Prevent has ‘increased distrust’
An £80m programme to tackle radicalisation in Muslim communities has increased distrust of local authorities and failed to tackle deep-seated problems, a committee of MPs heard yesterday.
In the first evidence session of the communities and local government committee's inquiry into Preventing violent extremism, committee members were told that policies to equip local authorities to deal with radicalisation were failing and that preventing terrorism should be left to security forces.
Ratna Lachman, director of racial justice organisation Just West Yorkshire, said that it was critical that institutions start to view Muslims as service users and that asking local authorities to deliver the government's preventing extremism agenda was sending out mixed messages to communities.
She claimed that a lot of young Muslims refused to engage with local authority youth workers for fear of being referred to the police-led Channel project, which is aimed at potential terrorists. 'I think that the local authorities are between a rock and a hard place,' she said.
Ms Lachman added that some local authorities were uncomfortable with the Prevent agenda, including several areas of west Yorkshire with large Muslim communities, and had not participated fully in the programme. 'The reason they have done it is they do not think there is an issue,' she told MPs.
But she praised the approach of communities secretary John Denham, to tackling British nationalism by starting a dialogue through the £12m connecting communities scheme. She said that if a fraction of that money was used to start a dialogue and provide diversionary activities, the resulting programme would be 'more powerful and potent than what we are doing now'.
Other witnesses claimed that failings in race equality policies in the 1980s had created an institutional Islamophobia and that the opportunity to tackle communities' feelings of alienation was missed at the time of the Cantle review in 2001.
Massoud Shadjarah, chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, said a lack of understanding of people of the Islamic faith in education and other public services had helped to create this disengagement.
He added that using local authorities as an interface with communities had failed and that the promotion of community cohesion was being mixed up with tackling extremism. 'Now we have a policy that is alienating people,' he said.
Prevent is a policy that is led across government by the Home Office. Its aim is 'to stop radicalisation, reduce support for terrorism and violent extremism and discourage people from becoming terrorists'.
The committee's inquiry will examine the effectiveness of the Prevent programme to date and in the future, and explore whether it is the right way of addressing the problem of violent extremism in communities and has been appropriately targeted.
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