How to get nothing done

I sometimes wonder whether our government makes any decisions at all. In fact I’m trying to think of any area of public policy that is not the subject of a review, commission, inquiry or similar. The most charitable explanation for this trend is that it worsened in the coalition years. Whenever the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives couldn’t agree on anything they could always kick the matter into the long grass by commissioning a review. So much better than risking upsetting Nick Clegg.

All this of course has a deep impact on the country, because it means nothing actually gets done. I am sure you will all remember the Casey review (2016). This was commissioned by David Cameron’s government from the admirable Louise (now Baroness) Casey. Its remit was to look into problems of integration in the UK. After much work, Casey delivered her review, was thanked for it, and I am sure that you will all agree that in the years since we have all noticed integration in the UK improve massively. For instance, now when a mob wants to shut down a film in Leicester or get a Batley school teacher fired for ‘blasphemy’, they can do it much faster than they could a decade ago.

You may also remember that after the London Bridge terror attack (or London Bridge 1, as it was soon to be known) the then prime minister, Theresa May, said: ‘Enough is enough.’ To which I am sure that the Islamists thought (as I did): ‘Ooooh. Tough talk.’ May then announced that she had personally had enough of young girls being blown up at pop concerts and women having their throats slashed on London Bridge, so she was going to commission a review. ‘Not a review!’ said every Islamist in chorus.

The also admirable Sara Khan was appointed to lead said review and immediately got to the heart of the matter by requesting that academics in the UK send in papers analysing what problems they believed could exist in the UK in relation to extremism in Britain. Khan and her team then spent some years trying to work out a definition of ‘extremism’, and which parts of society extremism might come from.

Sara Khan is a Muslim, but because she isn’t an extremist her appointment was roundly condemned by the usual suspects. The Muslim community may be overwhelmingly peaceful but it is poorly served by its representatives, who include a strange number of non-violent extremists. They spoke out against Sara Khan before she had published a single word.

Some such critics are perched within the Conservative party. The failed politician Sayeeda (Baroness) Warsi, for instance, had hoped to run the review herself and condemned Khan’s appointment.

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Hamish McRae

The crash is not as bad as it seems

So it goes on. In 2019 the government decided to have a review of Prevent. This is the strategy set up by Tony Blair’s government and gained prominence after the 7/7 bombings to try to tackle Islamist extremism in the UK. Since then Prevent has had some successes and many failures. Most of the time, after a successful Islamist terrorist attack is carried out, we learn that Prevent was aware of the person in question, but didn’t think the case required any follow-up. The man who murdered Sir David Amess is just one case in point.

Since 2005 the strategy has also naturally metastasised. For only to focus on Islamic extremism is of course deeply ‘Islamophobic’. Why concentrate on the community which has produced suicide bombers? Why not also focus on any and every other possible form of extremism? Including extremism which isn’t violent, doesn’t intend to be violent, but might for instance have perfectly mainstream attitudes on questions such as mass immigration? In its list of deviant ideologies, for example, the Prevent handbook mentions ‘cultural nationalism’, which it defines as ‘a belief that western culture is under threat from mass migration into Europe and from a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups’.

In this way, over the years the Prevent strategy swiftly became a great, expensive boondoggle for the public sector and gave jobs for life to people who were lucky to find any employment at all.

The Boris Johnson government (yes, that long ago) asked the distinguished author and former head of the Charity Commission, William Shawcross, to carry out its review into Prevent and this too proved an excellent opportunity for government to avoid making a decision. The Shawcross report was apparently finished last summer and delivered when Priti Patel was home secretary (yes, that long ago). Because while prime ministers and home secretaries come and go, the endless desire of politicians to kick cans along the road never does.

In recent weeks and indeed months there have been reports of struggles and rows within government about the Prevent review. There have apparently been efforts from officials to redact names, because you can’t have any Islamists publicly shamed, can you? What a terrible strategy that would be.

The report is rumoured to include the suggestion that maybe a strategy set up to tackle one type of extremism has instead decided to try to become an equal–opportunities strategy, which regards blowing up a pop concert as being on a roughly even keel as some young man in the north of England saying something politically incorrect.

And now finally it is said that the Shawcross report may be released. I hope it is. It has survived three prime ministers and should not be held up a moment longer. But let me predict what will happen when this report, from one of our most mainstream and respected public servants, is published.

We can expect Baroness Warsi to be on the airwaves explaining how ‘Islamophobic’ the whole thing is and how outrageous it is to ‘single out’ the Muslim community. The former heads of Muslim organisations who have advocated attacks on British warships will also be invited across the airwaves to say how terrible they think the report is. All of this will happen before they have read a word of it. All will be listened to in respectful silence by interviewers who don’t know what questions to ask.

Then the Shawcross report will be shelved. But the problem it addresses will not be. That, though, is Britain in the current era: report-heavy, action-light.