and writing them on a Whiteboard. Fretting over provincial procurement rules over a paltry 500k to get real-time data on a developing pandemic. He may well have been the only person in recent years serious about technology.
The Brexit campaign was won by bringing in scientists, physicists, and mathematicians, and leveraging their numeracy (listen to this to get an idea of what went on) with the latest technology to campaign to people in a way that had not been done before. Technology, science, and innovation gave us Brexit because it allowed people to be organised on a scale and in ways they never were before. It was only through a novel use of statistics, mathematical models, and Facebook advertising that the campaign reached so many people. The establishment lost on Brexit because they did not embrace new modes of thinking and new technologies. They settled for basic polling of 1-10 thousand people and rudimentary mathematics.
Meanwhile the Brexit campaign reached thousands upon thousands, and applied complex Bayesian statistics to get accurate insights into the electorate. It is those who innovate, evolve, and grow that shape the future. There is no going back to small-scale living. Scale is the advantage. Speed is the advantage. And once it exists, it devours the smaller modes of organisation around it, even smaller modes of organisation have the whole political establishment behind it.
When Cummings got what he wanted injected into the political establishment – a data science team in No. 10 – they were excised like a virus from the body the moment a new PM was installed. Tech has no friends in the political establishment, the speed, scale, and efficiency of the thing is anathema to a system which relies on slow-moving processes to keep a narrow group of incompetents in power for as long as possible. The fierce competition inherent to technology is the complete opposite of the ‘Rolls-Royce civil service’ which simply recycles bad staff around so they don’t bother too many people for too long.
By contrast, in tech, second best is close to last. When you run the most popular service, you get the data from running that service. This allows you to make a better service, outcompete others, which gets you more users, which gets you more data, and it all snowballs from there. Google holds 93.12% of the search engine market share. Amazon owns 48% of eCommerce sales. The iPhone is the most popular email client, at 47.13%. Twitch makes up 66% of all hours of video content watched. Google Chrome makes up 70% of web traffic. There next nearest competitor, Firefox (a measly 8.42%,) is only alive because Google gave them 0.5b to stick around. Each one of these companies is 2-40 times bigger than its next nearest competitor. Just as with civilisation, there is no half-arseing technology. It is build or die.
Nevertheless, there have been many attempts to half-ass technology and civilisation. When cities began to develop, and it became clear they were going to be the future powerhouses of modern economies, theorists attempted to create a ‘city of towns’ model.
Attempting to retain the virtues of small town and community living in a mass-scale settlement, they argued for a model of cities that could be made up of a collection of small towns. Inevitably, this failed.
The simple reason is that the utility of cities is scale. It is the access to the large labour pools that attracts businesses. If cities were to become collections of towns, there would be no functional difference in setting up a business in a city or a town, except perhaps the increased ground rent. The scale is the advantage.
This has been borne out mathematically. When things reach a certain scale, when they become networks of networks (the very thing you’re using, the internet, is one such example) they tend towards a winner-takes-all distribution.
Bowing out of the technological race to engage in some Luddite conquest of modernity, or to exact some grudge against the Enlightenment, is signalling to the world we have no interest in carving out our stake in the future. Any nation serious about competing in the modern world needs to understand the unique problems and advantages of scale, and address them.
Nowhere is this more strongly seen than in Amazon, arguably a company that deals with scale like no other. The sheer scale of co-ordination at a company like Amazon requires novel solutions which make Amazon competitive in a way other companies are not.
For example, Amazon currently owns the market on cloud services (one of the few places where a competitor is near the top, Amazon: 32%, Azure: 23%). Amazon provides data storage services in the cloud with its S3 service. Typically, data storage services have to handle peak times, when the majority of the users are online, or when a particularly onerous service dumps its data. However, Amazon services so many people – its peak demand is broadly flat. This allows Amazon to design its service around balancing a reasonably consistent load, and not handling peaks/troughs. The scale is the advantage.
Amazon warehouses do not have designated storage space, nor do they even have designated boxes for items. Everything is delivered and everything is distributed into boxes broadly at random, and tagged by machines so the machines know where to find it.
One would think this is a terrible way to organise a warehouse. You only know where things are when you go to look for them, how could this possibly be advantageous? The advantage is in the scale, size, and randomness of the whole affair. If things are stored on designated shelves, when those shelves are empty the space is wasted. If someone wants something from one designated shelf on one side of the warehouse, and something from another side of the factory, you waste time going from one side to the other. With randomness, you are more likely to have a desired item close by, as long as you know where that is, and with technology you do. Again, the scale is the advantage.
The chaos and incoherence of modern life, is not a bug but a feature. Just as the death of feudalism called humans to think beyond their glebe, Lord, and locality, the death of legacy media and old forms of communication call humans to think beyond the 9-5, elected representative, and favourite Marvel movie.
