TRASHFUTURE - An Ounce of Prevent feat. Maria Norris

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

The gang talks to academic Maria Norris (@MariaWNorris) about Prevent, the government’s star counter terrorism policy now getting fast tracked through a softball review. We answer the question: “why do children regularly end up in counterterrorism databases for talking about Fortnite in school?” Check out Maria's podcast, Enemies of the People, here! https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/enemies-of-the-people/id1581679731 If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo live dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome back to this free episode of the free one. I didn't even get through the name of the podcast. It's gonna get more advanced each time until we finally begin each episode with it's the free one. Yep. One day on the bonuses. No, either that or like enough of the listeners will kind of just say at some point that it's cringe and then we'll just pretend it never happened.

He was like it was never a thing. I don't care what they think. I'm not interested. A podcast in which the future, you know, we must do the free one, otherwise the future is or will be trash. Yeah. If you want to write in and be like, why can't you guys be more like the macro is I'm not interested. I don't want to hear it all beans juice.

Boy, do we have an episode for you today. However, beans. It's the free one before I sort of continue with the sort of opening of the episode capering that we're sort of contractually required to do. I first want to introduce our guest for today is Maria Norris, who is an academic in terrorism and security studies who has long studied the government's prevent program. Maria, how's it going? Oh, I'm very excited to trash prevent on trash future.

We tricked another smart person into coming on our stupid show for morons. Yeah, that's right. And now we shall be wasting her time for a little while. We're not like those squares over at my brother, my brother and me. We don't like to ask the big questions like they do. No, so I've been excited. So we've been wanting to do an episode about prevent for a while. And I think we can consider this a little bit of a spiritual sequel to our episode

with Daniel Trilling about the home office as a sort of a worked example, taking some of those ideas further. But before we get into that, open your trash future workbooks. The Riley lecture course, if the rest of you all weren't here, there would be a TF like workbook that you would have to follow. They'd be like stickers of big guys. You had to put on one page. I think that'd be fun.

But we have to do some... There are a few items that have been occurring in the news that I want to talk about first. I hate when those items are occurring in the news. Alice, you like this one because... Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes.

But in a heading, I've just titled Justice at the Commemorative Coin Dispute. People who have listened to this show will know that we have long been following a man from the West Country who has been attempting... I see from the West Country. Yeah, he's from Exeter, who has been attempting to fill up his car and then some jerry cans with petrol, but then paying using commemorative coins and recording it like a sort of sovereign citizen. The most annoying man on YouTube.

He's the truest kind of sovereign citizen that he's trying to play with gold sovereigns. So he... And basically, he would keep going to places trying to pay for stuff with a coin that remembers when Prince Philip got his first adrenochrome shot or whatever. A doubloon, something of that kind. But trying to pay with one of these commemorative coins and then being told to fuck off quite reasonably has now been paid 5,000 pounds because he was wrongfully arrested.

In what sort of denomination did they pay this 5,000 pounds to him is my question. Yes, yes. Diana and Charles wedding commemorative coins only for this man's 5k. He got a plate that somehow has a face value. And then they're like, well, you have to accept them. It's legal tender. Which this case has proven, which is fine. He could pay for anything with anything.

Well, is that what the case has proven though? Or is it just said that they weren't allowed to arrest him? It's not necessarily said that he's right. Well, it's that so now he's demanding. Don't take away from this man's absolute incredible moment of triumph at the hands of our courts. Yeah, it's the first time. That a man in a wig and a robe has sat down, poured over this and gone,

actually, you know what, when you took that 60 quid commemorative coin to Tesco service station to try and pay with petrol, that was not something with which the law should concern itself. Yeah, awesome. I had a very similar situation to this happen when I used to, when my parents had the shop and there was a customer who came in who had one of those old five pound coins. But you couldn't take it because it wouldn't be able to be processed,

because you couldn't use that currency. But they were so insistent that they could buy their daily shopping, using that coin. But they stayed in the shop the entire morning until my dad, the manager in this situation, came in and then complained to my dad for another two hours so that he could use the five pound coin. And my dad was ultimately just like, okay, fine, just, you know, we'll take it. You know, it's all good.

Another victory for the coin chat. Yeah, this happened in 2004. So I was thinking to myself, I wonder what would have happened in this took place in the era of Facebook. It would have been truly magical. I wonder whether my family would have gone bankrupt because we weren't going to take this guy's five pound coin. I mean, just your shop entirely full of people like this,

all filming you and themselves. Yeah, and Matt too. And Matt too. Wearing body cams. Yeah, which is very fun to just think that even despite all the sort of advancements in technology, but crucially just like how everything is cultural now, the very basics of like how the local British disputes have not changed in like any form. Oh, yeah, we are a commemorative coin dispute country.

Yeah, the British version of the proud boys is like a bunch of guys who get together with loads of cameras and like weird esoteric ephemera like commemorative coins and then film themselves committing a minor civil offence while yelling a load of incomprehensible stuff about the Magna Carta. It's the same thing as those guys that went into the like vaccine clinic with a copy of the Magna Carta, a copy of the Rome Statute. And we're just like, well, I think you'll find all of these documents are in order. You are committing crimes against humanity.

Thank you. British people love to show someone an authority, either spurious documents or some kind of like spurious like money. It's rules lawyering. It's rules lawyering. It is deeply, it is something that's deep in the bones of people in this country to think that they've found a technicality that lets them do something annoying. And you know what?

This guy did. So congratulations to him. You are the freak of the week. I learned a lot about the law from stopthevirus.limewire.scam.kz and I think you'll find. But there's another little bit of rules lawyering that I want to talk about. That's a little more serious and actually pertains a little bit to radicalization as well. So I want to bring Maria in on this one, which is that a lot of British people

seem to have been radicalized by our press into like sovereign citizen, their sovereign citizening their way into like egging each other on to committing vehicular homicide. And Maria as a scholar of extremism, I mean, what sort of goes through your mind when you see like radio announcers and columnists and you know small business owners all kind of agreeing that they should be able to run people over who get in their way? Well, what runs to my mind is that people are crazy everywhere, you know, because people, I know it's groundbreaking research here from Maria, but people are crazy everywhere. And you will find this kind of belief all over the world.

And the reason why I mentioned this is because it just goes to my biggest issue that I have with the UK counterterrorism strategy in general is that it doesn't work because it doesn't understand how extremism work. It doesn't understand how people work. People work nowadays, they are radicalized, they think that they know the truth because they read something online and doesn't matter what the rules say, doesn't matter what the laws as if some guy on Reddit or 4chan or increasingly things like Telegram tell you that you have the right to run somebody over with a car, then they'll think that that's the truth because they read it online. It doesn't matter what the laws are, it matters what people

tell you on the little online silo that you belong to. It's right here in Plain Lane in the Magna Carta, Abias Keosirento. Exactly. We're speaking of course of Insulate Britain and in the course of these these protests, the head of Dartford Borough Council came up with my favorite possible sentence about this, the most sort of British petty official response, which is he said, why don't they try gluing themselves to a job or gluing themselves to something productive that will take our country forward? I didn't know that the man of Dartford was a fucking crying laughing emoji.

Well, unlike you, I absolutely did because, well, I have not to turn this into the Dartford podcast, but this is very in character. So when this got sent around and it said the mayor of Dartford Council, I was just like, yeah, you know, I know what's happening next. They're going to like, they are going to do a cry laugh emoji response to all this stuff happening. And when someone dies, they're going to, or when an Insulate Britain protestor dies, they are going to erect a big statue of an SUV in the town, in the town guard. Yeah. Yeah, we went to mom's basement for comment on the Insulate Britain protestors, and they said, yo, those guys to try gluing themselves to some pussy for real.

