Two Tier Counter‑Terror
A single ideology was responsible for 32 times more British terror deaths than any other. Why is the British government taking aim at an entirely different group?
In the past decade, the UK massively expanded its PREVENT counter-terror program. As its name suggests, PREVENT is aimed at early-stage targeting. By definition, it intervenes with non-terrorist civilians before they supposedly become terrorists. PREVENT states that its mission is to “work with local authority partners and community organisations to help find solutions and work to support and protect vulnerable people.”
Terrorism is special legal territory, opening up classified, extrajudicial measures rarely used against civilians. PREVENT’s approach blurs the line between terrorist and civilian law enforcement, opening up the potential to misuse emergency powers. An Effort investigation revealed that PREVENT criteria and interventions fail to address empirical causes of terror attacks or deaths, instead focusing almost entirely on the UK government’s political opponents.
In the UK, Islamist terror attacks killed 97 people since the start of the twenty-first century, far outpacing any other motive. Far-right terror, even by an expansive definition, killed 3. Despite deaths from Islamist terror outnumbering extreme right-wing terror 32 to 1 in the UK, a plurality of PREVENT referrals is directed towards “extreme right-wing ideology.”
In 2025, 20% of Brits referred to PREVENT were referred for “extreme right-wing” ideology, compared to 8% for Islamist extremism. In Channel, PREVENT’s early intervention program, 42% of accepted cases referred to extreme right-wing ideology, while 12% referred to Islamist extremism.
Despite disproportionate targeting by PREVENT, those convicted or arrested pending trial for terrorism-related charges overwhelmingly have Islamist motivations. The UK government reports that “of those in custody, the majority (58%) were categorised as holding Islamist-extremist views; a further 29% were categorised as holding Extreme Right-Wing ideologies and 12% were categorised as holding other ideologies.”
Despite causing 32× fewer terror-related deaths in the UK, the number of people detained for right-wing terror is half that of Islamist terror — a gap of 16×. When compared to PREVENT targeting, that gap turns to 80× for PREVENT referrals and 112× for Channel interventions.
This two-tier politicization did not stop at early referrals. According to PREVENT’s own early-intervention guidance, two-tier counter-terror was official policy. The Research, Information, and Communications Unit (RICU), a program within PREVENT focused on controlling narratives around terrorist attacks, increasingly aimed to define mainstream political philosophy as terrorism.
RICU documents flagged the mainstream canon as “key texts” for white nationalists targeted for intervention, including Leviathan (Hobbes), Two Treatises of Government (Locke), Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), and 1984 (Orwell). They also targeted a prominent British political author, Douglas Murray, and his book The Strange Death of Europe.
RICU funded political media on the grounds of counter-terror. The British government disclosed that “This is Woke”, a far-left magazine, was funded by RICU through Breakthrough Media. Content produced by the now-defunct magazine includes “What is fake news?”, “Are dating apps the way forward?”, and “Will we all become vegan?”. The magazine did not disclose its connections to the UK government.
RICU was involved in the controversial Victim Liaison Officers program:
In the immediate aftermath of a deeply traumatic event they make themselves indispensable to the families. Liaison officers will answer every question, explain every process, keep others away, and as a result become an object of security and safety which those families inevitably come to rely on. Other families sharing the same pain and trauma are kept away, so there is no threat to the liaison officer’s primacy. And as a result, the families will generally happily and willingly comply with the suggestions, help and guidance which the officers provide, particularly over their public statements. The veiled threat of a trial collapsing due to reckless statements is also held in reserve, should families become non-compliant.
By 2023, RICU had fully blurred the line not only between terrorism and law enforcement, but terrorism and political expression. An independent investigation by the UK’s Commissioner for Public Appointments, William Shawcross, found that:
While the [research] products related to Islamist terrorism focus on the most serious material relating to violent Islamist ideology, mostly Islamic State and al-Qa’ida, much of the material covering extreme right-wing falls well below the threshold for even non-violent extremism … [resources] not only covered non-violent far right extremism, but also examples of center-right debate, populism, and controversial or distasteful forms of right-leaning commentary and intolerance.
By blurring the line between terrorism and domestic political activism, PREVENT has avoided complying with key transparency laws. The Home Office denied a request to report how much money RICU supplied to Breakthrough Media. According to the UK Home Office, disclosing the government’s relationship with This is Woke “would open up detailed information about organizations and individuals who are engaged in the delivery of, and who are supporting activities to prevent terrorism.”
In 2016, advertising agency M&C Saatchi won a £60m contract from the British Home Office to target “people who read Breitbart,” The Times reported. They produced 373 media products. On February 12, 2019, RICU granted M&C Saatchi a £50m contract to provide “communications services for RICU.” The UK Home Office denied two Freedom of Information Act requests seeking access to RICU products, including the results of this contract.
PREVENT’s early-stage referrals target the British right at levels extremely disproportionate to real rates of terror attacks and deaths. Publicized documents show that this targeting is intentional. At every opportunity to provide evidence which could exonerate PREVENT from the charges of using counter-terrorism programs to suppress political dissent, the Home Office instead refused to publish information on counter-terrorism grounds.
PREVENT is indeed a matter of national security.
Footnotes
2 Full incident data underlying the cumulative deaths graph. ↩
Islamist attacks, Great Britain since 2000
Extreme right-wing attacks, Great Britain since 2000
| Murder of Mohammed Saleem | Extreme right-wing | 1 | not stated | Home Secretary statement on Pavlo Lapshyn’s guilty pleasHome Secretary speech identifying the murder as far-right extremismHome Office parliamentary answer recording one victim death | |
| Murder of Jo Cox MP | Extreme right-wing | 1 | 1 (GBH) | R v Thomas Mair, sentencing remarks of Mr Justice Wilkie, judiciary.uk | |
| Finsbury Park van attack | Extreme right-wing | 1 | ~12 | R v Darren Osborne, sentencing remarks, judiciary.uk | |
| Dover migrant centre firebombing | Extreme right-wing | 0 | 2 | Counter Terrorism Policing South East investigation updateMI5 annual threat update |