In 1999, one year after Amazon began selling music and videos, and two years after going public – Barron’s, a reputable financial magazine created by Dow Jones & Company posted the following cover:
Remember, Barron’s is published by Dow Jones, the same people who run stock indices. If anyone is open to new markets, it’s them. Even they were outmanoeuvred by new technologies because they failed to understand what technophobes always do: scale is the advantage. People will not want to buy from 5 different retailers because they want to buy everything all at once.
Whereas Barron’s could be forgiven for not understanding a new, emerging market such as eCommerce, there should be no sympathy for those who spend most of their lives online decrying growth. Especially as they occupy a place on the largest public square to ever occur in human existence.
Despite claiming they want a small-scale existence, their revealed preference is the same as ours: scale, growth, and the convenience it provides. When faced with a choice between civilisation in the form of technology, and leaving Twitter a lifestyle closer to that of the past, even technology’s biggest enemies choose civilisation.
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The Family Sex Show: Grooming Comes to Britain
I knew Bristol was liberal; the city is famous for it. Me? I have traditional values, I am involved with the Conservative party, and I have been a Christian my whole life. But when I got an unconditional offer to study a course at the University of Bristol which ranked third in that subject, I accepted it without hesitation. Nine months into living here and I have seen advertisements for climate-crisis bake sales, intersectional feminist poetry slams, and students “occupying” the Wills Memorial Building (and subsequently whinging that their vegan Deliveroo wasn’t able to reach them) in solidarity with striking lecturers. However, having nonchalantly followed Bristol’s Tobacco Factory Theatres on Twitter to see if any shows piqued my interest, I saw something that one couldn’t just dismiss as liberal lefty nonsense – this was something truly horrifying.
Tobacco Factory Theatres retweets ThisEgg (a theatre company) promoting their new show, The Family Sex Show (also promoted by The Guardian) The title is possibly alluding to incest, to Red Light District sex shows, and is definitely intended to shock. Already feeling slightly disturbed, I read on. The age recommendation is 5+ and the show description reveals it is intended as “an alternative to porn”. I read on to learn that “there is nakedness, yes. At one point in the show, everyone on stage takes their clothes off…” This is ringing every alarm bell possible.
Posing as “sex education”, the adults involved (who were hastily cast via Twitter only a month ago) don’t seem to know the first thing about safe, age-appropriate sex education. What five-year-old needs an alternative to pornography? Exposure to pornography is often used as a desensitising tactic when grooming children. In defence of this horror show, the website claims that “sexual development and behaviour in children starts from birth”. This is an argument which I have only previously heard from a documentary about PIE (Paedophile Information Exchange) to justify removing the age of consent.
Speaking of consent, which this show claims to teach us all about, I have to question why the “actors” get to choose their level of comfort when stripping. A five-year-old child, however, cannot consent to seeing naked strangers. The only guidance for parents is that they can leave if they feel uncomfortable, yet the theatre manager has written extensively on how the actors will be supported if there was negative feedback. How, I ask, are the “actors” the victims in this situation? This show seems to be all about what the adults want to do in front of the children, convinced that they know best. Cyber-flashing has just become a crime, and yet the cast of The Family Sex Show feel it is their right to flash infant-school-aged children. Many Twitter commenters reminisced over days when “dirty flashers” would be chased off by police. Now, liberal parents pay them ten pounds a ticket to bare all on stage. These people do not deserve to be parents.
My sex education at school took place in Year Six. We were ten and eleven years old and were taught about sex and puberty in an age-appropriate, sensitive, non-embarrassing way. The teachers, surprisingly, didn’t find it necessary to strip naked and point to their genitals to get the message across. Most of my generation will have had a similar experience and don’t feel we have gaps in our knowledge. Of course, we have all witnessed the odd person getting changed at the beach rather indiscreetly – but this is contextual, and hopefully accidental. If children are taught that it is normal for strangers to want to show their genitals to them, then this completely undermines the preventative measures that parents, and trusted adults, take against grooming. And as for the argument that “children will encounter porn anyway, so why not teach them about it now?” I worked in Early Years education for four years and I didn’t meet a single five-year-old who could read, write or type well enough to access pornography. And if parents leave it accessible to children, someone needs to call CPS.
I am just thankful that the live show and tour was all suspended during the multiple lockdowns, or we could be two years into child-traumatising theatrical sex shows. The Twitter outrage has been huge, and the account, Libs of TikTok, made famous by Joe Rogan’s podcast, shared the story, at my request, to an audience of 591.3k angry followers. We also have riled up over 800 Bristolian mothers on Mumsnet who have taken this story to the Daily Mail, started a petition, and are boycotting the theatre. Grown adults are being paid to strip in front of little children, in UK theatres, funded by the National Lottery and Arts Council England. Bristol’s Tobacco Factory Theatres want your money! In return, you and your five-year-old can watch simulated sex acts followed by a stage full of strange adults exposing their genitals. I have never been more horrified.
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Richard Dawkins’ Reticence
Never be afraid of stridency. This was the title of the last ever interview with Christopher Hitchens. It came from advice he gave to Richard Dawkins, his interviewer and guest editor of the New Statesman where it was published in December 2011.
