This week, both the Home Secretary and the Education Secretary announced crackdowns on pro-Iran extremism.
The measures unveiled by Shabana Mahmood and Bridget Phillipson are fair but belated and disingenuous.
First came Ms Phillipson with her move against ‘hatred’ and ‘terrorism’ in higher education, and in her crosshairs were the 27 Ahlul-Bayt student groups (also known as AbSocs) that shared social-media posts expressing sorrow for the ‘martyrdom’ of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. An ‘unimaginable loss for the entire Ummah’, said one, while another urged members to ‘remain aware and ready’ as ‘this is not the end of the resistance’.
In a statement Ms Phillipson said: ‘We know our institutions work incredibly hard to support their students and uphold the law, but it is vital they can continue a zero-tolerance approach to those who incite hatred or draw students into terrorism.’
She promised additional help, support and ‘monitoring’. She said that said institutions could be sanctioned or de-registered for tolerating speakers who promote hatred or terrorism.
That last warning is revealing because it points to existing powers that the Government has not used equitably.
Statutes already criminalise incitement to violence, material support to terrorism, hate speech, and (most recently) hazards to online safety.
Specifically, the Terrorism Acts of 2000 and 2006 criminalise the encouragement of terrorism, dissemination of terrorist propaganda and material support to proscribed organisations.
The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act of 2015 requires universities to prevent radicalisation.
And the Office for Students already helps, supports and monitors these institutions to address extremism.
Educators can already refer students (and other educators) to the Prevent programme, which is where the Home Office comes in. The education sector generates more Prevent referrals (36 per cent) than any other source.
The Government does not need more powers, offices or programmes. It just needs to stop wasting them disproportionately on the bogeyman of the ‘far right’.
Right-wing terrorism rarely happens – in Britain, America, anywhere!
Islamists committed 94 per cent of terrorist murders in the UK over the last 25 years. About 75 per cent of MI5’s terrorism suspects, and 60 per cent of our prisons’ terrorists, are Islamists.
Yet only 10 per cent of the Prevent caseload is classified as Islamist. Instead, 21 per cent is classified as right wing, which conveniently allows the Government and its co-partisans to report right wing ‘terrorism’ as twice as common. How does the Government effect this sleight of hand when Prevent does not classify the ideology for 56 per cent of its cases?
In both 2023 and 2024, an independent reviewer, Sir William Shawcross, reported that Prevent is over-focused on right wing extremism to the neglect of Islamism.
And yet the Government changed nothing, and Shawcross was not invited to report in 2025.
The myth of ‘overwhelming’ far right extremism is propagandised by Prevent itself, through tax-payer-funded products such as the ‘Pathways’ game. Its landing page expects students to navigate ‘extremism’. But inside the game, only right wing extremism is featured. All the extremists are white, all the counter-extremists are non-white and all the victims are Muslims or immigrants. Researching ‘mass immigration’ is one of the things that gets the user flagged as ‘far right’.
Educators are in on it because Pathways was proposed by a consortium of local education authorities.
When educators engage in left wing partisanship, nothing happens, despite the statutory prohibition on partisanship in education.
In 2025 alone, teachers lectured that supporters of Britain’s most popular party (Reform UK) are ‘fascists’, told pupils that the St George’s Cross is a far right symbol, sent home a 12-year-old girl for wearing a Union Jack dress on ‘Diversity Day’, referred a fellow teacher to Prevent for showing videos by Donald Trump’s supporters in a class on American politics, and bused children to lobby the Labour Party conference on behalf of the National Education Union.
The NEU is the same union that declared Reform UK ‘far right and racist,’ the same union with only 10 per cent of members who profess to support the Conservative or Reform parties, the same union (in collusion with Palestine Solidarity Campaign) that organised teachers to cancel a visit by a Jewish MP (nominally because Damien Egan is vice-chairman of Labour Friends of Israel).
The ‘far right’ is disproportionately targeted not just by Prevent and by educators, but by judges and prosecutors too.
Most notoriously, in 2024 the government covered up the identity of Axel Rudakubana, who stabbed to death three girls at a dance class in Southport (and his referrals to Prevent, and his jihadism, and his second-generation immigrant status), while the same government fast-tracked and prejudiced the prosecution of Lucy Connolly (wife of a Conservative councillor) for her angry tweet against asylum centres.
Police also protect Islamist marchers while arresting counter-protesters. For instance, in 2024, a Jewish group posted videos of police escorting Palestine-flagged marchers, who said they were looking for Jewish ‘blood’, pelted Jews with missiles, told police that ‘Zionists’ were walking dogs as a ‘provocation’ and said further dogs would justify violent responses. The police nodded in agreement.
While police and prosecutors were privileging pro-Palestine marchers, they repressed critics of anti-Semitic tweets, counter-protesters against anti-Semites (including, infamously, a bystander arrested for ‘provoking’ protesters by being ‘openly Jewish’), and even bystanders filming the march.
Also repressed are trans-sceptics, those who refer to the biological gender of child abusers who transition to ‘female’ after indictment, drivers who remove climate-change protesters from highways, and wavers of British flags (but not foreign flags).
To be fair, the Met admitted fault for the ‘openly Jewish’ arrest, and has since said it would be arresting fewer people, such as Graham Linehan, for trans-sceptical tweets, and recording fewer non-crime hate incidents. However, NCHIs continue under the guise of ‘intelligence’ (note that a radical Muslim group was the audience for the Met’s announcement).
The Home Office either denies any two-tier policing, prosecutions, or justice, or claims frustration with its powerlessness.
For instance, in October, just after a deadly Islamist attack on a synagogue in Manchester, the Government pretended it needed new powers to crackdown on anti-Semitic and anti-Israel protests. In fact, it could have enforced existing laws equitably.
Consider what Ms Mahmood told the Commons on Wednesday when she said: ‘The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, has requested a prohibition on processions relating to al-Quds Day under section 13 of the Public Order Act 1986. I have consented to that request, placing a ban on those processions for both protesters and counter-protesters that will now last for a month. This is the first ban since 2012 . . .’
Mahmood is using a 40-year old law to ban pro-Iran protests, months after claiming she needs new powers to ban pro-Palestine protests – while turning a blind eye to years of two-tier protection of Islamists and leftists – and repression of everyone else.
The Government doesn’t need new powers, offices or programmes but should simply be acting against two-tier implementation.
Start punishing institutions of education for disproportionately going after students and parents with popular views.
Start punishing police, prosecutors, and judges for disproportionately going after popular speech.
And start punishing both educators and officials for protecting all Islamists and not just the 27 student groups that have expressed support for Iran’s dead theocrat.
