Far-right terrorist convictions have grown more than 15-fold since 2016, contradicting the argument for a greater focus on ‘Islamist’ activity. It is time for a reality check, says Huw Davies.

First published in Summer 2023 issue of Searchlight magazine

Pic credits: Counter Terrorism Policing North East/West Midlands Police/Metropolitan Police (names listed end of article)

A steady procession of far-right extremists going through the courts facing terrorism charges once again raises serious concerns about the Shawcross review of the Prevent programme and the direction in which it might take official action against terrorism and extremism.

The controversial, long-awaited report on Prevent, the government’s counter-terrorism programme, conducted by William Shawcross was published in February. Shawcross, previously criticised for anti-Muslim comments, was appointed by the then Home Secretary Priti Patel. From the outset it was predicted that the review would seek to drive the programme towards a greater but unwarranted focus on Islamic extremism. Indeed, many feared that this was the intention from the outset. And the report has done little to assuage those fears.

More than 500 civil liberties groups, Muslim-led civil society organisations and individuals vowed to boycott the review even before it was published, citing ‘serious concerns about bias’.

Following its release, The People’s Review of Prevent – a project run by Prevent Watch, an independent community-funded organisation that supports individuals and groups negatively impacted by Prevent – published a detailed, critical response highlighting the many shortcomings of the report.

The People’s Review argued that there was no secure basis for Shawcross’s recommendations and that ‘the evidence utilised in the report would in fact support different conclusions’.

A coalition of 17 human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, also boycotted the review expressing ‘grave concern’ over the appointment of William Shawcross as the reviewer, given his previous record of anti-Muslim statements.

The long-running criticisms of Prevent are manifold. Many human rights groups have argued extensively that the programme is discriminatory and that it disproportionately impacts Muslims across the UK.

One of the fundamental fears of the human rights groups was that the review would attempt to whitewash the Prevent strategy and give it a ‘clean bill of health, without interrogating, in good faith, its impacts on human rights and fundamental freedoms’. In reality, the review went even further, arguing that the programme has insufficient focus on ‘Islamist extremism’ and an excessive focus on right-wing extremism.

‘Insulting’

Shawcross has been accused of failing in his role as independent reviewer of Prevent by attending only 0.4% of the review panels charged with examining the more extreme cases identified by Prevent.

Indeed, much of the Shawcross review reads like a piece of right-wing ideological propaganda, a sentiment echoed by Britain’s former top counter terrorism officer, Neil Basu, of the Metropolitan Police, who said that parts of the report were ‘insulting’ to professionals whose job it is to avert terrorist attacks in Britain.

The conclusions that Shawcross makes in his review are simply not supported by the evidence.

One key claim made by Shawcross is that Prevent’s definition drawn for ‘Islamist’ extremism is too broad and in the case of right-wing terrorism it is too narrow. This, he says, means that Prevent does not accurately reflect ‘the lethal risks we actually face’. In effect, Shawcross is suggesting that because of this Prevent currently focuses disproportionately on far right extremism.

The problem here is that the facts contradict his assertions. If we take 2021–22, the last year for which data are available, 13% of all referrals to Prevent were adopted into Channel, the more intensive avenue of support provided for the most serious cases in which individuals are at greatest risk of extremism or radicalisation. Of these, 19% were for ‘Islamist’ extremism and 42% were for far-right extremism. However, the proportion of all referrals for both groups was broadly similar: 16% for Islamist extremism and 20% for right-wing extremism.

One glaring issue is Shawcross’s almost complete lack of discussion of right-wing extremism. He lists terror cases that he describes as ‘Islamist in nature’ as evidence that Prevent has failed in its duty and, by implication, that ‘Islamist’ extremism is what is slipping through the net. There is no mention here of any of the numerous, recent arrests and violent acts committed by right-wing actors.

Growing convictions

Official figures released by the Home Office in June show that the number of far-right terror convicts in UK prisons is increasing. At the end of March, there were 65 individuals in custody for crimes motivated by ‘extreme right wing’ ideology, eight higher than the equivalent figure 12 months earlier.

