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Changing UK’s counterterror strategy comes with trade-offs and benefits

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Good morning. Rachel Reeves has a big speech today in which she will promise to go “further and faster” to increase UK economic growth. (Our story here.) However, I will wait until after the chancellor’s address before giving my thoughts, as I prefer not to analyse speech extracts.

There is still more to be said about the government’s options for tweaking our counterterrorism response following the Southport murders. One aspect of that was the subject of an urgent question in the House of Commons yesterday. So today, I want to talk about the benefits of keeping those changes within the walls of the UK’s existing counterterrorism capabilities or as an extension to it.

Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Read the previous edition of the newsletter here. Please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com

Remit review

Prevent was established in the wake of the 2005 bombings in London, in which the perpetrators were all British-born. Its brief then was solely to focus on Islamist extremist terror, which makes up roughly 75 per cent of MI5’s counterterrorism caseload in the UK. Since then, Prevent’s remit has been expanded to include other forms of extremism, most importantly from a resource perspective the extreme far-right, which makes up almost all of the remainder of MI5’s caseload.

Some critics of the programme argue that this broadening of scope waters down Prevent’s focus and thus its effectiveness. I think there’s some truth in this, but there’s a trade-off either way. One reason why I favour keeping all the extremist ideologies under one hat is that very few organisations advocate for their own abolition. As I’ve written a lot lately, violent animal rights activists, who in the 2000s represented a serious threat both to the life of scientific researchers and to the ability of the UK to actually deliver scientific advances, have been pretty comprehensively routed by the British security services.

I’m not saying that violent animal rights activists are never going to re-enter the scene, but I am saying that, at present, they aren’t a big threat in the UK. I think the nature of human affairs is that, if a separate part of the UK’s counterterrorism apparatus were dealing with violent animal rights activists, they would be talking up this threat to ensure their continued relevance, engaging in turf wars with other bits of the security services and generally this would drain resources and time to no good end.

Similarly, a stripped down Prevent is not going to unlock greater time and resources to tackle the problem of people who support or commit acts of terror because they are Islamist extremists. It is going to spend that time having bureaucratic battles with whatever organisation you set up to address the problem of people who support or commit acts of terror because they are on the extreme right, the extreme left, and various other causes that are currently marginal in the UK.

We may not ever be able to comprehensively defeat either Islamist extremists or the extreme far right, as we currently have done to violent animal rights activists. But it is at least theoretically arguable we shouldn’t create organisations that are incentivised to pretend that we have not prevailed.

Violence for violence’s sake, however, which typifies many spree killers and school shooters, and was the case for Axel Rudakubana, is a perennial policy problem. No state has a clear sense of how to stop that problem entirely and it may well simply be part of the human condition. A separate focus on those committing violent acts for their own sake wouldn’t have the same risks of obsolescence later down the line — but would, of course, still be competing for resources.

Now try this

I had a lovely dinner last night courtesy of Martin Sandbu, but I did not, alas, have the presence of mind to ask for his recipe book. (Premium subscribers: sign up to the excellent Free Lunch newsletter, which is also now written by economics leader writer Tej Parikh on Sundays.)

I haven’t quite decided what I should cook for the return fixture but my absolute favourite cookery book is Claudia Roden’s wonderful Med.

Top stories today

  • A reel pain | Keir Starmer’s plan to agree a security pact with the EU is being blocked by French and other member states’ demands over fishing rights and a youth mobility scheme, complicating hopes of an early win in “reset” talks with Brussels.

  • Just Stop Oil hearing | Sixteen climate activists will call for judges to reduce their prison sentences today in a rare mass appeal, which their supporters argue will define Britain’s approach to peaceful protest for years to come. 

  • ‘There’s no AI without maths’ | The UK government is to cut back a hugely successful programme designed to encourage teenagers to take up higher-level maths courses, causing dismay among charities and campaign groups.

  • ‘The Brexit Files’ | A new report by UK in a Changing Europe, the think-tank, analyses the origins of Brexit, the referendum, subsequent arguments over what Brexit should mean and the future of UK-EU relations.

  • App happy | The UK is considering making households who only use streaming services such as Netflix and Disney pay the BBC licence fee, as part of plans to modernise the way it funds the public-service broadcaster, Bloomberg’s Ellen Milligan and Ailbhe Rea report.

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