Accusing Government of ‘Two-Tier Policing’, Talking About Child Rape Gangs Are Signs of Extremism, Says Leaked UK Gov’t Report

An internal report ordered by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper risks taking counter-terror police’s eye off radical Islamism and tarring “significant swathes” of the public with the “far-right” brush, critics warn, as widespread concerns have been labelled extremist by the government.

‘Understand’, an internal report on counter-extremism ordered by senior Labour politician Yvette Cooper last year after the anti-mass migration riots following the Southport child murders, has been leaked and reveals how civil servants advise the government to widen the net of the security services radically.

The report, which was leaked to the Policy Exchange think tank, took an extremely dismissive attitude towards important issues facing the country while branding concerns about them as obsessions of extremists. Objections over so-called two-tier policing — which is to say police treating various social, racial, and faith groups differently, in contravention of the concept of equality before the law — is an example of a “right-wing extremist narrative”. This attitude comes despite the idea of two-tier policing already being demonstrated as pretty widespread throughout the British public.

Policy Exchange warned: “There is an obvious risk here of tarring significant swathes of the public as Far Right. A similar danger may exist through the [review] categorising the Far Right as ‘hijacking extant local grievances about perceived inequalities around access to resources’.”

Meanwhile, the issue of so-called grooming gangs, the organised industrial-scale rape of young girls by predominantly Pakistani-heritage gangs in Britain’s regional towns and cities, is also airily dismissed by Yvette Cooper’s ‘Understand’. It states: “Right-wing extremists frequently exploit cases of alleged group-based sexual abuse to promote anti-Muslim sentiment as well as anti-government and anti-‘political correctness’ narratives”.

Policy Exchange drew attention to the fact civil servants felt the need to call it “alleged” abuse as if this was in question, as it dismisses any idea there may be any genuine concern about the rape of children among those holding right-wing views.

In an area of clear internal contradiction, if not outright hypocrisy, Policy Exchange also noted that the government document exhaustively talks about the danger of “extreme misogyny”, relating it to ideas like the “manosphere”, “Pick-Up Artists”, and “Incels”, but makes “little reference” to the perpetrators of some of the most horrendous violence against women in the UK in decades, those same Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs themselves.

Other areas of extremism name-checked included Hindu extremism, anarchism, and radical environmentalism.

The think tank reveals that, in particular, the report advises the Home Secretary to no longer focus on issues like Islamic extremism or right-wing extremism but to be “agnostic” on ideology and pivot to “behaviours and activity of concern” because of the “dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see”.

Policy Exchange warned in their assessment that this new approach could swamp Britain’s intelligence with thousands of new cases of questionable importance, making missing genuinely dangerous extremists more likely and that it risks the counter-British extremism establishment being pushed towards policing symptoms, not causes.

It stated the paper, if implemented, “de-centres and downplays Islamism, by far the greatest threat to national security” and “risks confusing extreme violence with extremism, or extremism with any shocking crime, bad belief or nasty social phenomenon about which we are worried.”

The report also calls for an intensification of the collection of the already controversial ‘Non-Crime Hate Incidents’ by reversing a standing order they should only be recorded in cases where a threat of harm is present. As noted by Policy Exchange the records, which can’t be challenged and sit on the police computer for years, where they can be seen by potential employers even though there has been no criminal conviction, are: “intensely controversial, criticised as a waste of police time, an avenue for malicious complaints and chilling to free speech… “NCHIs have been recorded against children after playground disputes and journalists who have used “outdated language.”.

Hours after the existence and questionable content of the document was made public, Yvette Cooper briefed that she would not be accepting the findings of the review that she had ordered. The Guardian noted on Tuesday morning that a spokesman said: “Ministers have rejected this advice… Ideology, particularly Islamist extremism followed by far-right extremism, continue to be at the heart of our approach to countering extremism and counter terror. But as the horrific Southport attack shows, alongside that we also need more action on those drawn towards mixed ideologies and violence-obsessed young people.”

The report comes just days after the British government announced it had decided it believes an effective way to crack down on the country’s knife crime problem is to make buying knives more difficult as if they aren’t already available in every kitchen.