This represents an enormous leap from March 2016 when just four far right inmates were recorded. Since the report’s release in February, at least 12 far-right extremism cases have come before the UK courts, for terror related offences:

• Kurt McGowan of Workington, Cumbria, convicted in February of sharing instructions for making weapons and explosives. Sentenced to 7 years
• Sejr Forster from Norwich, a neo-nazi and army recruit. Convicted in February for possessing bomb making instructions. Awaiting sentence
• Nicholas Roddis from Rotherham, sentenced to 4 years for breaching terrorist notification requirements and possessing ammunition. Had previously been sentenced to 7 years in 2009 for terrorism offences
• Vaughan Dolphin from Walsall, jailed for 8 and a half years in May for possessing instruction manuals for making guns and explosives. He had caused an explosion in his aunt’s kitchen as he tried to create an explosive device
• Ashley Prosiad-Sharp, a Hitler-worshipping prison officer from Barnsley, convicted for the possession and dissemination of terrorist material and possession of weapons
• Kristofer Kearney, a Patriotic Alternative member, pleaded guilty to disseminating terrorist publications online. Sentenced to two concurrent terms of 4 years and 8 months
• Darren Reynolds, a right-wing conspiracy theorist from Sheffield, convicted on eight counts of terrorist offences relating to the destruction of 5G masts. He was also in possession of a crossbow with bolts, a replica assault rifle and a booklet called How to Become an Assassin
• Luke Skelton, nazi sympathiser from Washington, Tyne and Wear, convicted in May of preparing to commit terrorism and possessing bomb ingredients. Four years in prison
• Ben Styles of Leamington, ‘obsessed with far-right wing ideologies’, pleaded guilty in June to collecting terrorism material and possession of an illegal weapon. He was trying to manufacture a machine-gun and ammunition. Awaiting sentence
• An unnamed 17-year-old youth from South Wales pleaded guilty in June to disseminating terrorist material and distributing material likely to be useful in the preparation for terrorism. Awaiting sentence
• Christopher Gibbons of Carshalton and Tyrone Patten-Walsh from Romford, who hosted nazi podcasts, convicted in July of encouraging terrorism. Gibbons was also found guilty of disseminating terrorist publications Both awaiting sentence.

Discriminatory

Bear in mind that these are the most extreme examples: this list does not include a number of right-wing extremists convicted of non-terrorist but nevertheless serious offences involving behaviour that might also be referred to Prevent.

The original call for an independent review of Prevent came in 2016 from the then Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, David Anderson KC. In evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee, he expressed concerns that the way the Prevent programme was operating was sowing mistrust and fear in the Muslim community. He also raised worries that elements of the programme were being applied in an insensitive and discriminatory manner.

Shawcross was never the person to address these concerns. He has expressed anti-Muslim views in the past and is affiliated with neo-conservative think-tanks. His review has simply brushed Anderson’s concerns aside and proposed a more anti-Muslim focus belied by much of the evidence presented to him and, as shown in this article, is now contradicted by the evidence of cases going through the courts.

If Prevent is to be genuinely effective, then the original review called for by David Anderson KC is still very much needed. In the meantime, if Shawcross’s report results in the tilt that he was obviously seeking, there is a danger that radicalisation towards right-wing terrorism, at present the greater danger, will slip under the radar. There may be a price to pay for that.

Pick of the terrorist crop – pictured above are

Top row (l to r): Kurt McGowan, Sejr Forster, Kristofer Kearney and Darren Reynolds

Second row (l to r): Nicholas Roddis, Vaughan Dolphin, Luke Skelton and Ben Styles

Bottow row (l to r) : Hitler-worshipping prison officer Ashley Prosiad-Sharp, Christopher Gibbons and Tyrone Patten-Walsh

Concerns over falling birth rates and high immigration loomed large at the recent National Conservatism conference in London. Star turn, Conservative MP Miriam Cates, is exercised by both. But what’s the connection?  David Edgar sifts through the rhetoric

First published in the Summer 2023 issue of Searchlight magazine

 Credit: National Conservatism You Tube channel

The two big stories to emerge from the National Conservatism conference in London in May were Jacob Rees-Mogg’s admission that voter ID was an attempt at gerrymandering (unsuccessful from his point of view, as it suppressed the older Conservative vote), and Douglas Murray’s claim that nazism was merely ‘mucking up’ patriotism (‘I don’t see why no one should be allowed to love their country because the Germans mucked up twice in a century’).

