My Lords, I am pleased to have the opportunity to open this short debate on the consideration given to the introduction of a counterextremism strategy. The usual form on these occasions is to describe the issues and ask some questions. However, the issues I want to describe and the questions I want to ask were described and asked recently in the House, as the Minister knows. I will therefore be as brief as I can in order to allow other noble Lords to have their say; I am delighted to see so many colleagues present.
I turn first to the issues. In sum, my view is that non-violent extremism aims to, in the words of the previous Government’s definition,
“negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others … undermine, overturn or replace”
our
“system of liberal … democracy and democratic rights; or … intentionally create a permissive environment for others”.
At best, this non-violent extremism makes cohesion and integration impossible; at worst, it gives rise to harassment, public order offences, acts of terrorism and other breaches of the rule of law. Its three most prominent forms are far-right, far-left and Islamist extremism. The last of those is responsible for some 71% of terrorist incidents in Britain since the London Tube atrocities of 7 July 2005, as well as some 75% of the case load of Contest, the Government’s counterterror strategy. This is not—I repeat, not—to conflate Islam, the ancient religion, with Islamism, the political ideology, any more than it is to conflate the far left and socialism or the far right and patriotism.
Having set out the issues, I turn next to the Government’s response. When asked recently in the House whether the Government uphold the definition of non-violent extremism that I quoted earlier or have one of their own, the Minister said that it,
“is a deeply challenging and complex area”,
and that,
“there is no statutory definition of or consensus on what would include extremism”.
When he was asked whether a counterextremism commissioner will be appointed to replace Robin Simcox, the Minister repeated:
“We are reviewing the roles and remits of various bodies to ensure our resources are best placed to meet current challenges”.
When he was asked whether the Government will publish the rapid analytical sprint review of non-violent extremism, commissioned after the general election, he said that publication,
“could, for example, undermine policy development”.—[Official Report, 27/1/26; cols. 804-06.]
and sent a file of support for terror, antisemitism, denial and conspiracy theory gleaned from mosques. I then asked how many prosecutions have arisen, and the Minister replied that no figures are available.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Goodman of Wycombe, on introducing this debate. A serious discussion on this is long overdue, and I thank him for all his work and leadership on this and the many colleagues who I am looking forward to hearing who have been very involved in it as well. I declare my interest as a trustee of the Hofenung Foundation and as someone who has been deeply concerned about the growing extremism crisis in our country. We face a rapidly accelerating threat. We see this in the historic levels of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate, the surge of Prevent referrals, the unprecedented normalisation of conspiracy theories and the rising tolerance, particularly among younger groups, of political violence. These are not isolated indicators; they are symptoms of a weakening social fabric and declining democratic resilience.
The most disturbing thing is that we are flying blind. We are confronting a fast-evolving, increasingly organised and sometimes foreign-backed extremism ecosystem without a national counterextremism strategy of any kind. We make a profound mistake when we conflate extremism with terrorism. Terrorism is the violent end point, but extremism is the infrastructure, the ideology, the recruitment ecosystem, the conspiracy culture, the dehumanisation and the democratic erosion that makes violence possible. Contest is an excellent counterterrorism strategy, but it was never designed to address the harms that sit below the terrorism threshold, where extremist groups currently operate with impunity. We have reached a point where extremist organisations—far left, far right, Islamicist—can radicalise children, spread dangerous ideological propaganda and mainstream hate on the streets and online without breaking any law because the law does not yet capture hateful extremism as a category. This is untenable.
What do we need to do? First, we need a clear operational definition of extremism, and I hope the Minister can confirm that the existing one announced by the previous Government still stands. It will be important to have his reflections on whether the Government will accept that it should include reference to hateful extremism. Secondly, the Government must close the legislative gaps. As set out in the report Operating With Impunity, we need hateful extremism proscription orders for extremist groups that sit below the terrorism threshold but whose actions are demonstrably harmful. Other democracies such as Canada and Germany already do this. Following the horrendous Islamicist terrorist attack in Australia, its Government are taking steps to list proscribed groups in regulations, where this can be applied. We cannot allow extremists to operate freely simply because the law has failed to keep pace.
My Lords, extremism is not what it used to be. In October 2024, MI5’s director Ken McCallum said:
“Straightforward labels like ‘Islamist terrorism’ or ‘extreme right wing’ don’t fully reflect the dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see”.
