The Future of 'Prevent'

Well there's been lots of talk, discussion and speculation about the future of the 'Preventing Violent Extremism' programme, what the current government is planning, what a new Tory government would do about it, and so forth.

Earlier on in the week I participated in a roundtable meeting hosted by Rt. Hon. Stephen Timms MP, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury - who also apparently takes the Cabinet lead on faith and community issues.

Anyway, an informed source at the meeting working at a senior level in Communities Minister John Denham's office confirmed in no uncertain terms what is gradually becoming clear to many - the government is essentially looking to narrow down the 'Prevent' agenda into a fundamentally and openly 'security'-oriented programme which may well be police and/or intelligence-led. Meanwhile, community-oriented capacity-building work which has previously been (at least in theory) the province of the 'Prevent' agenda will be relegated primarily to an emerging separate programme of work under 'Cohesion'.

Community capacity-building under Cohesion will be much less focused on one particular faith, i.e. Islam and Muslims, but will work toward getting different faith communities to collaborate and cooperate in various social enterprises. Even the new more ostensibly security-driven 'Prevent' programme would not focus exclusively on Islam and Muslims, but more broadly on 'violent extremism' coming from any other religious and non-religious groups.

Other sources familiar with 'Prevent' working in other government departments/agencies tend to generally corroborate this shift in thinking, so it's clear that although Denham has clearly taken a lead in driving this process in the Communities & Local Government Department, it's the outcome of a fair amount of new thinking going on throughout Whitehall.

Allowing myself to speculate, this could mean that if a new Tory government comes in after this year's elections, it's unlikely to be able or even willing to radically shake things up. The new Cabinet would of course consist of people who've had no experience of government for more than a decade, if not longer. They would be heavily dependent on civil servants to get to grips with things. That doesn't mean that they might not try to implement some major changes - given that many of the Tory MPs interested in security issues like Michael Gove or Patrick Mercer tend to swallow the pseudo-scholarly diagnoses of former (and still clearly quite confused) ex-Hizb ut-Tahrir ideologues hook, line and sinker, it's also likely that a Tory government would wish to ensure that 'security'-oriented programmes continue to focus heavily on Islam and Muslim communities generically.