The NatCon conference was organised by the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF), set up in 2019 by far-right Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony around a ‘Statement of Principles’, which begins: ‘We are citizens of Western nations who have watched with alarm as the traditional beliefs, institutions, and liberties underpinning life in the countries we love have been progressively undermined and overthrown.’

Often ill-attended, the conference’s speakers included the ambitious Home Secretary Suella Braverman and the jaded Michael Gove, two noted national-populist advocates (Matthew Goodwin and David Goodhart), the former Trotskyite and now Viktor Orbán-apologist Frank Furedi and – receiving the biggest ovation – the former feminist Melanie Phillips. But perhaps the most ideologically innovative contribution was made by backbench Conservative MP Miriam Cates.

Stating that she did not care if she was addressing ‘a Red Tory, a communitarian, a follower of Burke, or, heaven forbid, a libertarian free marketer’, she insisted that ‘the one overarching threat to British conservatism and, indeed, the whole of Western society’, was not climate change, Russia, China or Iran, or even ‘the neo-Marxist ideology that has so weakened our institutions’. No, she insisted, there was one ‘critical outcome that liberal individualism has completely failed to deliver’: babies.

This position is not surprising from Cates, who is an evangelical Christian who has opposed so-called censorship zones around abortion clinics (to protect patients from abuse), denies the possibility of changing sex, and campaigns against aspects of sex education. Until 2018, she was on the board of a Sheffield church that practised ‘conversion therapy’ of gay people (although she denied knowledge), and she co-founded the socially conservative New Social Covenant Unit with Boris Johnson’s former political secretary Danny Kruger MP.

Kruger told the NatCon conference that Conservatives faced a ‘new religion’, mixing ‘Marxism, narcissism and paganism’, and the ‘dystopian fantasy of John Lennon’ (Marxist-Lennonism?). He also insisted that heterosexual marriage was the ‘only possible basis for a safe and successful society’. On 3 July, Cates and Kruger launched a new pressure group of Red Wall Conservative MPs, titled the New Conservatives, to campaign for a dramatic reduction in immigration. Significantly, Cates’s justification for reducing immigration is to ‘restore democratic, cultural and economic security’.

As a faith, flag and family Conservative, Cates criticised ‘the indoctrination of our children with destructive and narcissistic ideologies’ (instead of ‘teaching them how to love our country’). She supports a family wage, which will discourage mothers from working, and opposes the liberalisation of divorce.

Despite views expressed elsewhere, Cates’s speech did not specifically blame what the EBF statement calls ‘a marked decline in marriage and childbirth’ on the encouragement of ‘ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation’. Her target here was not so much sexual permissiveness as the demographic threat.

Cates is not the only NatCon speaker to be concerned about the lowering of the domestic birth rate. In June, national-populist analyst-turned-activist Goodwin tweeted the same statistic quoted by Cates (that in 2021 the birth rate for England and Wales had fallen to 1.55 children per woman, according to data from the Office for National Statistics), noting that the rate is ‘lowest among the most highly educated women’.

In this, he perhaps unconsciously evoked the 1974 speech by (then) Conservative leadership hopeful Sir Keith Joseph, in which he claimed that ‘our human stock is threatened’ by the high proportion of births to ‘mothers least fitted to bring children into the world’, in social classes 4 and 5. But Goodwin’s main point is about how the domestic birth rate relates to immigration. In a Substack summary of his much (self) hyped new book Values, Voice and Virtue, Goodwin points out that ‘ …as Britain’s fertility rate dropped below the “replacement rate” of 2.1’, immigration and ‘higher fertility rates among young migrants made immigration the main driver of population growth’. (Substack 20 April 2023). No surprise that Goodwin agrees with Cates’s demand for a dramatic reduction in immigration.

