Thread by @Con_Tomlinson

A leaked Home Office report called grooming gangs a "grievance narrative”, and complaints about “two-tier policing” a “right-wing extremist” conspiracy theory.

It also aims to increase the number of non-crime hate incidents recorded.

There's a lot more to this story than just civil service incompetence.

A thread on how the Home Office has been ideologically captured, and enabled Islamic extremists.🧵

Details of the report were first publicised by @StevenEdginton in November 2024.

The paper claimed that grooming gangs are a “grievance narrative” invented by “right-wing extremists”.

It also said the statement “Western culture is under threat from mass migration” is an "extremist" view.

The report warned that "right-wing extremist narratives (particularly around immigration and policing) are in some cases 'leaking' into mainstream debates.”

It cited two-tier policing as an example.

After Edginton's reporting, a Labour source told GB News that the “paper was not approved by Home Office Ministers”.
gbnews.com/politics/labou…

I then detailed the ideological capture of the Home Office for @ayaan and @CourageMedia___

For those unaware: the Home Office’s Research, Information, and Communications Unit (RICU) is the parent body of anti-extremism programme Prevent.

RICU conducts 'controlled spontaneity' exercises: transporting Imams out to the aftermath of terror attacks to take photos and project the image of a Muslim community united against extremism.

RICU control newspaper coverage, such as the 'Union Jack Hijab' image printed on the front page of The Sun newspaper on October 8th, 2014, after British aid worker Alan Henning was beheaded on video by ISIS.

Emails procured by freedom of information access requests show RICU monitored online responses to the front page, calling it “our product”.
courage.media/2024/12/16/the…

Other examples include:

- The “Don't Look Back in Anger” message broadcast after the Manchester Arena bombings.

- The imams photographed at the scenes of the 2017 London Bridge and Westminster Bridge attacks.

- The COVID-19 pandemic – as documented by @BareReality

- And (suspected) the Socialist Workers Party / Stand Up To Racism protests, printed on newspaper front pages on August 8th 2024 – during the Southport riots.

The 2014 Sun image was produced by former government Counter-Extremism Commissioner, and Independent Adviser for Social Cohesion and Resilience, Dame Sara Khan's charity Inspire -- and Breakthrough Media, a communications company with connections to the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism.

In 2014, Khan was supported in her #MakingAStand campaign by then-Home Secretary Theresa May. While Prime Minister, Mrs. May went on to appoint Sara Khan as the government’s first Counter-Extremism Commissioner, working under then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd.

In a 2015 government document, titled “Prevent Strategy: Local delivery best practice catalogue”, the Home Office referred Khan’s #MakingAStand the campaign as a “RICU Product”. It was launched with the support of the UK government, and a portion of RICU’s £12-23 million annual budget.

@StevenEdginton @Ayaan @CourageMedia___ @BareReality Khan's sister, Sabrina, was deputy head of RICU at the time

Sabrina worked under former head Richard Chalk.

Chalk was also chief of staff to former chair of the Conservative party, now head of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi.

Former MI6 officer Charles Farr established RICU in 2007.

In 2011, a government review concluded that an effort to “identify credible partners” and develop “more professional counter-narrative products” was required.

They appointed Chalk, to do this, having just returned from conducting classified work in Baghdad during the Iraq war, for British PR firm Bell Pottinger.

David Hill became Bell Pottinger’s CEO in 2007, after serving as Tony Blair’s Director of Communications since 2003.

Hill replaced spin doctor Alastair Campbell — infamous for compiling the “dodgy dossier” which encouraged Britain and America to invade Iraq in search of fictitious WMDs.

Hill is married to former Downing Street press officer Hillary Coffman, herself previously married to David Seymour — Alastair Campbell’s editor at the Daily Mirror.

Quite the incestuous network.

Under Chalk and the Khan sisters’ leadership, during the previous Conservative governments, Prevent effectively stopped monitoring Islamist extremism.

Despite Islamist terrorism causing 94 percent of terror-related deaths and 88 percent of injuries since 1999, being 80 percent of Counter-Terror Police's and 75 percent of MI5's open cases, and 63 percent of terrorists in custody;

William Shawcross’ Prevent review found referrals for Islamist extremism fell to 22 percent, while “extreme right-wing” referrals rose to 25 percent, between March 2020 – 2021.

Only 10 percent of live Counter-Terror Police cases were right-wing extremists.

Shawcross found Prevent staff were unwilling to consider Islam as a motivator of terrorism and extremist violence, saying that:

“When discussing Islamism, Prevent staff frequently came back to issues relating to mental health concerns and ‘vulnerabilities’. Ideology, if acknowledged at all, was treated as a secondary factor and a derivative of a wider psychological or social issue. Put simply, ideology was not seen as an essential part of the trajectory towards terrorism, instead it was viewed as one of many potential radicalising factors.”