That is something a moron would say for sure. It is, I do think it's quite interesting how a lot of what we see as radicalization versus not, even as you can see, elected officials, columnists, newspaper anchor, news anchors, and so on, sort of egging people on to commit acts of vehicular murder. You can, it's sort of quite telling that that is discreet. That's all, that's all sort of falls under free speech. And then, yeah, being a religious Muslim falls under sort of things that are suspiciously terroristic. I was just thinking about that video. I don't know if you guys saw it, it was on a few outside, it was, I can't remember who posted the video, but it was

about the Insulate Britain protestors as well. And there was this man who was spraying ink all over the protestors. Yeah. Yeah. And my thought. Oh, the big protest squid. Yes, exactly. And it's like, well, these are people who are peacefully protesting in a way that you might disagree with, and then your solution is to assault them, and you think that that's okay. And it's again, this question of, if you flip the script, right, that if you had, let's say, a bunch of soldiers kneeling in front of the cenotaph or something, and a Muslim came and sprayed them with ink in protest, that would clearly be portrayed differently. And there would be all talks about extremism and prevent, and I wouldn't be surprised even if it was portrayed as a terrorist

attack, you know, the great ink terrorist attack. But in this case, the man was hailed as a hero by those who are against the methods of the Insulate Britain protest. I badly depressed myself looking at the replies to the, you know, the press tweets about that because a more sort of cry laugh emoji sort of response I haven't seen. Yeah. A lot of this like makes sense to me in that, especially because like the fact that it would occur in places like Dartford and stuff is kind of, I don't know, on the one hand, I think to myself, there's like this cultural element where like owning a big car and like driving is like a big part of the culture, right? Like so, you know, I've lived in Dartford for a long time and like live nearby,

and like, you know, all my time there, like what you've kind of found is that all these, all the like, the very minimum public services it's had, because this is a Tory, this is a Tory safety, it has been for a long time. All the public services have been like, just like decimated over the past decade, you have a bus service that like runs from 9am to 5pm. And then if you don't, and then like, if you don't have that, then like, again, cry laugh emoji, go get a taxi or whatever. You know, you have a library that's closed, a museum that's closed, like gardens that are now being developed into like high rise flats that are like half a million pounds each, right? But what I was going to say was that like in a lot of cases, like cars are sort of viewed,

like cars are kind of really protected in this area, because it's like the only way to kind of get around, right? It's the only kind of form of autonomy that people feel that they have. So when they see insulate Britain on like roads and stuff, what they kind of see is like, these people are kind of actively trying to make my already miserable life more miserable. And rather than kind of think about like, you know, what's going on or why they're doing that, instead, they'll kind of like, it'll just be immediate rage. And really like the point you made about like the press sort of agging people on until like someone gets killed, and then they'll like, you know, inevitably just claim, but like they never did that, and they were just, you know,

speaking for the people. Like, I think a lot of it also comes back to the fact that like, for lots of columnists and journalists, like they can't actually keep up with the cry laugh emoji, like internet culture, right? So they're trying to like, you know, this is where the whole like, you know, speaking up for the people and speaking up for the working class people comes on. What it is about like, they can't keep up with like posting. You're so right. It's like, the thing that, you know, the sun or whoever it talks about or whatever it's competing with, isn't like the mail or the times or whatever. It's the group chat of the guy who sold Milo a car. We had a bunch of memes about the European super league that he described as being quite racialist.

Yeah, right. Yeah. And like, and just like the bigger thing with it, they can't, they can't keep up with the online discourse. So instead, what they're doing is like, anticipating and like, as we know about online discourse, especially with like, on places like Facebook is that it's always going to push you to extremes. So the only way that columnists can really justify their existence is by like, white kind of like, justifying and whitewashing the extreme elements before they actually happen, but in a way that like is kind of respectful enough that when something does happen, they can just kind of claim that they never actually advocated violence and like, you know, this is

completely out of their hands. I think also we need to think about the role of the governmental all this, because let's remember that this is the government that has been trying to make progressive extremism thing. They've been trying to make progressive extremism happen, and they are talking about obviously Black Lives Matter protests, but also climate change protests. And the fact that they really want this progressive extremism thing to happen, they rely on the media to help them get there. And when the media is competing with the online discourse, as we've been saying, it will always lead you in that direction and a more extreme direction. And it is playing directly into their hands. The more people get annoyed at

mentally Britain, the more people think that they have the right to run them over or spread squid ink all over them or whatever it was, the more it plays into the hand of a government that is already trying to outlaw that kind of protest. And we'll get some more legislation. Oh, I've been on this to my life. I know exactly what you're going to say. And I my third through fifth eyes are fully open on this one. They do seem deliberately calibrated to be as annoying and yet demand nothing as possible. I have often said that when you talk about that the first of these drivers who actually does try to kill and insulate Britain protester with their car will be hailed as a hero until

they're charged with assaulting a police officer. Let's get into the meat and potatoes here. I want to talk about prevent. So before we crack on with prevent, let's get into a little bit of the extremes of how ridiculous it can get. Maria, can you tell me a little bit about the four-year-old boy who was referred to the Britain's counterterrorism strategy filter because he said something about a game of Fortnite? Yes. So this is one of my favorite stories. So there are several of those. There was a young child that was referred to the UK Cat Terrorism Unit. So essentially, since 2015, the UK government instituted a prevent statutory duty. What that means is that

local authorities, schools, nurseries, hospitals, teachers, etc., they have a duty to prevent terrorism. So what that means is that they have a duty to spot signs of extremism and then report those individuals to the prevent board. And those individuals can be as young as three as four. And they have been as young as four because nurseries have that statutory duty as well. My daughter's nursery has gone through prevent training and that is just absurd in many ways. So there has been... Why? Why? They're crafty, you know, because the last person you'd expect to blow you up is a three-year-old

child. You know, if you think about it that way it's quite uncanny. But my other argument is that have you met a three-year-old? They're all insane. They're all extremist. Yeah, they're dangerous. They're all extremely dangerous. So how are you going to sift through that to find the one that is, you know, a danger to the state? They're all dangerous to the state. They're insane creatures. But so there has been the case of the child who was talking about his father playing Fortnite or something like it. And the teacher thought they were talking legitimately about the father killing people. So refer them to prevent. My favorite story is about the four-year-old that

drew a picture at nursery in his preschool. And the teacher asked him what the picture was and the child said it's a cooker bomb. And the kid was trying to say a cucumber. And this was again a four-year-old, right? And instead of trying to get to the bottom of it, the teacher decided to that maybe perhaps we should refer this four-year-old and their entire family to the counter terrorism program. And child says a word wrong. Teacher jumps across the room, slams the button that makes the bars come down over the windows, draws an AR-15 from under the desk, calls pretty Patel who comes running in to abduct the child. Oh, absolutely. Was this teacher a Catherine Barbell sing? I don't know. It feels very much like something she would do. But like very much

jumping at shadows, which as we'll see is going to be kind of a theme here. It is. And it's also jumping at the wrong shadows because there has been a report that was released a few weeks ago by some academics at UCL that did some research on teachers and prevent. And the teachers are saying that the prevent training that they get from the government, the prevent support is absolutely useless because what they are actually seeing in the classroom right now is children from white backgrounds, from Muslim backgrounds, from any background really spouting conspiracy theories that they're picking up from the internet, really quoting almost board by word QAnon talk points, talking about the vaccine being a in-plant, you know, the Bill Gates in-plant thing