Both also claim that immigration is being encouraged. Cates insists that one cause of the demographic crisis is an insistence by ‘the liberal elite’ that women should ‘derive more fulfilment from a paid job – any job – than they do from nurturing their own children’. Elsewhere, she pits ‘common sense conservatism’ against ‘the Westminster – or Global – elite’. (The first New Conservatives press conference was peppered with references to the ‘establishment’ and the ‘liberal elite’).

In his NatCon speech, Goodwin referred to ‘a new and deeply narcissistic elite minority’ (narcissism again) imposing a ‘radical and rampant cultural liberalism’ on an unwilling majority. Goodwin’s book reiterates time and again that this new elite (sometimes consisting of Russell Group university graduates, sometimes of the entire graduate class) is promoting ‘radical progressive’ values, including – of course – feminism and immigration.

No surprise that Cates, too, thinks that far too many young people are going to university, a concern also expressed by Joseph in his 1974 speech. Elsewhere, though not in his book, Goodwin links his new elite with ‘multinational firms’ indulging in ‘woke capitalism’, in an ‘informal alliance between white elites, corporations and minorities, against the white working-class’ (Daily Mail 2 April 2021).

Thus Cates and Goodwin join a growing contemporary and historical move to blame changes in the structures of family life, and some of the factors (like liberalised divorce and abortion laws and the decriminalisation of homosexuality) that are claimed to have contributed to it, on a university-educated elite.

Cultural policy

For Goodwin, this elite is in cahoots with multinational companies. The idea that global capitalists are deliberately encouraging immigration not just as a source of cheap labour, but also as part of a cultural policy to undermine nationality is the thrust of the electorally successful ideology of Hungary’s now four-term Prime Minister Orbán, a model defined by Goodwin in his earlier volume National Populism (co-authored with Roger Eatwell).

Orbán, say Eatwell and Goodwin, asserts that ‘liberal politicians within the EU [European Union], along with the billionaire Hungarian-Jewish financier George Soros, are engaged in a plot to flood Hungary and “Christian” Europe with Muslim immigrants and refugees, which they see as part of a quest to dismantle Western nations and usher in a borderless world that is subservient to capitalism’.

The demographic decline of the Hungarian population is now central to the Orbán model. Cates criticises her government for imposing a two-child limit on those claiming welfare; the Hungarian government has instituted a lifetime tax break for women bearing four or more children, a cash incentive for large families to buy seven-seater cars and a ‘baby expecting loan’ of 10 million forints (£25,000), which couples can apply for if they promise to have children later on. As Sophia Siddiqui argued in Race & Class (October-December 2021), ‘the “birth-rate agenda” creates a space for anti-immigrant, demographic and ideologically anti-feminist agendas to converge’.

Addressing the Third Budapest World Conference of Demography (no less) in September 2019, Orbán painted an apocalyptic picture of the Hungarian population disappearing off the face of the map. Connecting this possibility with a version of the notorious Great Replacement Theory promoted by the far right on both sides of the Atlantic, Orbán asserted that ‘if Europe is not going to be populated by Europeans … then we are speaking about an exchange of populations, to replace the population of Europeans with others’.

He then went on to connect replacement to the conspiracy theory: ‘There are political forces in Europe who want a replacement of population for ideological or other reasons.’ Clearly, those forces include the supranational, liberal EU and Soros. In July 2022, Orbán repeated the assertion, insisting ‘the first and most important challenge … continues to be population, or demography’. The second challenge ‘is migration, which you could call population replacement or inundation’. And who is responsible? ‘Brussels, reinforced with Soros-affiliated troops, simply wants to force migrants on us’.

Eatwell and Goodwin acknowledge that the idea of international financiers plotting to destroy nation states by flooding them with immigrants is a version of ‘anti-Semitic conspiracy theory’, which makes it all the more striking when they assert that the claims of some of the conspiratorialists ‘are not entirely without credence’.

Of course, Goodwin’s version of the theory – corporations plus white liberals allying with migrants against the white working class – does not imply that the conspirators are Jewish. Nor, in bald fact, did Donald Trump’s claim (in a speech in Florida in 2016) that ‘Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty, in order to enrich those global financial powers’ specify the bankers’ race.

But compare both the content and the tone of these two statements:

‘Our corrupt political establishment, that is the greatest power behind the efforts at radical globalisation and the disenfranchisement of working people. Their financial resources are virtually unlimited, their political resources are unlimited, their media resources are unmatched.’

