Mick Hartley

At the JC, Robin Simcox offers five suggestions for the government to tackle the current situation after Manchester. He was the government’s independent adviser on extremism between 2021-25. – so “I have a good idea of where government action on counter extremism has proven insufficient”.

First, ban Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood:

Hamas has been well established in the UK for decades. We know who the key players are, we know the NGOs which serve as support groups, and we know what media outlets they rely upon to propagandise. We also know that rather than being treated as a foreign terrorist group that is unwelcome here, their leaders have been given citizenship and council houses.

This is not just a Hamas issue. After all, those aligned with al-Qaeda also used the UK as a base in the 1990s at the state’s invitation. The difference is that after 9/11, we quickly understood that was an obvious security risk.

We do not treat Hamas with the same level of seriousness. That is in part because Hamas has not yet launched attacks inside the UK. But it is very open about its genocidal intent with Jews and British citizens have carried out suicide attacks on its behalf in Israel. If the government wants to demonstrate it takes Jewish concerns seriously, it must surely unpick Hamas’s architecture in the UK.

Second, stop the hate preachers:

The post 7/10 landscape has demonstrated just how much easier this is said than done. The anti-Jewish, pro-terror and conspiratorial vitriol unleashed in mosques up and down the country is now prevalent across social media. I saw first hand just how often mosques that had hosted some of the most malevolent extremists and antisemites relied on public funding to operate via, for example, protective security funding. This was never leveraged properly to induce better behaviour from such mosques.

What made this particularly frustrating was that they were almost always registered charities. British Muslims who wanted to give to humanitarian causes in Gaza were donating to a part of the world that was controlled by Hamas. Yet it is an open secret that the charitable sector lacks visibility into how the money is being used. It is impossible to believe that none of that money has ended up with Hamas. This seems to be accepted because the greater good is for aid money to flow into Gaza. Whether that cost-benefit analysis works for British Jews seems a reasonable question to ask.

The Charity Commission must now be given the powers it needs to tackle this extremist abuse. At present, investigations take too long and punishments are insufficiently punitive to induce change. Accepting that some institutions have been set up specifically to subvert democratic values and are unreformable would also be welcome. Closing down charities with ties to the Iranian government, for example, will be no loss to our philanthropic culture and could help demonstrate to British Jews that a hostile state that loathes them is no longer able to operate so brazenly on British soil.

Another sensible step would be to take a more proactive approach to keeping hate preachers out of the country. Towards the end of the Sunak government, a task force was established in an attempt to do precisely this. We know there are clerics who frequently visit the UK and who preach an antisemitic version of Islam. We should not tolerate it any longer.

His other suggestions: curb the endless protests about Palestine; no more funding for, or engagement with, extremists; make combatting antisemitism central to counter extremism efforts.

You sense some frustration here. What, for instance, happened to that Sunak government initiative to keep hate preachers out of the country? Quietly dropped by the new government, it would seem. No more funding for, or engagement with, extremists? Police and local authorities apparently visited mosques where antisemitic preachers had visited, in a misguided effort to bolster “community cohesion”. It didn’t work, of course. All it did, as Simcox says, was to “expose how poorly understood extremism is for certain arms of the state”

As for the last – making combatting antisemitism central to counter extremism efforts – apparently the obsession with preventing another Southport has made the government move the other way, trying instead to concentrate on violence-obsessed loners, so that Prevent has become more of a violence reduction programme – sounds nice, but what does that actually mean? – and has lost its focus on counter-terrorism.

Will Manchester now concentrate some minds?