Why do Home Office staff think talk of two-tier policing is ‘extremist’?

How do you create a low-trust society? One way to do so is to have an administrative class which seems to treat the views of ordinary people with contempt. Today’s news of a leaked Home Office report on counter-extremism is a classic of the genre. The report, commissioned by the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, in the wake of the August 2024 riots, says that claims of ‘two-tier policing’ are a ‘right-wing extremist narrative’. 

This is a rather bold assertion, not least because the widely held and almost certainly correct perception that police obfuscation over the identity of the Southport child murderer Axel Rudakubana was a catalyst for disorder in the summer. Trust in our public institutions is at historically low levels. There have been legitimate concerns amongst citizens over widely differing policing postures on everything from rape gangs to public order. Effectively labelling them as neo-Nazi adjacent won’t reverse this trend.

The review, styled as a ‘rapid analytical sprint’ on counter-extremism policy, fell at other hurdles.