Displaying items by tag: William Shawcross

William Shawcross was appointed to review the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy in January 2021. Last week he concluded that Prevent concentrated too much on the far right and not enough on Islamist extremism. But he only attended six of the thousands of review panels examining the more extreme cases. A more intensive support, known as Channel, is needed for the small proportion of individuals seen as being at greatest risk. Between April 2021 and March 2022 almost 1,500 assessments for Channel took place. But Shawcross’s attendance at such a small number of these raises questions over how thorough his research was. Britain’s former top counter-terrorism officer, Neil Basu, said parts of the government-backed report appeared to be inspired by right-wing ideology and were ‘insulting’ to professionals fighting to tackle extremism.