They Are More Interested In Cultural Silencing Than Countering Terrorism
Prevent UK is one of the most morally illiterate quangos around. It inadvertently encourages a climate of confusion towards the terrorist security threat facing the UK.
I have always thought that Prevent was a useless institution that was incapable of understanding Islamist Terrorism. Now, I realize that it is also a threat to our freedom. Its latest act of losing the plot over terrorism was to declare in its online guidance that ‘cultural nationalism’ could be a reason for referring someone for deradicalisation![i]
Hopefully I am not going to be referred by this quango for participation in their de-radicalisation indoctrination programme. I happen to think that cultural nationalism is a legitimate standpoint that should be taken seriously in our public conversation. Cultural nationalism aims to promote a common cultural outlook through which a string sensibility of national community can be forged.
Prevent is a hyper-multiculturalist outfit that regards any serious manifestation of patriotism as symptom of a cultural crime. That is why it has also decided to warn officialdom about individuals who are concerned about mass migration. Prevent Online guidance asserts that such concern is linked to a terrorist ideology. In its official ‘refresher awareness course, Prevent contends that cultural nationalism is a ‘sub-set’ of terrorist ideology. In effect the expression of the belief that shared cultural norms help sustain social solidarity and relation of trust are deemed to be no less dangerous than the conviction that Britain should be part of an Islamic Caliphate.
As an illustration of the working of this supposed terrorist ideology, the website cites the ‘conviction that ‘Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups’. Prevent’s de-radicalisers are going to have their hands full because there are millions of people in Britain who are deeply worried about the impact of mass migration on society as they are about the failure to assimilate new arrivals to embrace the norms of British society.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Prevent has decided to prevent the free communication of views about immigration and multiculturalism.
Why are they targeting cultural nationalism?
There are two reasons why Prevent has chosen to target cultural nationalism. Firstly, Prevent want to control what can or cannot be said in British society. In particular it wants to ensure that critical voices regarding the wisdom of allowing mass migration are silenced. It also wants to silence people who are sceptical about the impact of multiculturalism on people’s lives. Until now the Ideologues of multiculturalism relied on silencing critics by dismissing them as simply racists. Now Prevent has gone a step further and seeks to shut down critical voices regarding migration by treating them as would be terrorists.
In effect Prevent believes that curbing the freedom of voice of opponents of multiculturalism is a small price to pay for silencing them. Prevent knows that once critics of multiculturalism succeed is putting their case in front of the public it will gain traction amongst the electorate. That is what it tries to Prevent!
The second reason why Prevent has decided to criminalise cultural nationalism is because it is committed to promoting the claim that asserts that the real terrorist threat facing Britain emanates from the British white community rather than from Islamicists activist. For some time now Prevent has been reluctant to openly discuss the threat posed by Islamist terrorism to British society. In this respect Prevent’s approach echo those of the British Establishment. The British media discourages a forthright discussion of this subject on the ground that it might be interpreted as Islamophobic.
As the criminology Ian Acheson wrote in his critique of Prevent’s naïve approach towards the threat posed by jihadist terrorist this organisation fears coming across as racist of Islamophobic. He observed that ‘nice, middle class’ Prevent officials ‘are being deceived and manipulated, often because there is a race disparity in it’. He added ‘we don’t have the robust challenge we should have because everyone is so afraid of being racist’[ii].
‘Nice, middle class members’ of the mainstream media often insist that Islamic terrorism should not be the only focus of counter-terrorist activity. They feel far more comfortable about speculating whether or not misogynist INCELS should be classified as terrorist[iii]. The reluctance to discuss jihadist terrorism stands in sharp contrast with obsessing about far-right white terrorism. The phenomenon of far right- terrorism has been elevated to the point, where according to sections of the media it is represented as a greater threat than that of jihadist terror. The Guardian, in particular conveys the impression that the ‘record number of children’ arrested for far right offences constitutes the defining threat of terrorism[iv].
The obsession with right wing terrorism has also influenced Prevent’s behaviour. Acheson is concerned about Prevent’s disproportionate focus on far-Right extremism, saying it is given a ‘false equivalent’ to Islamist extremism. The inflation of the threat posed by far-right terrorism in Britain is underpinned by an identity-politics influenced narrative that reduces cause of the problem of society to white privilege and racism.
