GOVERNMENT BY DUPLICITY

It is difficult to find the right word to describe the current practice of our national government.  Grand announcements of virtuous intentions fall far short of expectations or are just not carried out.  Much saying and promising one thing and doing another.  Google’s definition of duplicity: “the belying of one’s true intentions by deceptive words or actions” fits best.  Here are just two examples of our duplicitous government at work. 
  
When David Cameron was Prime Minister, he made a commitment in 2013, a time of austerity, to annual spending of 0.7% of GDI (Gross Domestic Income) on International Development.  Aid which enhanced Britain’s position in the world and brought vital help to the poorest.  In November 2020 Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak reneged on that promise reducing spending “temporarily” to 0.5% of GDI.  Now, within the amalgamated Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office presided over by the same David Cameron, now a peer, more than a third of that reduced international aid budget is spent inside the UK.  In 2022-2023, Britain spent £3.6 billion on asylum seekers, 29% of the international aid budget, mainly the cost of hotel accommodation – currently running at £8 million a day.  And, of course, there is the estimated £600 million earmarked for the crowd-pleasing plan to send some 300 people who arrived here in small boats to Rwanda. 

“We have seen a shocking increase in disruption and criminality...the world's most successful multi-ethnic multi-faith democracy is being deliberately undermined”.  Anyone listening to Rishi Sunak’s 1st March podium address to the nation might have imagined the Prime Minister was reacting to something comparable to the devastating terrorist attacks of 2017.   But no.   Sunak was alarmed by the largely peaceful demonstrations in support of a ceasefire in Gaza and the rise in antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents since October 7th.  Of course they should be taken seriously.  Terrorist threats have risen.  But Britain remains at the ‘substantial’ (likely) rather than severe (very likely) threat level determined by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) and MI5. 

On 14 March Communities Secretary, Michael Gove, appeared in Parliament in the improbable role of an Old Testament prophet preaching healing of divisions in society and warning against ‘Islamism’ as a ‘totalitarian ideology’.  He offered a new definition of extremism: “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance” which aimed to “negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others” or “undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights” and to “intentionally create a permissive environment” for others to achieve the above aims.
 
Gove went on to suggest a short-list of organisations of concern which would henceforth be shunned by the Home Office and receive no public funding.  Organisations can change over time.  Gove’s list will require regular reassessment.  None on his present list had ever received public funds from Government and all had been shunned by the Home Office for many years.  A brazen performance.  Business as usual dressed up as change, inaction sounding like a dramatic demarche.  Except that we have a new definition of extremism which Church leaders and others worry could disproportionately affect Muslims and curtail freedom of speech.
  
Whilst ‘Islamism’ was named as a threatening ideology Gove made do with Neo-Nazi for his example of right-wing extremism.   So let us pass over the inconvenient thought that some of the less poisonous though more influential right-wing extremism has emerged from within the Tory Party.
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Just as ISIS was reaching the height of its power in 2014-2015, and we were learning about the horrors of Jihadi John and his team of executioners, I was working on the dynamics of religious extremism.  Shamima Begum, aged only 15, running away with her two school friends to join the self-declared Caliphate, embodied a far greater and more mystifying threat to society than today’s largely political divisions.  What on earth did these children think they were doing?  What were the psychological and ideological causes?  And how do you change a permissive environment which allows perverse ideas to inspire irrevocable action?  In the case of the girls leading to marriage to jihadists and some degree of complicity in their brutality? 

Safeguarding vulnerable people, challenging the ideas behind, and countering, terrorism, reversing radicalisation are the aims of the national Prevent programme initiated some twenty years ago.  The behaviour to be combatted was then defined as “vocal or active opposition to British fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”.   The seven dead of the 2017 London Bridge attack and the 26 who died at the hands of a suicide bomber in the Manchester Arena the same year, showed how such a mindset could – not inevitably would- trigger actual murderous jihadist violence and underlined the importance of Prevent. 

Prevent issues, and updates, extensive guidelines intended to help public bodies, Local Authorities, teachers and parents understand their statutory duty to be alert to and report people showing indications of extremism, and when to make a referral for further investigation which might be followed up by mentoring.    Prevent has been overwhelmed by the number of referrals, only a fraction of which go forward.  By 2021 more than half of referrals involved extremist right-wing behaviour and attitudes.  Views about Prevent are highly politicised; it is caught between fire from both the right and from Muslim communities. 
 
In January 2021 the Government commissioned a review of Prevent headed by the former head of the Charity Commission, William Shawcross.  The review was boycotted by many Muslim organisations and rejected by Amnesty International on grounds of Shawcross’s alleged bias and remarks he had made which were considered anti-Muslim.  Some of the report’s 34 recommendations such as expanding the Prevent duty to immigration and job centres,  and questioning the consistency between the treatment of Islamic and right-wing extremist referrals, proved contentious. 

Islamic values do need to be disentangled from what is called Islamist ideology.    But in general, the label Islamism is far too catch-all and left undefined or refers simply to seeking an ‘Islamic state with shari’a law’.  So, it can include everything from ISIS executioners to the peaceful and pious Muslim Brotherhood supporters, protesting after General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi's July 2013 coup toppled an elected Egyptian government, gunned down amongst the 900 massacred by police.  Is the wish to have a government imbued with Islamic values, even if it is the result of a non-violent, incremental, democratic process, to be labelled Islamism?  Currently, in a predominantly secular society, probably the answer is yes.  

All the recent talk about Islamism, though, was intended to cast Sunak and Gove as statesmen, responsible custodians of law and order, protectors against an extremist threat, unifying the nation, rousing the Red Wall constituencies.   But it came across as a carefully contrived contribution to the culture wars.  Meanwhile behind the scenes – at least until Mayor Sadiq Khan pointed it out – the Home Office was cutting the annual funding for Prevent in London by two-thirds from £6.1 million in December 2019 to £2 million after April 2025.
 
Words do not trump reality.  And what you hear is not what you get.  Call it duplicity, call it deceit.  It is no way to govern.

See TheArticle 18/03/2024  ​