and also extreme misogyny, very much reminiscent of the ideology that you see from the in-cell community. That's what the teachers are grappling with in the classroom, which as we have seen over and over again is a kind of extremism that is deadly, that kills people and harms people on a regular basis. But that is not the focus. Those who are involved in the prevent statutory duty at the front of the teachers that have to do this by law, whether or not they want to, are saying that the strategy doesn't work and they're not getting the help that they need to deal with the actual issues that they're seeing in the classroom. I think it's great that we made a bunch of like nursery carers and like primary school teachers into counterterrorism police,

but also, crucially, we didn't tell them anything about how to do it. We just kind of said, yeah, go with the vibes. Here's a slideshow about like the scary Islamic traits you can develop. And the training, the prevent training is not regulated, so there are all these different private committees. Oh, yes. Yes. I love a counterterrorism training industry, because you can just say any old shit. And they do. And they do. I've had some people tell me about their counterterrorism training. I've been in disguise, incognito, into a few of them, and they're all pretty terrible. And one of the worst that I've heard is my husband. He used to work as a, he worked in an insurance company in a city many years ago, many, many years ago now,

and he went through prevent training. And some of the things that the people told him, the people delivering the training was, you know, be aware if suddenly a colleague starts going to pray at lunchtime or if they wear a classic sign. It's, you know, if you see somebody praying, you know that they're going to blow something up. I think I'm once praying my Lord call prevent. Somebody's praying call prevent. But you know, if they're praying in a church, probably fine. I don't think prevent covers that. And, you know, if they are refusing to go to social events and citing religious reasons for that, all of those things, there are possible signs of radicalization that you have to be aware of. Maybe they're just an introvert. I always

refuse to go to social events and I'll give whatever reason is needed to get out. And maybe there's what those people are doing as well. But the prevent training industry is completely in ISIS. Sorry. Running out of excuses, losing the thread a bit and kind of panicking. Yeah. Oh, I got him a heading to go to. Sorry. So the other thing, right, I think even then, right, just sort of circling back to sort of the teachers, how this is mis... This is sort of a bad policy aimed poorly. It's kind of a... The food is terrible in such small portions, but that sort of ruins people's lives.

Yeah. Especially because... Such small portions. Right. That's not true. Especially because if you say the real problems we're dealing with, sort of like kids who are being radicalized into QAnon shit by their crazy parents or Facebook or whatever, I doubt the way to deal with that is more cops and surveillance and, you know, unaccountable databases held forever. I don't know. It's never gone wrong before.

Yeah, exactly. No, this problem is never more counterterrorism powers. That's something that people get wrong when they read my work or they listen to me talking, you know, because I talk a lot about how the UK government doesn't deal with the far right or extreme misogyny as an actual former terrorism. I don't want more terrorism. I want the terrorism apparatus that we have to be dismantled and we need to start again from scratch because it doesn't work. It hasn't worked for decades. I don't think it's ever really worked and it just creates way more problems than it solves. What's also amazing about Britain is that because we can't spend money on everything

and unlike most right-wing governments that includes the police, all we can do is give the one cop who's left more powers. We can give him more work and more powers but we can't employ any more. Oh, to be England's single remaining cop. The one police officer is constantly sort of running after a bus with a little piece of toast in his mouth and a schoolgirl out first. The last Jew in Kabul, the last cop in Britain. The last cop in Britain and he shall be their king. So I want to talk a little bit more about the details of Prevent, right? We've talked around it. Prevent in law is one of the four strands of contest which is the government's

multi-pronged counterterrorism strategy. It's a shame they couldn't have had five. We don't like to be too prescriptive but there are five key pillars to any Prevent scheme. Exactly. Beboying, MCing, DJ. Well, that's the key to Prevent, right? They went to like Muslims and they were like, look, there are five pillars to your religion. That's a bit much, isn't it? So how about four instead? Do you really need harsh? What if you sell one of those pillars and lease it back from a private company? So Prevent, as we talked about, is this counter extremism policy that aims to identify people

who may at some point commit a terrorist act. The other strands are pursue, prepare and protect, which are all pretty self-explanatory. But Prevent is stuff my Hancock does every morning. Exactly. Prevent is to stop people being radicalized, which is a real thing, right? And as we've said, in reference to incels and other stuff, people get predated upon and people get exploited and get recruited into violent ideologies. It's just we're very selective about which ones we count as extremism. Absolutely. And the thing is being anti-radicalization and having some kind of prevention program is brilliant, right? We want to stop people from becoming radicalized. It is very much as you say, Alice, it's a safeguarding issue. We want to protect

people from being brought into radicalization. I'm getting the sense, though, that when we talk about Prevent, the safeguarding part of that is not going to be entirely sincere. It's never been about safeguarding. It's been about safeguarding on paper because it sounds nice, but the way that it's been delivered, it's always been delivered from a security setting from the very, very start. So if you get into, not to get too academic here, but we have this thing in security theory called securitization, where you turn something that isn't a security issue, you turn it into a security issue and that's what Prevent has done. It grows cops on it like mold. Exactly. It throws cops at it. It throws counter radicalization strategies at the channel program,

which is the official counter radicalization program in the UK is extremely secretive. Nobody really knows what it does, but it is a deep programming program, essentially. It's important in a democracy that you don't know, for example, what you might be subject to for saying something looks like a cucumber and having a little bit of food in your mouth and it coming out wrong. That would spoil the surprise. Exactly. You couldn't possibly want to know. Prevent is this big amorphous thing that's just really about does someone kind of scare you if you have the prevent duty attached to you and it's you're engaging in safeguarding. Those limbs are so spooky. You're engaging in these concepts of safeguarding and

extremism seem to be the two biggest concepts. If you wanted to be a little bit cynical about this, right? And I hate to tell you, but I might be a bit cynical about this. Given that terrorist attacks have been committed by people who have been referred to prevent previously, not been referred to prevent previously, one might say that a lot of this is an aid of that one sentence in a BBC news article when an attack happens that goes, oh yeah, this guy was previously referred to prevent. It's sort of like an ass-covering measure. I think what they're covering their ass is from, right? Let's leave aside safeguarding, because we know it's not really, there's not much in there. They're not actually protecting

vulnerable people. They're just throwing cops at them. Extremism is the most slippery term in the whole sort of set of concepts. What they mean by it is, and this is a quote from the actual text of the law itself, active or vocal opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance towards different faiths and beliefs. So the Tory policy then. Yeah, yeah. Because one thing I like to do is look around Britain and go, there's so much mutual respect around here. Well, this is one of the things that we were talking about earlier, Alice, right? Where clearly, especially as we go through this, what we'll see a lot of is that most of what the state is doing here is it's trying to use its power

to correct how the people's affect. It's trying to make people feel and express the right things, because as much as throughout all of the different prevent strategies, they talk about risk factors for radicalization being things like poverty or social isolation or all these things. They have no lever that they can or they want to pull that isn't just attempting to police the affect of people, trying to control what they feel and what they can say. This is kind of like, this is a particularly new labor vibe for me. And I know it's something that's existed in a totally bipartisan way, but it's always occurred to me that that's a particular sort of new labor bugbearers, this sort of deputy head sort of insistence on respect