And this:

Through the Press, we have gained the power to influence while remaining ourselves in the shade: thanks to the Press we have got the gold in our hands.’

Conspiracy

The first is from the same Trump speech in Florida; the second is from the fake ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, the Tsarist secret police forgery that outlined a Jewish plot to destroy the national states and impose a one world tyranny. At its core is a sinister alliance between Jewish finance capital and the left:

‘Nowadays, with the destruction of the aristocracy, the people have fallen into the grips of merciless money-grinding scoundrels who have laid a pitiless and cruel yoke upon the necks of the workers. We appear on the scene as the alleged saviours of the worker from this oppression and we suggest that he should enter the ranks of our fighting forces – Socialists, Anarchists, Communists – to whom we always give support.’

Used by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust, this theory reappears throughout the 20th century, in a variety of forms. In late 1950s America, the John Birch Society claimed that ‘both the US and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers and corrupt politicians’, identifying the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and international bodies such as the Bilderberg Group as agents of the conspiracy.

In the early 1970s, Bircher Gary Allen claimed that Middle America was being attacked from above by bankers and from below by student revolutionaries and the Black Panthers (‘We are going to have a dictatorship of the elite disguised as a dictatorship of the proletariat’). AK Chesterton, pre-war fascist and first National Front chair, wrote a conspiratorial tract called the New Unhappy Lords, with a chapter headed ‘Is the conspiracy Jewish?’ (his answer was ‘yes’).

In the same year as his notorious anti-immigration ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Enoch Powell MP claimed that ‘conspirators sit in the seats of the mighty, at the desks of ministers and editors’. In 1970, he argued that the British people ‘have been misled, cruelly and persistently, till one begins to wonder if the Foreign Office was the only Department of State into which enemies of this country were infiltrated’. Powell cited student protesters and civil rights campaigners in Northern Ireland, alongside ‘combustible material of another kind’ – Britain’s immigrant population – ‘accumulated for years, and not without deliberate intention in some quarters’.

It would be wrong to accuse promoters of one element of the theory of thereby buying into the theory in its entirety. You can think that the liberal elite is encouraging a lowering of the birth rate without thinking that it is in alliance with global finance capital. You can assert that global finance encourages immigration without thinking it is a plot to undermine the nation state. But it is clear from history that a taste for one item on the conspiratorial menu can lead people to try another.

Over the past decade, versions of the theory – with or without specifically anti-Semitic overtones – have been pumped out by national-populists across Europe and north America.

Acquiescing in or even promoting a declining indigenous birth rate is just the latest in a series of phenomena blamed on opinion formers in thrall to – or consisting of – global financial elites. But in a time in which full-blown conspiracy theories are being trumpeted not just on social media and right-wing media outlets, but also by current, former or aspirant national leaders, promoting seemingly freestanding parts of the theory can prove a gateway drug to the whole.

Far right parties were humiliated in yesterday’s three Parliamentary by elections. With none of the more mainstream racial nationalist groups (Britain First or British Democrats) running, the field was left open to those outfits peddling the gamut of post pandemic conspiracy theories focussed on the World Economic Forum and issue such as ULEZ, “15 minute cities” and digital currency. The results were derisory.

Laurence Fox, Reclaim

In the most significant election, in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, they were all swept aside when the Conservatives managed to transform a referendum on Boris Johnson’s behaviour into a vote on Labour mayor Sadiq Khan’s proposed Ultra Low Emission Zone expansion into West London. ULEZ had previously been the right-wing fringe’s issue of choice in the election, but now voters opposed to paying a £12.50 daily levy to drive old polluting cars had a relatively respectable Tory option, and didn’t have to side with groups like Laurence Fox’s Reclaim or UKIP who claim ULEZ is the first step in establishing the infrastructure for imprisoning people in their own neighbourhoods.

Laurence Fox, the Reclaim candidate, came 4th with 714 votes (2.3%); UKIP, represented by Rebecca Jane came 14th with 61 votes (0.2%) beaten even by the deranged conspiracist Piers Corbyn (Let London Live) who came 11th with 101 votes (0.3%).