Earlier this year a leaked Home Office report concluded that the focus of counter-terrorist strategy should radically alter[v].
It recommends that the Government’s approach to extremism should no longer be based on ‘specific ideologies of concern’ but instead on ‘behaviours and activities of concern’.
So far, so confusing. Inevitably, there are no prizes for which ‘specific ideology’ is being relegated down the watch list. It is, of course, Islamism.
Instead, the report cites a whole new raft of behaviours which our security services ought equally to concern themselves with.
Among them is being a ‘conspiracy theorist’, a ‘misogynist’, having a propensity for violence against girls and women or engaging in what is termed an ‘online subculture called the manosphere’ (websites, blogs and online forums promoting traditional masculinity and opposition to feminism).
In one section, the report even claims that those who believe we have a system of ‘two-tier policing’ – the argument that some riots and demonstrations are dealt with more leniently than others – are subscribing to a ‘Right-wing extremist narrative’. Now scepticism about the benefits of multiculturalism is added to the list of views that demand the attention of Prevention’s operatives.
As matters stand it is unlikely that the police will come knocking on your door because you posted a statement criticising mass migration. But the point of Prevent’s guidance is not to increase Britain’s prison population with cultural nationalists. Its aim is to silence discussion on issues to do with race, Islam, social cohesion and multiculturalism. It wants to ensure that so-called controversial view on this subject are silenced and that the concerns of people become inaudible.
Our right to express are views is under threat by Prevent. We must respond to them by boldly affirming the importance of free and open debate. We must not allow cultural nationalist sentiments from being placed under quarantine. On the contrary at a time when the elites that run Britain have given up on securing Britain’s border, standing up for the integrity of the nation assumes a special importance.
[i] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/06/concern-over-mass-migration-terrorist-ideology-prevent/
[ii] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/04/11/prevent-failing-say-terror-experts-murderer-ali-harbi-ali-deceived/
[iii] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/03/incel-movement-terror-threat-canada
[iv] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/09/record-number-of-uk-
[v] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14331447/FRANK-FUREDI-falsehoods-Home-Office-review-counter-terrorism-Britains-security.html
Renaud Camus asked: "Can you join a people? You can, though the bar is high. Individuals who so wish can always join a people out of love for its language, literature, its art de vivre or its landscapes. But, you can’t do this at scale: 'peoples who remain peoples cannot join other peoples. They can only conquer them, submerge them, replace them.' ”
Given the historically unprecedented immigration, all too often from cultures incompatible with our own and in which 'peoples remain peoples' under the doctrine of multiculturalism, government and its media running dogs have a choice: stop the importation of people at scale or suppress dissent over the submerging and replacement of us. They have chosen the latter with a hoped for side effect of suppressing populist challenge to their rule.
Camus also said, in a French context: “if a veiled woman with a shaky command of our language, entirely ignorant of our culture can say to a native Frenchman with a passionate interest in Roman churches, the finer points of vocabulary and syntax, Montaigne, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Burgundy Wine, and Proust and whose family has for several generations lived in the same little valley of the Vivrais … 'I am just as French as you are', it follows that being French is nothing”.
As with Stockport and the 'Welsh choirboy' we found that being Welsh was nothing just as being British was with Abedi and the Manchester bombing. Raised in an area of Manchester known as Little Libya his refugee parents made frequent trips back to Libya the country they supposedly escaped from. Assertion of culture, history and tradition is encouraged for everyone except the English. Moral illiteracy and confusion, as this article points out, is inevitable.
No wonder Camus was recently denied entry to the UK.
Frank, is Prevent UK incompetent or sinister? I worry that anyone expressing any concerns re the survival of Western Civilization will be targeted. I live in London and feel that European cities are gradually being turned into what US multinationals called EMEA - Europe, Middle East and Africa. I know I am only allowed to applaud this fact. It is easy to believe this has been foisted upon us by the hard left (smash Capitalism) and the open borders Big Business lobby (one tax rate and no tariffs.)