right as a value. You're very right. Prevent is a new labor baby. It was developed under new labor and it is a direct outgrowth of the community cohesion strategy developed in 2001, which is again, new labor's baby. The Tories obviously have taken and run with it, making into a statutory duty, but it is very much a new labor thing. Yeah, when you're in uniform, you're representing Britain. The standards of behavior apply. I mean, and so let's also think like, what happened, like what's one of the things that's happened recently, right, is because basically ever since 2006, people have been leveling the quite correct criticism that, well, Prevent just seems to be a way to call the police in case someone is slightly too Muslim

around you. It seems to be that... Please, like, sorry, there's just one guy. It's going to take him a while to get around. But that people have been rightly saying it's very Islamophobic. And I've noticed that a lot of the usual suspects in British media have been sort of saying, ah, well, actually, it's more sort of people on the far right are getting referred. And I mean, I tend to think that like this is one of these things where it's one of these machines that just builds itself, right? Yeah. And it also, none of those people have bothered to ask, hmm, why might there be an upswing in like far right recruitment? See, that's the thing that you can't see me, but I'm banging my head against the table because this thing drives me absolutely up the

wall. Prevent referrals from people from the far right have increased. And recently, I think in the last year and the last year's data, it has overtaken the referrals from individuals from the, from supposedly Islamic extremism, suspected of Islamic extremism. But the thing is, the prevent referral data is just one layer because after there is a prevent referral, it goes through a sifting process until it actually gets assessed by a prevent panel. And what has happened over the last few years, I would say, as I think it started in 2016, the prevent referrals that are considered to be credible referrals from the far right community far outweigh the prevents the referral that are considered to be credible from Islamic extremism. So for me, that tells that more people

are saying, Oh, my God, that Muslim freaks me out a bit. So I'm going to refer them to prevent. And most of those are not legitimate concerns. And we can debate whether or not they're legitimate in the first place. But that's for later. But fewer people are referring far right individuals or individuals in danger of being far right extremists. But more of those referrals are valid. So the problem with far right extremism in the UK has existed for generations. It has gotten so much worse since Brexit. But there has been more and more referrals for prevent, but prevent prevent cannot deal with the far right, even though it says it can. It wasn't designed to deal with the far right. There isn't a single paragraph in the entirety of the prevent strategy

papers. And there are hundreds and hundreds of these papers. And I've read them all, there isn't a single paragraph explaining what the far right is, what they believe, where did they come from. And that is contrasted with the hundreds of pages that the government has spent writing on their understanding, very prejudice understanding, but their understanding of Islam. There are simple signs that someone might be getting radicalized to the far right. They may, for instance, spend more time at the mosque. They might refuse to go to events that conflict with their Islamic religious beliefs. I'm just imagining like the one really overworked guy who works at the prevent call center, who's just getting hundreds of calls a day about Dr. Kuzvani whispering

people is the guy who's overcharging people for soup. There's one thing that interests me though, which is we mentioned sort of like spurious referrals to prevent like people who are referred to prevent by people who have no real reason to be referring them. And that these, these are sort of like sifted out, right? Is I hope there's no like life ruining consequences for being referred to prevent and then prevent just like, Oh yeah, you didn't need to do that. Actually, it's very difficult to tell because it's so secretive. What happens is when people get referred to prevent, if it's considered to be a credible referral, then they're sent to, you know, the actual prevent channel, the panel, I mean, and out of the prevent panel, you can have two outcomes. You can either

be referred to the channel program, the direct callization program, or you get referred to social services or local authorities. And most of the referrals are sent to social services. So things like, you know, somebody needs therapy, they're not extremists, just the need, they just need therapy. I mean, don't we all, but whether it's the special podcasting program. Exactly. But, but we don't really know what happens to those people who have been referred to prevent and what effect being referred to prevent has on their lives, because these things are not secret, they're supposed to be secret, but they're clearly not. Otherwise, we wouldn't know about the cucumber boy, the fortnight boy, we wouldn't know about the girl who said that in

her family, they didn't celebrate Christmas, she was nine years old. And she was also referred to the prevent program. Because of that, we don't know what impact that will have on their lives, because if we know about it, then I can guarantee that their friends and their community will know about it as well. So there is an impact. And who knows what kind of like file, you know, what kind of data that then leads to being kept on that. I know, I know, I know, I know that because Liberty recently published, published an expose that the home office just keeps all of it, every referral database of everyone who's ever been referred regardless of what happens to them. Next time, next time you interact with the state in any capacity, there's the possibility that

that's just going to flash up on the screen, you get pulled over by the police and there's a little terrorism flag on the police national computer, you know, you apply for a job where you have to get a, you know, some kind of like a security clearance or a background check or something. And that's on that too. Yeah. Well, it's because one of the, well, some of the logics of like, especially the home office, right, which is this, because prevent is run out of the home office, this sort of this secret of paranoid culture where you're always worried that if you, if you do anything other than the harshest thing that if anything goes wrong, you and everyone will know it will get immediately fired because the right wing press will be out

for your blood, right? You, of course, they're going to basically keep a database of everyone who has been a little bit too Muslim in public and, and then obviously secure it poorly and then just have it sort of forever and either lose the part of it that said that you nothing, that there was no further action taken, or maybe it's one of these things and the departments like the home office create these files that just because they're so thick, they means that they need to keep being checked and every time they're checked or every time they look at you, that adds a little bit of thickness to the file and it's this kind of surveillance web that it's very, very difficult to escape from that has been put on you for basically no reason.

And I think it is posed as a really fundamental question about the nature of our democracy when you cannot trust the government with our national security and with our well-being in all the possible levels at the moment, because at the end of the day, prevent is a national security strategy. The purpose of it is to keep us safe. It is not doing that and it is fostering conditions that deal, that end up leading to more insecurity, to potentially more threat. See, I would actually almost argue the opposite. Not the opposite is happening, but that a lot of the national security state really isn't to keep you safe. It's actually just to control where the unsafety comes from.

And of course, the most important thing in any government to preserve our phony baloney jobs. No, you're right. It's two perspectives, right? National security should be about our protection, the protection of the people who live in that particular nation state. But in reality, it isn't. It's about control and about power. I also think about this is such a British equivalent to what the security state does in America to sort of preserve and expand its own power. In America, they just love to, you know, again, just call up some lonely guy pretending to be a woman and be like, hey, I'll show you my left boob if you go shoot up a mall and then they can try to stop him and

often won't. See, remember, the guys who were all trying to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, it was revealed they were all either police or police informants who were egging one another on to go do this Cohen Brothers movie plot for no other reason. Like, curiously, that is something that formed a lot of British counterterrorism strategy in Northern Ireland back in the day of just make everyone an informer and that way you know about everything, but also you're complicit in everything and we'll get to the problems with that. You know, when we get to them, we're not going to worry about it. What I mean, I guess, is that I sort of see, I see sort of just these two separate approaches

to accomplishing the same thing, which is really the national security state kind of making this sort of claim that it's we're keeping you safe, but it's we're either keeping you safe from threats that we're imagining or threats that we're literally creating. It really does also highlight like the difference in attitudes between Britain and America where like I feel like in America, they just love to just go go all out and they love to be like, yeah, we're basically going to entrap some people into committing a fake crime so we can send them to jail for like a thousand years. Whereas in Britain, it's kind of like, okay, what we're going to do is for no reason put someone on a list for the rest of their life,