My current experience as Independent Prevent Commissioner confirms his analysis. Young people, often disturbed by family trauma or personal grievances, seek comfort in the rigid hatreds of their offline or online tribe, often with added misogyny or anti- semitism. Their minds are inflamed by geopolitical events, dehumanising computer games and the malign algorithms of social media into an unpredictable mash-up of resentment, rage and normalised violence. Conspiracy theories are promoted by hostile states. Fragments of ideology are packaged as video clips. The boy drawing Nazi symbols on his arm may, the next week, be seen shouting sectarian slogans, refusing to interact with female teachers or posing as a suicide bomber.
The terrorism statistics record violent offences that were motivated by a single, consistent ideology, most commonly—as the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, has rightly said—a perverted version of Islam. Extremism in its broader sense, however, motivates many attacks of equivalent seriousness, including those perpetrated by the multiple killers Danyal Hussein, Jake Davison and, in Southport, Axel Rudakubana. These violent expressions of extremism represent, of course, only a small part of the social problems caused by its non-violent outworkings.
The single point I want to make today is that while the word extremism is a convenient label for drawing attention to a vast bundle of problems, it is not a satisfactory key to solving them. The normal meaning of the word is dauntingly broad. In the libel case Shakeel Begg v BBC, Mr Justice Haddon-Cave said:
I have one and a half sentences left. If our laws on online safety, public order, hate crime, counterterrorism, hostile state activity or proscription are insufficient, let us revisit, amend and supplement them. But the trick is to excise the tumours without undue harm to the healthy tissue of free speech, which requires a scalpel, not the suffocating blanket labelled “extremism”.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Goodman of Wycombe, for this crucial debate. I want to focus on the normalisation of Islamism and virulent antisemitism but first I need to negotiate the obstacle course of counterextremism. I am not the first to note that official definitions of extremism can be unhelpful: too vague, ambiguous and broad, and a distraction from real threats. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, about the problem of extremism as a legal concept. Also, in a democratic, pluralist society of citizens with diverse views, how can you establish a robust legal definition without being partisan or censorious?
I am worried about a blank cheque. Official signs of extremism include everything from spreading misinformation to involvement in the manosphere—think “Adolescence”, a drama, not a documentary, yet the Government vowed to show it in every school to counter online extremism. Such a shallow lack of specificity means that state agencies acquire huge power to police legitimate, if unpleasant or dissenting, views. Recently, a Home Office-funded interactive computer game hit the headlines. “Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism” takes 13 to 18 year-olds on a journey. As game characters, they must make decisions to avoid being reported for extreme right-wing ideology. If they wrongly answer multiple-choice questions on, for example, migration, or if their avatar chooses to attend a protest against the “erosion in British values”, they are branded.
This superficial approach begs questions. In January, the director of counterterrorism at the Homeland Security Group claimed that 68 civil society groups are being funded by Prevent. Can the Minister outline who these groups are, what kind of programmes they are delivering and, crucially, how the Home Office is assessing their effectiveness? I ask because the “Pathways” computer game backfired spectacularly. The developers created a purple-haired goth girl, Amelia, as the far-right baddie, but rather than being viewed as a dangerous extremist, Amelia has been embraced as an ironic heroine and has become a union jack-waving viral meme.
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for initiating this debate. He has been consistent and persistent in his arguments, which he was also able to spell out in his Times article on Tuesday. The thousand comments, almost all in support, were striking, expressing anxiety and concern about the rise of terrorism and antisemitism, as well as fear, however unjustified, that they—we—no longer feel safe in our streets. This is particularly true for women who worry about their safety walking home at night or even, now, in broad daylight. They fear for their daughters and even their sons, as exemplified by this week’s school knife attack. People are afraid of masked men, crowded tubes, buses. I feel it myself. It is in large part because they—we—do not feel that the Government have a grip and that they have no sense of urgency. Of course, none of us underestimates the challenges faced by government and the security services, but there is a strong sense that as a country we are behind the curve rather than fully aware of and dealing with not only the current challenges but those coming down the track.
More and more people, especially younger friends and acquaintances, spontaneously raise these issues with me. They are concerned about radicalisation, cohesion and integration. They have a strong feeling that they cannot, or generally should not, talk publicly about their worries and fear that they will be judged for doing so, which is why I am speaking today.
