Parents at Buxton School in Leytonstone were rightly shocked last month when they discovered that their children were being given questionnaires on radicalisation distributed as part of Waltham Forest Council’s Building Resilience through Integration & Trust (BRIT) programme.
However, with local authorities - along with schools, health, the penal system and others - now all having a statutory duty to prevent people being drawn into terrorism what happened at Buxton School may be the start of a wider trend.
Indeed, whilst briefing the UN Security Council Mark Sedwill, a Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, announced that “we aim not only to tackle the symptoms, but also the root causes of terrorism. So two million public servants in thousands of public authorities in the United Kingdom now have a legal duty to seek to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism and extremism.”
Local authorities, in an age of unprecedented budget cuts, are now having to add the challenge of how to deal with globalised terrorism to that of bin collection and clean streets.
The Government’s concern with the real issue of British citizens travelling to fight in the Middle East must be translated into effective policy that empowers communities to prevent exactly that rather than giving licensing to intrusive monitoring mechanisms that are more likely to divide and radicalise.
This requires not just the devolution of statutory responsibilities to local authorities but also the trust and resources to be able to do things that fit best for our communities.
The scale of the challenge is clear. More than half the countries in the world are currently generating extremist fighters for groups such as al-Qaida and Islamic State, the UN has said. More than 700 British extremists are thought to have travelled to Syria – with about half subsequently returning to the UK.
We’re particularly sensitive to this issue in Brent, one of the most diverse borough’s in Britain. Although we are proud of how well different communities get on well together locally, it is still the case that individuals from Brent have travelled to Iraq and Syria this year.
It has been said that in national security, there is no longer a distinction between the domestic and the international and nor must there be between central and local government when it comes to how we respond to this challenge. The Home Secretary, Theresa May, has said that she wants to ‘bring people together to ensure we are living together as one society’ but there is a fine line between tools given to communities to protect their own versus powers exercised by the state that appear to target certain sections of society.
That’s why in Brent we’re determined to not only fulfil our statutory responsibility but also ensure that the challenge of extremism is seen as one of common cause across our communities. This requires, for want of better words, radical thinking.
Traditional means of engagement – especially those that see religious leaders as somehow or other ‘in control’ of their congregation – miss the highly personalised nature of how youngsters in particular have been groomed and recruited by ISIS. In Brent we’re looking to ensure that we set up the right forums of dialogue and debate to ensure genuine local ownership of this issue.
We should also learn from how other countries have tackled the issue. In Tunisia the centralised state has taken a far more active approach with mixed results. I spoke with Dr Rafik Abdessalem, the former Tunisian foreign minister who now heads up external communications for the ENNAHDHA party, about how they’ve handled the issue.
Dr Abdessalem explained how 98% of mosques are under ‘state control’ and extremist imams are ‘not welcome’. However, whilst this more activist approach has led to domestic improvements, more Tunisians than any other nationality have travelled to fight in the Middle East. The lesson appears to be that if you clamp down on more public space you push people underground and off the grid – the exact area where ISIS recruiters await.
Local political leaders can be doing much more to counter extremism in their neighbourhoods. Councillors’ knowledge, relationships and legitimacy can ensure that they can be an effective frontline both when combatting dogma as well as dog poo.
James Denselow is Brent LBC’s cabinet member for stronger communities