which obligates them to come and have like a meeting at a church hall once a month, where they like talk to a board civil servant about like their vibes. I'm going to force you to be friends with me. Well, Riley, you mentioned creating threats, but like there's a couple of dimensions to that that's striking. One is the sort of the obvious foreign policy thing, which is, you know, invade Iraq, invade Libya, invade Afghanistan, whatever. But also the sort of domestic thing, the thing that interests me about this is the sort of like the aspect of prevent that we've talked about is kind of like a fig leaf, like the social services aspect, the safeguarding aspect,

the things that we know materially can lead to people becoming easier to radicalize, like poverty, for instance. The plan for those things is we can never help them. In fact, those always have to get worse, right? And so anything that prevent does, even if it was entirely well intentioned, which it's not, but even if it were, it would always be playing catch-ups so long as the ideology behind everything else material was no, that has to get worse. That has to get worse. You can't have a fucking, you know, a bus service or whatever. You can't have a job. But what you're not allowed to do is to show any kind of sort of disrespect. What we need to consider as well is that prevent is incredibly successful

around the world. And by that, I mean that it's incredibly popular. Prevent has been the inspiration for the U.S.'s countering violent extremism program under President Obama. Countering violent extremism around Europe and European countries as well has completely been inspired by prevent. Within counterterrorism circles, prevent is this beautiful, shiny thing that is extremely successful and everybody wants to copy and everybody has copied. And I think that is so fascinating because it is a policy that has never really worked, that people on the ground have been saying it doesn't work. It's been criticised over and over and over again. And yet, it's still being sold and showcased around the world as the gold standard.

What's really instructive to that is also that like they've never, the British government, have never had to prove that it's like worked either. And every time you sort of just say, hey, because when I was doing journalism on this, I spent kind of two years trying to cover the prevent me and just failing at every obstacle and then being convinced that I was a really bad reporter when it just sort of turned out. But no, the way that you sort of get access to prevent circles is if your friends with government ministers or if one of the departments wants you to sort of do a puff piece, which is why the most critical articles about prevent are either ones that come out of leaks, accidental leaks, which tend to be anecdotes anyway,

or they tend to be these puff pieces about show up in the Times and the Telegraph about being invited to a channel meeting or being invited to a de-radicalisation workshop. And then when you find out that a lot of this was orchestrated by the Home Office and given to their special home correspondence, that was the big strategy between 2014 to 2017. I think it's changed a little bit now where they become even more secretive. A lot of that has come when the Home Office centralised prevent in 2011. So where you had prevent has never been perfect. It's been far from it. The first iteration prevent was very kind of community driven, which had its own problems. But when it kind of went into the Home Office, it became much more ideologically driven

as far as I could tell. And it was one where if you sort of question the logics of prevent or how it worked, you would either have people invested in prevent telling you that you had no idea what you were talking about, but actually, no, I'm not going to explain to you how this works. Or you would have commentators. That's emotional labour. But if you then you'd have commentators and columnists and think tank ideologs, often they're the same people meshed together who still use the same lines now, which is like, oh, if you're anti-prevent, then what you're doing is actually just Islamist sympathy. And you're kind of legitimising their view because a lot of the cases what prevent, and I think I would write in Murray, you kind of both touched on this,

it was the idea of prevent in the ideological state is one where they're trying to save up all this like Islamist ideology that you kind of whether that means like however legitimate that is, like it is not as kind of like rewarding long term is like, you know, the Western environment that you exist in. However, it's really hard to make that case when like in a time of austerity, when like you see your community like degrading and falling apart and realizing that you don't have any opportunities and no one in power wants to make that any better. It's really hard to make that case. So then you have like the columnists and like the think tank ideologs who basically ignore all this and will kind of say that any

kind of like criticism of prevent and the prevent program as it is, or even just like his ideological underpinnings is ceding to the Islamists and what needs to happen is prevent needs to be expanded. And that also means giving my think tank more resources to get more investment into it. It's so immune to criticism that like these sort of de-radicalization workshops sort of still go unremarked upon even though it's a terrorist attack at one of them. Yes. It's the it's the classic example we talk about sort of it's been exported widely even though it's not a failure from the perspective of what sort of the security state wants. I'm hearing only successes, which is the security state needs there to be some attacks because otherwise

their phony baloney jobs don't exist. They don't get justify having more power, but they also need to have they need to have more power because the thing exists to get more power and exist to get more power to spy on you and exist to get more power to fuck with your life to make you go check in to make you fill in a form to get that file bigger on you. Are any of us old enough to remember when members of the security services walked the Manchester Arena bomber through security at a UK airport because I do remember that. The thing about that was that we needed some sort of tamed jihadists to to fight in Libya a war of choice that we sort of started and we we assumed that we could control them forever. And the thing about that is there are no lessons from history that

might have taught us otherwise. None. And therefore it's a totally forgivable lapse. A guy at MI6 who's doing Ariana Grande guerrilla marketing. I have two wonderful recently vacant lots in lower Manhattan to sell you. I don't know why they're there or why they're vacant, but boy do I have them to sell you. So this is this is this is sort of all comes around right to this fact that I think actually prevent is very successful because it's a program of no oversight that has enabled the security state to massively tighten its control kind of based on whatever it feels like doing. And you know the the press creates bogeymen all the time for it spent the last 20 years creating sort of a Muslim bogeyman. But now if you read The Guardian you have a you

have someone you can refer to the cops as well maybe more rightly who can say. But nevertheless it is these it's the it's the it's the it's the same ideology. It's the same security state ideology of control. And I mean if you look at it in history right it's it's in 2000 the terrorism law is created in response to Northern Ireland. In 2003 the first contest law is created in response to 9 11 remains secret. Then after the 7 7 attacks Maria I'm quoting from your thesis here in the aftermath of the attacks Tony Blair gave a speech claiming that the rules of the game had changed the country was facing an evil ideology a battle of hearts ideas and minds and now is the time to defend common values which is a theme that comes up again and again. And that speech then

gets written into prevent 2006 which basically says terrorism as we conceive of it is a foreign problem that comes into the UK through Muslim channels and is a threat that is bent on destroying the way we live for no reason that we can fathom it is simply deranged evil. I am extremely touched that you read my thesis it's like you and three other people so thank you for that. He's actually got some notes for you if you can't oh please go ahead they'll be nicer than my examiners who are like I think we're you're exaggerating a bit Maria it's not that bad so I have to admit somebody worked that bad. This reminds me of something Nate once said to me which is that when he was on his creative writing MFA he wrote a story about some high school kids

in Indiana in the 90s which is where he grew up and went to school in the 90s and they said to tone down the homophobia in the kids conversations because it's not realistic and he was like buddy. Yeah so I think it all goes to history and history that I also didn't cover on my thesis but I'm covering on the book that I've just finished writing which I'm provisionally called Empire of Terror which is just looking at how the UK has dealt with terrorism since the time of the Empire. Great title by the way. I think it's good too so if any Asians are listening or publishers you know let me know I have a good title and a good book for you but what I what I look at that book is that when the Terrorism Act 2000 happened it was the first time the UK had

a permanent piece of legislation dealing with terrorism previously we had provisional pieces of legislation dealing with the threat Northern Ireland but before that we had terrorism legislation in the colonies it was how the British Empire dealt with any kind of dissent in the colonies you know the British in India used to shoot people out of cannons that they considered to be terrorist it was called canoning it was quite a thing and there is a lot of records that that I have looked at where you have empire officials talking about all these people who are against the British Empire in India they are all terrorists and people complain about us using the word terrorists but that's because they don't know what it means we know what it means we know