My noble friend Lord Goodman and the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, mentioned the director of MI5, who confirmed in his threat updates both last October and in 2024 that Islamist extremism remains the most significant terrorism threat to the UK and accounts for 75% of MI5’s case load. I, for one, am very grateful to the security services for holding the line in the most complex and interconnected threat environment ever seen, but there are concerns about whether they have the resources that they need and are collecting the relevant data. This debate is an opportunity for the Government to clarify what they know, what they monitor and where the gaps remain. I look forward to the Minister’s response to the many questions raised today.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, for securing this debate. Like him, I want to refer to the APPG’s report, Time to Act: Addressing the UK’s Accelerating Extremism Threat, a copy of which I have handily placed in front of me on the desk. I will come to that in a minute.
I start by pointing out that only two days ago the Community Security Trust, another great organisation that we should probably refer to more often in these debates, recorded that 3,700 antisemitic incidents were recorded in 2025. That is the second-highest on record, the highest being in 2023, which was, of course, the year of the appalling attacks in southern Israel. In that year, there were 4,298 incidents.
It is also worth pointing out that, as noted in the APPG report, anti-Muslim hate has doubled over the past decade. Tell Mama recorded that anti-Muslim hate incidents rose from 500 per annum in 2012 to 2,500 per annum in 2021, which is going some. As the APPG has also pointed out, the explosion in the online world—this is stating the obvious—has gone hand in hand with an equally virulent explosion in conspiracy theories and the two have created a toxic mix.
I am pleased that the Government are taking certain steps against the hate marches in the form of the Crime and Policing Bill. It remains to be seen when that Bill reaches the statute book how effective the new measures will be, but I hope that we will leave the door open to going further with those measures, if necessary. I am also pleased that HMG has created criminal sanctions for those who have undeclared links to Tehran, whose proxies operate in the UK and elsewhere.
On that subject, I have two questions for the Minister. The first—he is probably getting tired of listening to me raise this, because I do so probably every couple of weeks—is that we need to look at the question of proscribing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. This is an issue that came up under the previous Government. It has come up persistently under this Government. I have never heard a convincing explanation as to why we do not proscribe the IRGC. Let us for a minute reflect on what the IRGC is. It is a group of homicidal maniacs who answer to a bunch of clerical fascists in Tehran. The important thing as far as proscription in the UK is concerned is that the IRGC persistently uses proxies. They use front organisations in the UK and elsewhere across the globe in order to carry out their vile activities.
This is an excellent time to be debating this vital issue and I congratulate my noble friend Lord Goodman of Wycombe on initiating this debate and on his recent comments on this important and complex subject. The Government have commissioned a rapid analytical sprint review but have not yet accepted its findings. But the review, as we know, has been the subject of a Policy Exchange document and identifies a broad range of extremist threats from the far right, the manosphere, left-wing and climate-change protests and many other areas. However, it does not seem to prioritise what is evidently the single biggest threat to the UK, which is, of course, Islamism, as my noble friend and many others have mentioned.
The leaked report is interesting because it reveals the Civil Service’s approach to this issue. It seeks to focus on behaviour and conducts, not ideologies that pose enormous threats to this country. These threats include not just terrorist activities and persistent violent protests but dangerous, non-violent activities below the radar by organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, as my noble friend Lady Jenkin mentioned, and Iranian cells. It should be a matter of great concern that certain moderate Muslim countries recognise these risks more than we do.
The clue to the approach in the leaked document can be found in the title: “Understand”. This is in contrast to the title of the APPG’s counterterrorism document, Time to Act. I know which approach I prefer. The core of our problem today is that there has been too much understanding and not enough action. A tolerance has built up of despicable actions by certain segments of our society. Jonathan Hall KC recently referred to this as the normalisation of extremism, where hateful and divisive views, once occupying the fringe, are now widely expressed with impunity.
This is happening because a great deal of hateful extremism operates just below the legal threshold. I would be interested in the Government’s assessment of the report by the commission led by Sir Mark Rowley and Dame Sara Khan in 2021, Operating with Impunity, as it seems very relevant to any strategy formulation today. Sir Mark reiterated his findings as recently as December 2025.
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It is not hard to see what is happening here. There is a repeated cycle. First, there is an incident. It could be the conviction of a left-wing anarchist in 2024 on multiple terror charges. It could be the attack on the Heaton Park synagogue last year, which saw the first murder of Jews simply for being Jews in Britain in modern times. It could be the conviction of a far-right racist for the 2017 attack on Finsbury Park mosque. Then there is a wave of public alarm. Ministers promise action, time passes, media attention moves on and inertia sets in as the Government, the Opposition, the security services, the police, advisers and academics retreat into their siloes and disagree about solutions. Ministers are then reshuffled or a general election takes place, and we go back to square one until the next time.