CH: You must never be afraid of that charge [of being a bore], any more than stridency.
RD: I will remember that.
CH: If I was strident, it doesn’t matter – I was a jobbing hack, I bang my drum. You have a discipline in which you are very distinguished. You’ve educated a lot of people; nobody denies that, not even your worst enemies. You see your discipline being attacked and defamed and attempts made to drive it out. Stridency is the least you should muster . . .
In the following eleven years or so, Dawkins certainly lived up to Hitchens’ challenge. That is, until recently, in his own interview with Piers Morgan, where he appeared decidedly more reticent than strident.
This is not to say he has become agnostic, or anything of the sort, but rather that he seemed strangely unwilling to display the full strength of his arguments against bad logic, or even sometimes to express an argument at all.
At the start of the interview, for example, when Morgan pressed him on the Big Bang theory, asserting that a ‘super-being-power’ must have preceded it, the strongest response from Dawkins was to defer to physicists who would say that it was naive, or that ‘science starts with simplicity’.
Of course this was partly humility of discipline, but far more than we’re used to. The overall effect was to make Morgan’s contention seem plausible and Dawkins happily resigned. Only a few years ago one would have expected him to incisively dismantle, as he did in his bestselling book The God Delusion, this notion of infinite regress. (If God created the universe, who created God?)
It was as if, after being introduced with the usual sensational epithets: firebrand, controversialist, incendiary, offensive – and later according to Morgan, vehement – he was doing his best to disprove them by being overly passive. Or perhaps he really had changed.
Sensing this possibility, Morgan eventually asked: ‘Have you got milder about this as you’ve got older?’
‘Yes’, replied Dawkins.
To anyone who has followed his work long enough, this is a surprising enough admittance. He was already 65 when he published The God Delusion in 2006. And even those who came to him late will know that one of his hallmarks is to make bald statements of fact on sensitive subjects, if just to inspire debate. Many would inevitably get him wrong in the process, but to Dawkins free speech was always a theory to be defended through practice.
This is what made it so shocking when he point-blank refused to comment on the case of Shamima Begum.
Morgan: ‘There’s been a big debate about this ISIS bride, Shamima Begum – whether she should be allowed to come back to this country. Do you have a view about that?’
Dawkins: ‘I’d rather not say.’
His reluctance to discuss the issue is difficult to comprehend given his erstwhile tireless opposition to theocratic statism, of which ISIS was by its own definition the exemplar.
It is even more difficult when one remembers that he was outspoken on the Begum question specifically, as far back as 2019. In response to a BBC article which referenced a previous interview with her, he tweeted:
This, one might say, is quite strident. In which case, why did he feel unable to be similar with Morgan, to robustly convey his thoughts and afterwards qualify them according to the nuances of the case? He is surely more informed than most people on the matter, many of whom are less willing to make concessions than even he was four years ago. And yet instead he further excused himself from the debate saying he ‘hasn’t studied it enough’.
‘There are areas which you would prefer not to discuss?’ Morgan went on to ask.
‘Yes. I should have said that before we started.’
This was another troubling statement. But what made the moment more so in general was Dawkins’ demeanour, which had shifted from playful to withdrawn, to the point where he barely voiced his monosyllabic demurrals. Eventually, even Piers Morgan, clearly nonplussed at having avoided the fireworks promised by his intro, felt it appropriate to move to another line of questioning.
As a great admirer of Dawkins, it is disappointing to see that he no longer feels comfortable expressing an opinion on certain topics, especially when it is called upon and in a conducive environment. Indeed, at the very start of the interview on Piers Morgan Uncensored, the host put the programme’s premise direct to the interviewee:
‘I assume you will be uncensored?’ To which Dawkins replied, ‘Of course.’
Overriding this disappointment, however, is uncondescending sympathy. It cannot have been easy to be ‘the face’ of New Atheism in the age of new extremism and the incessant threat that comes with it. Nor to have survived long enough to see the actuation of this threat against friends no less, as in the case of Salman Rushdie (as far as someone in hiding across thirty years can have friends).
Further still, he has been let down immensely by those who should have stood by him, most notably the American Humanist Association who, in 2021, withdrew the award they had given him after he pointed out inconsistencies between transgender and transracial rhetoric.
That he, at 82, is still engaged in such debates at all is testament to his enduring commitment to truth and reason. But by the same measure, he is an increasingly lonely voice, among the last of a generation of rigorous thinkers who have either fallen away around him or been forcibly removed from public life. It is only natural that his thoughts would turn to the legacy of his prolific output, which, as he reminds us, contains only two books about religion. He has much more left to defend.
As Hitchens went on to say in 2011: ‘It’s the shame of your colleagues that they don’t form ranks and say, “Listen, we’re going to defend our colleagues from these appalling and obfuscating elements.”’
More than a decade on, Professor Dawkins is still waiting.