Piers Corbyn, Let London Live

Both were beaten by Count Binface.

Rebecca Jane, clearly sensing which way the wind was blowing, tried to salvage something the day before the poll by tweeting that she didn’t really expect people to vote for her, but they had to vote against Labour. Needless to say, after the result was announced with the Tories retaining the seat, she claimed this as a personal victory.

Laurence Fox’s principal backer, Jeremy Hosking, who is reputed to have poured £5 million or more into Reclaim, must be wondering when he is going to get any sort of return on his investment.

In the Somerton and Frome by-election Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party, led by Richard Tice) came 4th with 1,303 votes (3%) and UKIP came 7th with 275 votes. In Selby and Ainsty, Reform UK came 5th with 1,332 votes (3.7%) while David Kurten’s Heritage Party came 10th with 162 votes (0.5% – 10 votes fewer than the Official Monster Raving Loony Party).

Reclaim and Reform had reached a non-aggression pact before the elections so did not stand against each other, an arrangement which excluded UKIP and infuriated Rebecca Jane who thought she had a clear run in Uxbridge till Fox tossed his hat into the ring.

The results are particularly disastrous for UKIP which is shedding members fast, a process which accelerated after it recently lifted its ban on fascists and nazis joining the party.

The Charity Commission is looking into a charity linked to UKIP’s Uxbridge by election candidate, Rebecca Jane.

The organisation, called The Children’s Charity, is linked to Rebecca Jane’s private company RJ8 which provides counselling and mental health services. However, The Children’s Charity is not registered with the Charity Commission. After enquiries from Searchlight, the Commission has said it is now assessing the case.

Rebecca Jane, real name Rebecca Jane Sutton, is UKIP’s Deputy Chair, and the party’s candidate in the by election in Boris Johnson’s recently vacated parliamentary seat at Uxbridge and South Ruislip.

She is also a self-styled “Marilyn Monroe lookalike” and “television personality” with a rather colourful past.

She first sprang to public attention in 2009 when, suspecting her husband of infidelity, she set up the Ladies Detective Agency to help other woman investigate their husbands. She openly admitted that she used attractive women to “honeytrap” suspected wayward husbands. This was followed by an appearance on Dragon’s Den in 2012 (no investment offers for a PR company) and on Big Brother in 2017 where she was booed as she was evicted from the Big Brother House.

Regular appearances on ITV’s Good Morning Britain and This Morning followed in what The Sun called her “rise to minor telly fame”.

But she is clearly not a complete airhead as she is sometimes portrayed – in 2019 she successfully completed a law degree. Now she runs RJ8, though she took time off last year to tell the tabloids how she had been sending topless pictures of herself to former Liverpool and England footballer, Michael Owen. At his request, we hasten to add.

Image: Rebecca Jane’s Instagram post re BIBA 2022 Awards

RJ8 had The Children’s Charity, which seems to have been set up at the beginning of 2022. under its wing when the charity won an award at the North and West Lancashire Be Inspired In Business Awards last September. It shared an office address with RJ8, it was linked through the RJ8 website, and Rebecca Jane was listed as the charity’s CEO.

When we asked Rebecca Jane about her connection with the Children’s Charity last week, she told us that the charity project is no longer run under RJ8 and now belongs to a not-for-profit charitable entity. However, the Charity Commission has said it has no record of such an entity, which would have to be registered, and Rebecca Jane did not respond to follow up enquiries.

And at the time of writing, a week after Rebecca Jane told us there was no longer a connection between The Children’s Charity and RJ8, there is still a link to the Children’s Charity on the RJ8 website, and Rebecca Jane is still named as its CEO. The charity’s published address is still the same as RJ8.

This, of course, does not mean that there is necessarily anything untoward going on and there is no suggestion of wrongdoing. A charity can operate without registration if its income is less than £5,000 a year. However, Rebecca Jane told Searchlight that “last year I did plough a £50,000 investment into funding the project on behalf of myself and RJ8”.

UPDATE: The Commission tells us that it has now assessed the case and has told us that “Pre-registration advice and guidance has been issued to the organisation and…we do expect our advice and guidance to be followed”.