Only two recent Prime Ministers seriously attempted to break the cycle: Tony Blair and my noble friend Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton. Both understood that in our centralised system, only a cross-government counterextremism strategy driven from Downing Street will produce results. Such a strategy would ensure that the Government themselves do not patronise, give platforms to, fund or engage with extremists; that prisons are run by governors and staff, not by gangs; that extremist mobs do not dictate terms to the police, as happened recently in Birmingham; that hospitals and surgeries are neutral spaces; that posters on walls and lanyards worn by staff do not advertise political causes; that demonstrators and marchers do not incite violence by calling, for example, for the intifada to be globalised; and that funds raised for charities do not end up funding terror.
I pay tribute to two all-party initiatives that have the potential to develop such a policy. The first is the All-Party Parliamentary Group on defending democracy, led by the noble Lord, Lord Walney, who I am pleased to see will speak today. The second is the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Counter Extremism, chaired by Damien Egan, which has already produced a useful report, Time to Act.
I described the pattern of events in counterextremism policy as a cycle, but perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a spiral, one which is descending steadily downwards. I have assumed for the whole of my adult life that our multifaith and multiracial democracy will continue to progress for the better, and, on balance, I still believe that it will, but I also believe that we can no longer be sure. The 2022 disturbances in Leicester, the Aston Villa game scandal in Birmingham, the Manchester synagogue attack, the firebomb attack on the Peacehaven mosque, the outbreak of Palestinian and St George’s Cross flag flying, the rise of the Gaza independents and the push for an “Islamophobia” definition, plus the Sikh and Hindu reaction to it, are signs that our towns and cities are in danger of dividing, at least in part, into ethnic and religious enclaves. It is hard to see how such a future could square with the Disraelian “one nation” ideal or, indeed, with a coherent nation at all.
The Government currently seem too battered, disorientated and bewildered by events to rise to the challenge. The opposition parties are only beginning, at this stage of the electoral cycle, to grapple with it, and Parliament as an institution is running to catch up with the pace of events. I would not claim that this debate is the start of further discussion to come, but I hope it can be an important step along the road, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Thirdly, the Government must fund ideological challenge programmes. When asked about what kinds of counterextremism programmes the Home Office funds outside Prevent, Jonathan Emmett mentioned at the Home Affairs Select Committee that the Government had made a significant sum available for protective security at places of worship. I welcome such funding—although not that much, as it is a sign of real failure that we must produce money for security in those places; it would be nice if it went down, rather than kept going up—but it is a mistake to equate protective security with counterextremism programmes. We must challenge extremist narratives, online and offline, support vulnerable individuals and build resilience against conspiracy theories, dehumanisation and hate.
The data shows a country fragmenting with extremism metastasising into the cracks, online in civic spaces, on our streets and in community relations. If we fail to act now, the social, political and security-related costs will only deepen. This debate is about safeguarding the integrity of our democracy and the safety of our communities in the kind of country we aspire to be. I hope that the Minister will agree that we need a muscular and values-driven counterextremism strategy. It is not optional; we must do it, and now.
“What is ‘extreme’ is, by definition, something which is not ‘moderate’”.
Attempts by successive Governments to narrow it down have been inconsistent and hard to translate into consistent policy. Phrases such as “opposition to British values” and “creating a permissive environment” are too wide to form a reliable basis for rules or coercive action.
Confronted with so large a target, counterextremism strategies have been diffuse and ineffective. The 2015 Counter-Extremism Strategy was diagnosed by Professor Clive Walker, our greatest academic authority on terrorism, as suffering from
“inexact and contested meanings, objectives, and mechanisms which generate dynamics of suspicion as much as persuasion”.
The rapid analytical sprint leaked last January was said by Policy Exchange to have confused extremism with
“any shocking crime, bad belief or nasty social phenomenon about which we are worried”.
Overbreadth is particularly dangerous when accompanied by harsh sanctions. The counterextremism Bill of 2016, which I was privileged to see, would have allowed the penalisation of “extremist activity”, defined to include huge swathes of otherwise perfectly legitimate political and religious speech. It was, at least to me, a relief when, after being announced in two successive Queen’s Speeches, it blew up on the launch pad.