a terrorist when we see one I'm paraphrasing but that's basically what they say in very posh language so this idea of the terrorist being an other a foreign other that is posing some kind of a challenge to the state to the British state is as old as the empire and it has filtered through the centuries really has filtered through every iteration of terrorism legislation that UK has had and has culminated in the prevent duty what we have today because Maria are you saying that a method of colonial repression has made its way back to the metropolis that's just talking isn't it because that is wild at the core it's all about nation building right it's about saying who are the good people who are the good brits and who are the outsiders

the empire was not just about colonizing the colonies but also about reasserting an idea of Britishness of British identity respect for British values exactly it was about British values back then it is about British values now it has always been the same so I argue that the prevent strategy in particular and the UK counterterrorism strategy as a whole is just an extension of the empire it's a modern tool of the empire and in many ways it's highly depressing because it has been happening for over a hundred years and I personally don't see a way especially with the kind of government that we have in power of stopping it I don't see a way to stop it into the heart of Africa I was most disheartened to discover that many of the natives did not

understand the key concepts of sportsmanly conduct in cricket and for that reason we're going to shoot them out of cannons which was the thing they actually did so but it's it's it's you should talk about this as something an empire is doing it's something that a one it's something that a a sort of a crumbling a crumbling and very insecure feeling empire does because we've decided that there are sort of the community the community of acceptable people is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and more and more and more paranoid and the security state is promising to protect this shrinking community from a growing pool of threats it's a losing battle it's a losing battle because what they're doing in the end is that they're fighting

reality you know they're going against reality we love that I mean it's Britain oh boy what are you saying that British people are fighting people that they have that exist in their head they're fighting for a world that entirely exists in their own mind it's not real and I'm saying that they are fighting against reality in the sense that they are fighting a losing battle you know what they are trying to to create with this this idea of an insular Britain you know with the proper British people and the foreigners are all outside it's not a reality it has never been a reality but it's even less of a reality now and that's what they are trying to impose through these measures and it is going to fail eventually it's going to fail but until it gets to that point the amount

of suffering that is going to cause to people the amount of damage and I'm very clear in this in my work in general that this is a type of violence we we we can joke about it and we do joke about it because it is so absurd is ridiculous but what prevent does it commits a form of violence against a certain group of people and it is state sanctioned violence that is being dressed up as safeguarding and it's all a process of nation building and social control and about increasing the security state and it is so harmful and it is still ongoing because it is touted as this great success because it does what they wanted to do right which is control people something I also find interesting of I mean aside from the aspects of it which are obviously like deliberately malign and the other

aspects of it which are inadvertently malign um there's this there's a very intriguing aspect of like sloppiness to it where like they're like well we're not going to bother to define what a terrorist is it's like you're writing a law like I love the politicians who are just like oh lawyers fucking nerds they're always trying to define what stuff is and what it means they're fucking losers go read a book you always want to have this sort of state of permanent exception right like that's you always want to have this thing where terrorism is such a unique evil that even a law that deals with uh like evils regularly has to place it in its own separate category and it requires special measures and then it requires you to do you know not really fully

define what those measures might be so you can keep tinkering and adding to them we need to get all this red tape out of the lawmaking process but also we want if we want to talk about I want to go back to this idea of fantasy because essentially what we've done is we've written a fantasy into the law and this happens numerous times right we've written the fantasy into the law that by controlling people's affect by controlling what they can say and how they can present themselves and stuff uh through yeah a network of paranoid snitches that you can sort of fight the effects of say alienation and poverty and all this stuff but also which way again constantly making worse we have to make worse because if you try not to make it worse that's also terrorism

but uh that we also say right uh they talk a lot about foreign policy in the 2006 paper where we say yes that the threat come to the uk comes from different quarters this is from the from their paper terrorists inspired by islamist extremism may have come from british communities in recent years terrorist suspects investigated in the uk have come originally from countries as diverse as libya algeria jordan saudi arabia iraq samalia and elsewhere the first action to counter radicalization lies in addressing structural problems in the uk and elsewhere that may contribute to radicalization in the uk this forms part of the government's broader equality agenda and again yeah we just don't do the equality agenda then but you say that it's there

so you know but second here's the foreign policy bit comes in is they say is they say look terrorism is problem problem that comes from abroad people are fighting us despite the fact that we're helpfully intervening in their countries and you say it sounds like i'm i'm sort of exaggerating or joking but barely britain is like microsoft clippy it just shows up and it's like it seems like you're trying to have some democracy so here's here's here's the paragraph uh some argue that the west does not apply consistent standards in its international behavior conflicts such as bosnia and cheshire are cited and it's a fucking weasel fucking way of going like if you if you object to you know bombing libya or whatever in fact you're actually just pushing

for more rules based international order so but what they say right is that is that if addressing that maybe uh their western nations are the main aggressors here that terrorism isn't just this evil ideology up from abroad that hates us for reasons purely within the ideology that comes from abroad and is muslim basically right they they have to say us and uk action in iraq to remove a serious threat to international security and subsequently promote a democratic and pluralist government which is going great it was certainly pluralist in the sense of there are lots of people vying to control the territory sometimes portrayed as a tax on islam itself regardless of the actual rationale for the action so it's like it's living in the other fantasy where you get to decide how

the invasion of iraq and afghanistan get interpreted by everyone around the world what's an invasion between friends and i mean there's also this other domestic aspect of this that i want to talk about really quickly which is like why would you think that britain is you know an institutionally islamophobic or institutionally hostile to you place uh you know not taking into account the successive governments being sort of sheepdogs buy various sort of tabloids and in order to like appease them while they publish sort of naked islamophobia going back to that thing in iraq i mean that's that's bad and it is really bad this from 2006 isn't it my favorite comes from the 2009 strategy when they're talking about what happened in guantanamo bay and an abu grave

you know the very clear torture happening there and the way that they frame it in in the text is like some may argue that the treatment of detainees was not up to the standards of human rights and like what some may argue some may argue that the torture of people some terrorists may argue that way so it's fucking pussies everything is presented as everything that could implicate the west in any way when it comes to the motivations of terrorists is presented as a conditional rust everything else is presented as fact interestingly interestingly by the way uh that 2009 strategy uh that is where saji java got the law to strip shemima beguma for citizenship and cause the death of her baby it was the gordon browns 2009 prevent prevent review

that added that the ability to strip citizenship from someone who's deemed to be a terrorist threat to the country can i just add a quick um note to that it's yes the strategy proposed it the change in law came in 2014 which is in the british nationality act um which amended the british nationality act the immigration act 2014 amended the british nationality act which meant that you can deprive someone of their citizenship even if they don't have a second citizenship before that you could you could remove somebody of their remove their citizen british citizenship if they had a second citizenship already but the change that came directly as you said from that um argument through prevent it came in 2014 is what allowed for shemima beguma

to be deprived of her citizenship because she doesn't have another one but because she could potentially get one then um then that's why um it was it was removed that whole thing about deprivation of citizenship is ridiculous it's it's it the government is gaslighting people on it because what happens with citizenship right is that um you cannot be a stateless being stateless is an is against a geneva convention so the way that the government has gotten around this is that it's argued and it's argued that in court because it has gone as far as the uk supreme court to say that it is not us it's not us the state that isn't making you stateless you are making yourself stateless because you could apply for a second citizenship you just haven't done so yet once

