Prevent is becoming a complaints desk for the offended

There can be no doubt that an Islamic blasphemy law is in full swing in Britain today. Its latest instrument of enforcement is not a court, nor even a police force, but Prevent — the Government’s own counter-extremism programme.

This week, the Muslim news website 5Pillars revealed that Robert Jenrick, Reform UK’s Shadow Chancellor, had been reported to both the Metropolitan Police and Prevent over comments he made about Islam on Dan Wootton Outspoken on 6 October. The complainant asked the police to assess whether his remarks fell foul of Part 3A of the Public Order Act 1986 by meeting the threshold for stirring up religious hatred. They also asked Prevent to consider whether the framing of his comments fell within its definition of extreme right-wing ideology.

What, then, did Mr Jenrick say? That: “Radical Islam is a threat to everything that we hold dear in this country. That it has to be fought and destroyed. It has to be eradicated from our country. And that we can’t allow the creeping Islamification of the United Kingdom.” And that: “Wearing the burka, Shari’ah courts, hate preachers. End every one of these as quickly as possible, then maybe we’ve got a fighting chance of saving our country from going down the same path as France has clearly gone down.”

Well, he is not wrong, is he? These are mainstream views, voiced by a democratically elected Member of Parliament and shared by many people across the country. The police complaint is a complete joke: Part 3A requires threatening words intended to stir up religious hatred, and Parliament wrote into it an express protection for “discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions”. Nor is Mr Jenrick a potential terrorist. I should know: I used to work for the man.

The police complaint will almost certainly go nowhere. The Prevent referral is the more insidious of the two, because it does not need to go anywhere to do its work.

A referral carries no criminal sanction, and that is precisely what makes it so useful to those who wish to punish speech, because it still places the target’s name before a counter-terrorism system. To accuse someone of being an extremist for perfectly acceptable speech is a waste and an abuse of an important mechanism, one that should be dedicated solely to identifying those at risk of radicalisation and preventing them from committing acts of terror on our streets. The increasing weaponisation of this programme will call its integrity into question and undermine public safety.

Mr Jenrick is the second prominent public figure in recent weeks to be reported to Prevent for remarks about Islam. Before him came the Fawlty Towers star and national treasure John Cleese, reported for what has been described as “incendiary posts about Muslims and Islam” on social media. The complainant reportedly described the pattern of his posts as dehumanising and as collectively attributing violence and criminality to Muslims, and assessed the risk he posed as “Moderate to High”. The referral forms part of an orchestrated campaign against Mr Cleese, and followed attempts by activists to have his show in Birmingham — part of a national tour — cancelled, and his performances branded “hate speech”. Would there be the same hysteria had he joked about the Catholic Church? Obviously not.

Prevent really ought to be the last institution of the state to be corrupted by, and to kowtow to, activists. But should we really be surprised? In 2023, Sir William Shawcross’s independent review of Prevent found a “double standard” at its heart in its treatment of the two principal ideologies with which it deals.

A leaked draft of the review stated that the definition of extreme right-wing ideology had been “so broad it has included mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, right-wing-leaning commentary that have no meaningful connection to terrorism or radicalisation”. On the other side of the coin, Shawcross argued that Prevent had ignored “Islamist narratives” by focusing on proscribed organisations. In essence, the programme took a two-tier approach to assessing potential extremism from the two ideologies. Prevent treated non-violent right-wing opinion as a radicalisation risk, whereas Islamism was a concern only where it overlapped with groups banned by the state. Shawcross therefore called for the programme to refocus on tackling “extremist Islamist ideology”.

One of the most shocking revelations concerned resources. Shawcross found a troubling disparity: 75 per cent of MI5’s caseload was focused on Islamist threats, yet only one in ten Prevent staff were focused on the same issue. This is despite the fact that, since 2000, Islamist terrorists have killed more than thirty times as many people in Great Britain as extreme right-wing terrorists: 98 victims against 3. Put another way, Islamist terrorism accounts for 97 per cent of all victims of terrorism since 2000. Radical Islam is a threat; indeed, by MI5’s own account, Islamist terrorism is the primary threat to our country.

