Can you really be radicalised by Great British Railway Journeys?

The late Robert Conquest adumbrated three rules of politics. Perhaps the most famous (also known as O’Sullivan’s law) is that ‘Any organisation not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing’. I would like to add a fourth law: ‘Any programme set up by government will inevitably metastasise unless consciously cut back by observant officials.’

Anyone in search of a textbook example need look no further than the government’s Prevent programme, into which the government’s official review was finally published last week. William Shawcross’s excellent comprehensive report contains many things worth lingering over. But one of the most interesting is what he uncovered about Prevent’s saunter into ‘right-wing extremism’. Because of course it was never going to be enough for a government programme set up to tackle one form of extremism to look only into that form of extremism. It is almost inevitable that the people taking part will come to feel that there are other forms of ‘extremism’ that they must also focus on and that there is something almost bigoted about pursuing the specific thing they were set up to address.