again the deputy heads stuff like it's your own time you're wasting exactly that's exactly that is that the wall doesn't need your support it's the i found this particularly interesting on a number of levels both because a if you genuinely think that shemima begum is a dangerous international terrorist like you can literally let her back into the country and immediately put her in jail like that is like the way in which she doesn't go to jail is you don't let her back into the country so the security argument just doesn't hold up to any like again leaving aside any moral questions here i'm not suggesting that shemima begum is a genuinely dangerous terrorist but if if you believe that surely you want to put that person in jail right in which case the easiest

thing to do would be to let her back into the country where you could quite reasonably again reasonably in a legal sense prosecute her under a number of laws about taking part in terrorist activity and put her in jail where she would be under your supervision no but that's the problem that doesn't fit with the fantasy you can't put them in jail anymore they have big they have big tallies so yeah it's like an all day camp she'd be watching bmv videos in wormwood scrubs i'm sure there's going to come as a complete surprise to all of you but um the number of people who have been deprived of their citizenship is a secret you can there is it's not widely available there is an estimate of about 20 people that we know of were deprived of their

citizenship most of them were muslim and they were deprived of their citizenship without having a second citizenship as well so they were made stateless until they sorted themselves out and it's the the thing that's i mean it's all bad but none of those people were charged with any crimes before they were they had their citizenship removed they were had the citizenship removed at the discretion of the home secretary without any kind of due diligence yeah maria have you considered that these people might have had bad vibes i mean i'm sure they did clearly otherwise they would still be british well like one thing to remember is also like there are also there were also very there were some organizations that did like make a note of this like one very notable

organization that still kind of does a lot of work in this area happens to be cage like former cage prisoners um and like one of the things that kind of every time they sort of mentioned this like one of the things that was always kind of come back is that well okay cage are islamist sympathizers and therefore everything they say like if you kind of even even if you sort of point it out and like there were journalists like peace robin for example who pointed this out which is like you know if this organization has like discovered evidence that the state is kind of like stripping people of citizenship without like and we're with like these secret trials or without like even any sort of like public oversight like this is a really bad thing for

democracy and journalists should like maybe consider covering it and it was this remarkable cow like even during even during my time covering like the prevent me and stuff how like i sort of knew that there were certain people that if i quote certain organizations including cage that if i quoted um like my addresses would like either spike the piece or just get rid of it entirely like and it just i mean it kind of on the one hand is like very much this thing and we've spoken about this in so many contexts before about journalists who are just like massively curious about how the state works right and that they're also kind of super aware that their jobs are all dependent on proximity and access to power and that means like not kind of questioning

any sort of the structural forces of how the state actually works particularly in an area of the state where like it kind of increasingly keeps getting like very well funded and also like very well protected within the home office um and then the other part just being that like reported like media just can't really conceive of this type of stuff happening um and because of like how prevent is structured and because of how secretive is kept as Maria mentioned like it's literally impossible to like do any kind of meaningful like FOIA request on them um it means that like these types of very abject demonstrations of the punitive nature of the state are just kind of even kind of unknown to most of the public or not really contextualized in the right way

I definitely think that like spy cops is also a very good example of this like an investigation that is still ongoing and there's like one journalist at the Guardian who's like still kind of doing this work um and very and you know there was like a spy cop since there was a spy cop story that came out like a few days ago um and like no one really paid attention to it so I think it must be really difficult to be a Guardian columnist a Guardian journalist who like wants to investigate this stuff you're like frantically typing what on your laptop while your editor tries to drill through the hard drive from the other side but I think it goes it goes down to the fact that sort of everyone doing this all the politicians

making the laws about it and most of the people writing about it and telling you about it basically are just extensions of the security state and in this case it is trying to project this fantasy this strange world where all of the things that the brit that the british state wishes were true were true because much like our discussion of that the home office it kind of takes the same shape which is where new labor comes and believes that through sort of closer and finer grained knowledge about what everyone's doing and with more or less unlimited and poorly defined powers to do what they want they can kind of fix problems technocratically and then the Tories come in and use those tools to bash the over to window open and uh much further to the right so you know this

example of when god closes the door he opens an over some window that's right right because the new labor mindset was always that there's them bible the the new labor mindset was that there is no problem they can't solve if they simply had enough authority and information to do so right and so this is how you get something like prevent this strange this strange unaccountable thing that just sort of collects information on people and shunts them off into different directions that now by the way is being sort of fast tracked in the the review of it is being fast tracked in the in the sort of wake of the killing of david amos even though the guy was referred to but now it's referred to prevent like nothing happened obviously and so they're fast tracking it to

sort of as i understand it and i'm sort of happy to be corrected by maria on this they're fast tracking it to make it much more copish that's as you guys can obviously because the camera is not on but i am again banging my head against the desk because how many reviews of prevent have we had by now you know how many more are we gonna have it's it's it's ridiculous and a lot of the thing that is powering this review as well as this again fantasy this absurdity that prevent is dealing too much with the far right it's like what where'd you guys get that from i'd like to know because it's it's just absurd and um i don't hold any faith on any prevent review because every prevent review to date and this one is no exception has not spoken to any expert on prevent other than

the experts of prevent that are you know state sanctioned they have not spoken they don't care really what we have to say people like me and so many others who have worked on this for so many years and we're not just doing this because we like to trash the government we do it because we care about national security we care about human rights we care about care about national security sounds a bit insane doesn't it but like we care about the world being a safe place and we want national security strategy that is effective but also that protects people and doesn't turn them into terrorists just because they are brown or go to pray in the middle of the day but i have no faith in any review of prevent that does not speak to the experts and i don't mean that they have to

invite me personally i mean i would love that but any expert that works in prevent should be able to participate in the review and to date they haven't so i don't hold any faith on what's going to happen well if we want to talk briefly also about like enough of experts who who um who is able to sort of talk and work around prevent it's one of the other things it does one of the other reasons why it's so unassailable in addition to creating the problems that the natsite community wants to solve and the way that they want to solve them as opposed to in the ways that they actually exist is that also it's like it's um it is absolutely a massive money hole for like the quilliam the henry jackson society and stupor strategic dialogue a lot of de radicalization

guys strategic dialogue what do they do i even or even a strategic dialogue yeah who's saying you mentioned you mentioned uh tech against terrorism where they have an ai platform designed to identify extremist material on the internet um that like would never never got used it seems like you're being muslim i don't think it was tech against terrorism i think it was another organization that sounded a lot like them who had like so the government invested i think like kind of 600 000 pounds into a type of ai that was designed to like um to like indicate and get rid of like potentially extremist material again like you know this was from a buzzfeed article where they didn't like disclose any like details though to how like it defined extremist terms or like

how it will work and stuff like that it was but what seemed to be the case was that they invested a lot of money into this british startup and no platform like facebook twitter and stuff like but no platform like was willing to take it up so they basically wasted a bunch of money which likely like some of it likely came from prevent to to like uh try to champion the software that has no proof of like it working and like i was like trying to look up to see what happened to it and then i just can't waste prevents money that's good i do more of that yeah but well but what i was going to say was that like these think tanks and stuff like they definitely do and again like because like the funding structure is so shady and so um hard to trace like they will

kind of take prevent money from because prevent is multi-agency it means that like they can take money from like different departments that are still like technically prevent money but it doesn't kind of you can't really trace it as such right so it's really difficult to actually figure out how much prevent money is being used where and why and why and why is nephra spending 600 grand on counter radicalization algorithms i think you know why then at the same time and again everyone's packing around here but at the same time and again this came from a leak in the garden a couple of years ago you have like units like the research information and communications unit in the home office they said cool which which is also linked to prevent and what they were doing