The then Conservative Government duly accepted the findings in full, along with all thirty-four recommendations. It appears that the programme has been either unable or unwilling to change.

Every hour that Prevent spends assessing whether a Member of Parliament’s television interview is a symptom of radicalisation is an hour not spent on those who pose a genuine threat. We know what that can cost. The Southport killer was referred to Prevent three times, and three times his case was closed. A programme that could not see the threat in him has no business sifting a comedian’s social media posts or investigating an MP. Weaponising Prevent does not merely chill speech; it degrades our counter-terrorism efforts, and so becomes a threat to public and national security in its own right.

Ever since the Government announced its Islamophobia definition — published in March and repackaged as “anti-Muslim hostility” — the Free Speech Union has warned that it would have a sinister and chilling effect on the ability of elected politicians and private citizens to criticise Islam. Throughout the process, Labour ministers repeatedly assured us that it would not silence legitimate criticism of Islam, its history, or its practices. Yet here we are. The definition has emboldened a network of sinister Islamist activists to clamp down on those who wish — as is their right — to criticise, mock, and debate Islam in what remains a culturally Christian country.

How that definition came to be written is itself alarming. Nick Timothy, the Shadow Justice Secretary, working alongside the Free Speech Union, exposed the Communities department’s claim that it had deleted all the evidence submitted to the working group that drafted it — evidence that might have shown whether Islamist extremists helped to shape it. Ministers have since admitted that the records still exist.

Prevent is merely the newest channel for a well-practised tactic. When Mr Timothy criticised a mass Muslim prayer event in Trafalgar Square, he was reported to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards by Labour MPs, branded “Islamophobic”, and urged to resign by the then Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer; the Commissioner declined to investigate. Reform UK was referred to the Equality and Human Rights Commission by 27 left-wing MPs, citing, among other things, Nigel Farage’s criticism of the same Iftar event. Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, has been reported to the Standards Commissioner over his “repeated rhetoric about Muslims, Islam and Pakistanis”, a complaint that could in principle end in his suspension from the Commons. That story, too, was broken by 5Pillars.

The complaint against Mr Lowe focuses on his use of the term “Pakistani Muslim rape gangs”, his claim of an “undeniable link” between Islam and the rape gangs, and his warnings about the “Islamification of Britain”. Yet Baroness Casey’s 2025 audit of group-based child sexual exploitation found that men of Asian and Pakistani heritage were over-represented among suspects, and that the authorities shied away from saying so for fear of being branded racist or Islamophobic, or of stirring up community tensions. In each case the method is the same: the complaint is the punishment, whatever its outcome.

But the courts, too, are becoming increasingly willing to enforce an Islamic blasphemy law. Hamit Coskun was convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London, in a peaceful protest against what he regarded as the Islamification of his home country, Turkey. With the help of the Free Speech Union, his conviction was overturned, the judge declaring that there is no offence of blasphemy in our law.

Stephen Gray, a former police officer of nearly thirty years’ service, has been less fortunate — so far. He was convicted of sending a “grossly offensive” message, an offence under the Communications Act 2003, for sharing a joke about the Prophet Muhammad.

The former police officer had reposted an image on Facebook that featured a rasher of bacon, a man in a turban, and the accompanying text: “Fun fact about bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a nine year old”. It was clearly satirical, and a reference to the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha at the age of six and the consummation of that marriage when she was nine. But, as Mr Gray said in his defence, its purpose was to raise an important point about the abhorrent practice of child marriage. He is now appealing, with the support of the Free Speech Union.

We must not let a de facto Islamic blasphemy law take root

Parliament abolished the blasphemy offences of England and Wales in 2008 because they are not compatible with a free society. Yet the Government, police, activists, and courts appear determined to impose one for Islam alone, through the back door and without the scrutiny and approval of Parliament.

We must not let a de facto Islamic blasphemy law take root, and nor must we allow activists to turn a counter-terrorism programme into an instrument for shutting down criticism of Islam.