This is the opening to my essay on the flaws of Britain’s Prevent strategy, published in the Observer on 15 June 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer.

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If you believe that immigration has destroyed Western civilisation, I might think you’ve become too drunk on Robert Jenrick and Allison Pearson, Douglas Murray and Melanie Phillips. The British state, though, may well mark you down as being on the path to terrorism.

According to an online training course for Prevent, the government’s anti-radicalisation programme, “cultural nationalism” – defined as the belief that “‘Western culture’ is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups” – is one of “the three most common subcategories of extreme rightwing terrorist ideologies”, the others being “white/ethno-nationalism” and “white supremacism”.

The claim inevitably drew outrage from rightwing commentators. Toby Young, founder of the Free Speech Union (FSU), wrote to the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, pointing out that Prevent’s definitions of “extremism” and “terrorist ideologies” expand “the scope of suspicion to include individuals whose views are entirely lawful but politically controversial”, and that “right-of-centre beliefs risk being treated as ideologically suspect”.

Prevent, the FSU’s Freddie Attenborough wrote in The Critic magazine, “has shifted from focusing on conduct (acquiring weapons, making threats, inciting violence) to treating political ideologies as indicators of risk – the problem being that ‘risky’ ideologies are both vaguely defined and culturally loaded”.

Young and Attenborough are right about the dangers of Prevent overreach. There is, though, nothing new in this. Prevent has long pursued “political ideologies as indicators of risk”. In the past, it was mainly Muslims or radicals that caught its eye. Many of those outraged by the targeting of “cultural nationalism” said little about such practices, indeed often cheered them on because they applied largely to Muslims. Now they are incandescent as more mainstream conservative views have been drawn in as part of Prevent’s clampdown on far-right terror.

Read the full version of the essay in the Observer.