Parliament and the courts have calibrated our laws over the centuries with extraordinary and rather impressive care. It would be a lazy and illiberal error to overlay those laws with vague and contested notions such as extremism or—I agree—Islamophobia. Let us promote integration, critical thinking, social media literacy and awareness of our civic rights and duties. Let us research harmful belief systems and challenge divisive or intolerant narratives wherever we find them. If our laws on online safety, public order, hate crime, counterterrorism, hostile state activity—
This backlash reveals how tone deaf anti-extremist initiatives can be. For example, framing patriotic sentiment as extremism risks radicalising those moderate youth who resent their scepticism of progressive orthodoxies being criminalised, especially while the elephant in the room, radical Islamism, is allowed free rein. They have a point. Official interventions using vague and non-exhaustive definitions of extremism, applied with little discrimination to an expanding number of targets, often avoid tackling Islamist extremism. One reason is that people are afraid of upsetting radical Islamists but are not afraid of upsetting critics of multiculturalism, real-life Amelias, the Pink Ladies, Reform UK supporters or whoever.
A year ago, the Speaker in the other place overrode centuries of parliamentary procedure to protect Labour MPs scared by threats from extremists over a Gaza vote. This morning, at Questions, we were reminded of the unprecedented harassment and intimidation of candidates, MPs and even voters at and since the general election. The Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal exposed police capitulation to fundamentalist threats to Israeli fans. All that is just a taste of a growing Islamist veto over public life. Then there is the fear of being labelled an Islamophobic extremist if you raise such concern. The Government’s push to define anti-Muslim hatred threatens to institutionalise that chilling effect. They say, “See it. Say it. Sorted”, but if we see it and cannot say it, it will not get sorted. We must stop wasting time on fictitious Amelias and target the real-life problem hiding in plain sight.
Will the Minister confirm that the Government still assess Islamist extremism as the predominant terrorism threat to the UK? The Government’s 2015 review of the Muslim Brotherhood concluded that aspects of its ideology and activities were
“contrary to our values and … national interests”,
and noted expressions of support for terrorist violence by individuals linked to Muslim Brotherhood-influenced organisations. More than a decade later, the Muslim Brotherhood remains legal in the United Kingdom but, since that review, numerous allied states have banned or designated the Muslim Brotherhood or its branches. Hamas, which identifies itself as the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing, has shown intent to operate internationally, including in Europe. Will the Minister update us on the Government’s current thinking about the Muslim Brotherhood and on whether the Home Office or MI5 currently monitors Muslim Brotherhood-linked organisations operating in the UK and, if so, on what basis? There is also a big issue around data. Do the Government feel that they have sufficient data on extremism in the UK? Specifically, do they monitor non-terrorist Islamist activities that may nevertheless contribute to radicalisation and intimidation?
Other noble Lords today speak from personal and community experience about antisemitism, but I watch its growth on social media and elsewhere with dismay. My noble friend Lord Finkelstein’s Times article earlier this week spelled out in detail the horrific abuse he has experienced when taking on Nick Fuentes. The viral hate that poured in and continues today—I looked again online this morning—is beyond horrible. Something in this country has changed, is changing, and not for the better.
Many of us are worried that we are not perhaps tracking the extremist landscape as effectively as we should be, so my second question for my noble friend is: what assessment have the Government made of who the most prominent domestic extremists are, what is their scale and influence and what is the level of harm that they are causing to British society? I will leave it at that for the time being.
Just 7% of those arrested in pro-Palestinian marches have been charged. When so-called protestors break a police officer’s back with a sledgehammer, a jury is unable to convict them. Is it any wonder that they operate with complete impunity? Terrorist incidents do not occur in a vacuum. The fact that incidents of antisemitism actually increased in the aftermath of the Manchester attack, just as they did in the aftermath of the massacre of 7 October, shows that extremism needs to be addressed early and decisively.
Part of the problem, as has been mentioned, is the fear of appearing discriminatory. Dame Sara Khan put the problem well in her recent review on social cohesion and democratic resilience. She says:
“It is vital that police forces do not inadvertently support hate preachers and extremist actors in the misguided belief that such activity supports social cohesion or diversity and inclusion principles”.
These comments could apply to important cases in Rotherham and Batley, and most recently with the West Midlands Police Force. As the Government finalise their review, I ask the Minister to ensure that there will be a well-resourced unit to centre on the Islamist threat to this country, especially on the organised—and organised is a key word—funded and planned aspect of this threat. Yes, we need understanding, but it really is time to act.
Counter-Extremism Strategy · Order Paper · Order Paper