He concluded that “Prevent is not doing enough to counter non-violent Islamist extremism”, and has applied “a double standard when dealing with the extreme right-wing and Islamism.”

“It is worth restating that Islamist terrorism is currently the largest terrorist threat facing the United Kingdom…

“[But] the present boundaries around what is termed by Prevent as extremist Islamist ideology are drawn too narrowly while the boundaries around the ideology of the extreme right-wing are too broad.”
gov.uk/government/pub…

Prevent staff disagreed.

In January 2024, at a Kings College London (KCL) course called “Issues in Countering Terrorism” for Home Office civil servants, a lecturer described Shawcross as “the type of person who would say all current counter-terrorism professionals are woke…He is of that ilk”.

During a seminar, a member of the Home Office Islamic Network said “Prevent is inherently racist because it focuses on Islamist extremism” — before pointing and laughing at a jihadist in an ISIS recruitment video, saying “He used to go to my school! I know him!”
spectator.co.uk/article/civil-…

The Islamic Network is a 700-member Muslim activist group working within the Home Office to "promote the recruitment, retention and progression of Muslim staff in the Home Office" and “influence policymakers so that policy is more inclusive of Muslim needs”.

One Home Office whistleblower told GB News: “Having an Islamic lobby group inside the Home Office represents a serious threat to the Government’s aims in combating Islamic extremism and granting asylum to those fleeing Islamic countries over religious persecution.”

“The network has already produced pro-Hijab propaganda which it sent to asylum seeker decision makers in the Home Office, and explicitly states it aims to influence policy to support their religious goals.”

“Far from shutting down the group or banning it from attempting to influence Government policy, ministers and senior civil servants have endorsed it as a part of their commitment to diversity.”

“It is anti-democratic and very worrying that this group exists.”
gbnews.com/membership/hom…

It is a cause for concern, then, that this Network May have influence over RICU, Prevent, and the softening of views against Islamist extremism.

Shawross expressed concern that the focus of Prevent and counter-extremism programmes was being purposefully drawn away from Islamism by bad-faith actors, given quarter by government employees.

He noted that the founding chair of the National Association of Muslim Police’s (NAMP) West Midlands branch shared videos on his social media which called for the destruction of Israel and described Jews as “filth”, and speeches delivered by a pro-Hamas cleric and a former Guantanamo Bay detainee (who has since joined CAGE).

That same NAMP branch chair authored a paper in 2020, advising Counter Terrorism Policing to drop the terms ‘Islamism’ and ‘jihadism’. Other NAMP branches have hosted events with Muslim Engagement and Development (Mend), whose former members have been accused of glorifying terrorism.

Mend’s former head of Community Development and Engagement, Azad Ali, was found guilty in 2010 of using his personal website to justify the killing of British troops in Iraq. Ali left Mend to join CAGE — which denounced Gove’s effort to redefine extremism in 2024 in partnership with Palestine Action, Black Lives Matter UK, and others who excused the October 7th attacks.

Mend is one of many organisations who fund the Islamophobia Awareness Month initiative — which has received more publicity this November.

The Met Police was forced to distance itself from former advisor Mohammed Kozbar, a member of the force’s London Muslim Communities Forum which “inform[s] and help[s] shape police policy and procedure at a strategic level”.

Kozbar was found to have praised Hamas as “the master of the martyrs of the resistance” after October 7th, and expressed support for the now-proscribed group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Shawcross credits the campaign against Prevent monitoring Islamist extremism to Hizb ut-Tahrir, writing:

“In 2008, the revolutionary Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir published a report framing the strategy as an attempt by the state to gain “control over the Muslim community in Britain”, to bring about a “reformation of Islam”, and to “ban Islamic ideas”. These lines of argument have set the tone for much of the campaign against Prevent ever since.”

Kozbar’s praise of Hizb ut-Tahrir may help explain why, in response to a video of Hizb ut-Tahrir gathering after October 7th to call for “Muslim armies” to wage “Jihad” against the West, the Met Police obfuscated by saying on X, “The word jihad has a number of meanings”, and that they had “not identified any offences arising from the specific clip.”
x.com/MrAndyNgo/stat…

In January 2024, the Conservative government proscribed Hizb ut-Tahrir as a terrorist organisation, making belonging to or supporting the group a criminal offence.

This had been attempted by the Conservatives back in 2007, while in opposition — but Keir Starmer, then-Director of Public Prosecutions, took it upon himself to submit an application to the European Court of Human Rights in June 2008 on Hizb ut-Tahrir’s behalf, saying “it is very important that everyone is represented”.

So, RICU has been trying to sanitise the brand of Islam after multiple terror attacks, while ignoring Islamist extremism and focusing on the far right.