was then like leasing where they were kind of like contracting services to a company called breakthrough media um you know it was this very big store was a big story in like ct spaces but didn't really get much kind of play in like other areas as you can imagine because british media is entirely incurious um but it was like this shape is organization that operated out of like this kind of um very suspect building in war salute um and i've been there because they were trying to hire me like very very funny so like you know that's a curious bastards is that anything that's right so it's like this really dodgy room where like they're like oh yeah we're kind of a content producer and we're like producing content for marginalized communities um they showed me around

a bit and like some of the websites they were looking at were things like muslims with a z at the end which is how you definitely know but like yeah this is this is this is like yeah this this is like a side upgrade so basically it's like what george smiley turns a chair around is like hello fellow muslims right they were trying to basically they were trying to do basically like a buzzfeed listicle website where um the whole name was like remember this where the whole name was like which of the five pairs are you where we're like to empower like british muslim women and stuff and then like a week after i turned down the job because like it was just like really suspicious to me the guardian like releases this article which is like oh yeah by the way this is

like a rick who related project um and like so it's kind of being centrally funded by the home office but we don't know how much is being funded by and we don't really know like who's it's like this this listicle costs 300 000 pounds but the article but the article like very the article like found documents from breakthrough media where it basically very openly said that like our job is to basically kind of like um because it was modeled on like cold war like propaganda units right like media propaganda units so the whole thing was like the whole thing was like you know we're doing the whole like changing hearts and minds thing we're challenging like you know a radical ideology with one of like tolerance and liberalism and like our content is all kind of

breached around that um so they weren't kind of like direct they weren't trying to hide the fact that they were like being funded by prefen but they were trying to obscure it and i think like one thing to bear in mind about had buzzfeed the soviet union would have collapsed in 1920 that's right that's that's newsroom season four baby um but like like you know that's i think it's like an important for like listeners to understand this which is that like one of the big issues about prevent is just how like they sort of operate in plain sight but they operate in such an obscure way but it makes it almost impossible to like really critique it right so even like even kind of like counterterrorism consultants who are always like sort of batting for prevent on twister and stuff

they will kind of you know so so maria like mentioned the the the cucumber cook a bomb story like there were i remember when that story broke how many like ct kind of consultants came on twitter to be like oh this is like inaccurate reporting they weren't actually reported to prevent they were simply just kind of like you know uh they were um they were notified that there could be like a problem and then they were like referred to like uh they were referred to their head teachers and then their head teachers made the call um and you know they weren't actually kind they basically they were making the argument that they weren't really preferred referred to prevent but they were referred to like channel which is something completely different but they

weren't denying that that was the case and like because of the level of obscurity and because it's like even even as like someone who has spent you know i'm sure like i don't know if maria feels the same way but as like someone who like tried to kind of cover this for two years and then left the job extremely stressed out and like physically sick for months right like it is such a hard thing to kind of get your head around and i think like it is it is it is by design but it's built that way because i think once you sort of like really nail down how this is effective and like how this actually operates you kind of realize that you know again we sort of mentioned that like this is all kind of built on this very these are all built on like mirages and mirages that no one really buys into

and no one's really convinced of and what's interesting now about prevent having to sort of deal with the far-right radicalization and like you know nationalist groups even even like you know eco-activist groups and stuff is that you can kind of really see how ideologically ideologically structured prevent is and how like it's completely inadequate not only to like not only in trying to solve the problem that it's set out to do but also just like in terms of even conceiving what of what like a radical or a threat to the state is i agree with you completely i am exhausted of working on prevent for so long because you just keep on hitting walls over and over again and um and i'm also it's one of the reasons why i'm moving my research away from prevent towards

you know the balmy relaxing models of white nationalism in the uk because it's essentially what i'm doing is switching the focus from looking at how the states is approaching the issue to you you know looking more at how the issue is a problem in the first place but um but because it is it when you work in this field it can be so exhausting because the layers of secrecy the layers of misinformation that you get told from the government as well i cannot tell you how many times i've had freedom of information requests denied because to release them with aiding and abetting terrorism when i'm just asking simple questions it's you do hit a wall and it is exhausting and no wonder people move away from it it's important to remain

aware of what's going on but it's not going to change anytime soon so it's not like our knowledge is going to become obsolete and there is a lot of work that can be done on prevent if you're not even if you're not explicitly working on the policy because working on the policy side and with the the state is just ridiculously exhausting the thing is maria asking questions and wanting to understand things and how they work is fundamentally contrary to british values that is true in that respect they are absolutely right that was part of the life of the uk test i did years ago and i i got that question wrong then and i still do um but it's it's something like where um you know i i think maybe we can think that maybe did this new review uh will be uh

effective in making uh prevent more effective in humane let me just look at the biography let me one more let me look at the biography of william schockross uh formerly of the henry jackson society who's now leading the independent review of prevent his most recent book published called lemmingham let me see here i assume this will be good justice in the enemy nuremberg 9 11 in the trial of khalid sheik muhammed looks like nish kuma's reading something else thank god that man's not an mp nish came close there anyway so i i think we can say yeah it's uh it is it is it is the machine that builds itself that um in a very british way this machine sucks itself off in a very british way it learned how to do it how to rib remove in a very british

way it is a sort of a thing that is there just to um enforce misery and uh sort of extend as you guys we say colonial violence uh in the service of a fantasy um and that is just more of how britain is a dream it's not a real place um cool so with all that being said i want to say maria thank you so much for coming and talking to us today i had a very good time discussing a very uh unpleasant issue it was upbeat yeah we managed to keep it upbeat yeah thank you so much for having me i also had a really good time it's important to talk about these things even though they are exhausting but it's also good to talk to people about these things so it's not just me yelling at the walls in my office about it so it's it's good to to to hear other voices other than

my own right you could have heard so many more voices if you'd have made that no no no no cut his mic it's possible there were more people here than you first thought no um so with all that being said uh don't forget we have a patreon second episode every week cost five dollars a month uh you could afford that it's like you can subscribe to it yeah and maybe lose your virginity to sas mom yeah well look there's so many layers look you can look look right you can either subscribe on patreon or you can subscribe using a special commemorative five pound coin just mail it to us you will take a special commemorative five pound coin you will have to mail us another five pound coin every month though so yeah do be aware of that can i put in and plug my own podcast before

i forget oh please thank you so i have a podcast called enemies of the people and it's basically about extremism in the 21st century and it's me in conversation with authors policy makers experts people in general working in the field or experiencing the world that we live in so it's it's really about how are we living in a fascist society and how can we fix it and um i'd love it if you check it out i am on a mission to leapfrog nigel farage in the uk politics podcast charts and last time i checked we were enemies of the people on 32nd place in the rankings and he's in 31st so i am going to beat him i am going to get away with it get his ass get his ass i will with your help so please check it out i'll be another sad day for nigel farage uh stood in front of a

seven inch tv with a pine nigel farage being referred to prevent for endorsing the ira that's right uh man when he eventually finds out the queen died he's gonna have such a sad little personal funeral at his house yeah um anyway uh i'm very hungry i'd like to go to eat some dinner so maria thank you again very much everybody check that out we will have a link in the description to enemies of the people otherwise i will see you in a few days on the premium bye