They define “Far Right”, absurdly, as keen readers of the following “actively patriotic and proud” texts:

- Books by Peter Hitchens, Melanie Phillips and C.S. Lewis
- Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe
- Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan
- John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government
- Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France
- The Lord of the Rings
- Beowulf
- Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
- Micahel Portillo’s Great British Railway Journeys
-And, without a hint of irony, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Curiously, the Qur’an and Hadiths were not mentioned; but watching The Thick of It will turn you into Anders Breivik.
spectator.co.uk/article/can-yo…

This ideological capture has deadly consequences.

Abi Harbi Ali — who murdered Sir David Amess MP at a constituency surgery in Southend, Essex on October 15, 2021 — had been reported to Prevent in 2014, but had only one meeting before his case was closed.

Amess’ daughter, Katie explained to The Times that “The police told us they didn’t follow up with him due to an admin error”.

According to a July 2024 coroner’s report, Ali’s six-month case review was “missed”, and a 12-month review revealed “nothing of concern”.
thetimes.com/uk/crime/artic…

More recently came the revelation that Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana was referred to Prevent three times between 2019 and 2021.

“He was absolutely obsessed with genocides,” said one senior official. “He could name every genocide in history and how many people were killed – Rwanda, Genghis Khan, Hitler. It’s all he wanted to talk about.”

Downloaded to his personal tablet devices were documents on ISIS car bombs, Nazi Germany, violence involving Buddhists in Sri Lanka, ethnic clan-based cleansing in Somalia, the Rwandan genocide, the Iraq and Balkans wars, and depictions of torture and beheadings. He had also researched the 2024 Sydney Church stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmannuel by a suspected Islamist. Police also found copious post-colonial literature in his bedroom, including: A place under heaven – Amerindian Torture and Cultural Violence, The Mau Mau War: British Counterinsurgency in Colonial Kenya, Death and survival during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Examination of punishments dealt to slave rebels in two 18th Century British Plantation Societies, and Before The Poison Had Been Far Spread (about 18th-century British plantations in Antigua and South Carolina).

It appears Rudakubana was nurturing a violent ethnic resentment toward the British, based on the history of British imperial rule in Africa. His contempt of fellow pupils for their race, and desire to do them harm, preceded the Southport massacre.

Despite bringing a knife into school ten times, breaking the wrist of a former classmate with a hockey stick after being expelled, and receiving a youth justice referral order, Prevent took no action.
courage.media/2025/01/23/wha…

@StevenEdginton @Ayaan @CourageMedia___ @BareReality They are, however, appalled about teenagers putting up anti-immigration stickers in public parks.

Yes, this is a real training video.

On 9th December 2024, Sara Khan published another report on “far right extremism”.

She commissioned HOPE Not Hate to do the polling for the report — skewing the results toward the far left.

In 2017, HOPE Not Hate ran an article from #MakingAStand’s Sara Khan in its State of Hate report. Kahn became commissioner of the May government’s Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group, which appointed Nick Lowles as a member. Khan’s sister was still deputy head of RICU at this time.

While both Khan sisters worked at the Home Office, HOPE Not Hate received grants of £50,000 and £141,380 in 2019-2020 to “brief multiple departments… on emerging trends in UK hate”.

HOPE Not Hate also received payments of £240,000 (2022/2023), £275,000 (2019/2020), and £60,000 (2015/2016) from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation — a total of £585,000 over eight years. Between 2020 and 2023, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation received £1.36 million in government grants.

These grants were part of the Foundation’s Migration Fund, established to create “a UK network of young migrant leaders”, and a “network of leaders and organisations within towns who will respond to local needs and pressure points and share learning to enable rapid response to provocative elements”.

Effectively, HOPE Not Hate were paid to mobilize rapid-response protests in British towns and cities to quell public outrage about immigration and multiculturalism.

No wonder HOPE Not Hate founder Nick Lowles was so involved with the counterprotests “hoax” during the Southport riots.

In an interview with The Guardian after releasing the report, Khan said:

“Politicians clearly have an important role in what they say and the language they use.

“If you are using language that talks about distrusting the police or attacking an ‘establishment’ in a certain way to whip up power or votes then you have to think about the long-term consequences of that.

“That’s contributing to this acceleration of decline of trust in our democracy and institutions and is going to cause serious, long-term decline. I am concerned that over recent years we’ve seen increasing numbers of politicians jump on the conspiracy theory bandwagon, spread disinformation online, or use inflammatory and divisive language. I won’t use names but people know who they are.”

Given the thumbnail of the article was a photo of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, it is obvious which partisan targets Khan has in mind.

Both Khan and RICU are targeting Reform UK for censorship as “right-wing extremists”.
theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/d…

Among the “conspiracy theories” listed by Khan and HOPE Not Hate in the 2024 report are:

- “Cultural Marxism”

- “the Great Replacement Theory.”

- “The Great Reset”

- “Alongside the promotion of the Great Replacement Theory, contemporary Far Right narratives on asylum seekers allude to them as ‘Muslim invaders’, with small boat crossings being characterised as an ‘invasion of fighting aged men’.”

Khan provides the following poor definitions:

“Great Replacement Theory: an anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim theory stipulating that white European populations are being deliberately replaced at an ethnic and cultural level through mass migration and minority communities at the hands of the elites.”

“Cultural Marxism: A theory alleging that those subscribing to Far Left ideologies are embedded in cultural and political institutions, and are working to undermine Western culture. Often posits that Jewish people have disproportionate influence within cultural institutions.”

But doesn't link to any sources which might challenge those claims — as I do in the following article:
courage.media/2024/12/16/the…

All of this is an effort to criminalise political opposition to mass immigration, multiculturalism, and in particular the influence of Muslim groups over government.

The RICU report only mentioned Anjem Choudary’s al-Muhajiroun as a case study.

Nothing on numerous terror attacks.

Nothing on the Batley Grammar School teacher sent into hiding by an Islamist mob.

Nothing on the pro-Hamas protests since October 7th.

Nothing on the Pakistani Muslim rape gang scandal — except to dismiss it as a “grievance narrative”.

And this was the review commissioned by the Home Secretary.
policyexchange.org.uk/publication/ex…

Since the leaks, the government have announced they will not move forward in adopting the recommendations.

But this is just for show. Their ideological goals align with what is in the report.

Hence why Keir Starmer called those wanting a rape gang inquiry jumping aboard a “Far Right bandwagon.”

They really believe this stuff.

As for the Non-Crime Hate Incidents that Yvette Cooper wants to resurrect:

More of them are already recorded than ever before.

In August 2024, the Telegraph reported that Cooper plans to reverse a policy passed by the prior Conservative government which aimed to prevent the police from arbitrarily recording non-crime hate incidents.

34 police forces across England and Wales recorded 119,934 NCHIs between 2014 and 2019. The Free Speech Union believes this has doubled in the five years since Miller v College of Policing, to over 250,000—an average of 66 recorded per day.

Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman intervened and passed new guidance into law using the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act in 2023.

She tried to improve things, telling police to not record non-crime hate incidents which are “trivial, irrational and/or malicious.”

However, the College of Policing were already discouraged from engaging in "secondary victimisation" by asking someone of a "protected characteristic" under the Equality Act 2010 for proof of harm when filing a non-crime hate incident.

And so, the Free Speech Union found that, in the year since the revised guidance, NCHIs were recorded 0.4% more—11,690, up from 11,642, in the year from June 2023 to 2024. Some constabularies saw 140% (Staffordshire), 65% (North Yorkshire), and 63% (Gwent) increases.

In fact, the 2023 guidance arguably made NCHIs worse: disestablishing the “dwelling defence,” and undermining the cornerstone of common law jurisprudence that an Englishman’s home is his castle.

The guidance recommends that, “some parts of hate crime legislation do not apply where hostile conduct takes place in a private dwelling. This means that such conduct cannot always be prosecuted as a crime. … Where this is the case, an NCHI should be recorded instead.”

So Brits are having marks on their permanent record logged against them by police, for comments mad in their own home.
europeanconservative.com/articles/analy…

RICU must be dismantled.

Prevent must be overhauled.

The Islamic Network must be banned.

It was already suspended, under the prior Conservative government, pending investigation of its support for Hamas.

During a webinar, one member said the “Israel lobby” has an “insidious influence” on British politics, and that the mainstream media is “biased” and “full of lies”.

Labour reinstated the Islamic Network in September.
civilserviceworld.com/professions/ar…

The Home Office staff must be dismissed and replaced with those more interested in ensuring the security of the country than in ideology or advancing “Muslim interests”.

And any legislation — like the Equality Act, or Constitutional Reform Act — which gets in the way must be repealed.

These are not neutral institutions acting in our best interests.

They are activist Trojan Horses, waging revolution on our country and putting lives at risk.

And we must have a grave conversation about the influence of political Islam in Britain, without giving up at the first cry of "Islamophobia!" 🧵

@StevenEdginton @Ayaan @CourageMedia___ @BareReality To read more about all this, please consult my extensive work for @CourageMedia___
courage.media/2024/12/16/the…

@StevenEdginton @Ayaan @CourageMedia___ @BareReality "It should alarm you all to learn that the grieving parents of the Manchester Arena attack were told “Don’t Look Back In Anger” in a coordinated propaganda effort by the UK government."

I'll have another part in this series out later this week.
courage.media/2024/11/25/how…