A powerful committee of MPs is likely to hold a formal hearing into allegations that a government anti-extremism programme is being used to gather information on innocent Muslims.

The home affairs select committee meets on Tuesday and will discuss widening its inquiry into the £140m Preventing Violent Extremism scheme, also known as Prevent.

The hearing follows a Guardian investigation that revealed allegations that the programme, whose public aim is to prevent Muslims from being lured into violent extremism, is being used to gather intelligence about innocent people not suspected of involvement in terrorism.

Guardian, 19 October 2009

“Not only is it morally reprehensible to treat responsible and law-abiding Muslim citizens as a subversive threat, it is also hugely counter-productive. If ministers continue to follow Ed Husain’s advice they will begin to jeopardise social cohesion as well as effective and legitimate counter-terrorism in the UK.”

Jonathan Githens-Mazer and Robert Lambert at Comment is Free, 19 October 2009

The government must stop seeing all Muslims as innately prone to violence if it wants to rebuild trust in the community, argues Rizwaan Sabir.

Comment is Free, 19 October 2009

Excessive surveillance of Muslims undermines a central component of counter-terrorism work, argues Arun Kundnani, author of the IRR study Spooked! How not to prevent violent extremism.

Guardian, 19 October 2009

The topic for this evening’s Politics and Media slot on the Islam Channel (Sky 813) at 7pm is ‘Spying on Muslims’. The programme is presented by Salma Yaqoob and the studio guests are:

Arun Kundnani – author of Spooked: how not to prevent violent extremism, published by the Institute of Race Relations; Vikram Dodd – Crime Reporter, Guardian; and Dr Daud Abdullah – Deputy Secretary General, Muslim Council of Britain and Chair, Middle East Monitor (MEMO).

Dr Jonathan Githens-Mazer – Senior lecturer in politics, University of Exeter, currently researching political mobilisation amongst British Muslims – will join the discussion by phone.

The Home Office has been invited to send a spokesperson.

The government programme aimed at preventing Muslims from being lured into violent extremism is being used to gather intelligence about innocent people who are not suspected of involvement in terrorism, the Guardian has learned.

The information the authorities are trying to find out includes political and religious views, information on mental health, sexual activity and associates, and other sensitive information, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Other documents reveal that the intelligence and information can be stored until the people concerned reach the age of 100.

Tonight Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, branded it the biggest spying programme in Britain in modern times and an affront to civil liberties.

The intelligence is being gathered as part of the strategy Preventing Violent Extremism – Prevent for short. It was launched three years ago to stop people being lured to al-Qaida ideology and committing acts of terrorism.

The government and police have repeatedly denied that the £140m programme is a cover for spying on Muslims in Britain. But sources directly involved in running Prevent schemes say it involves gathering intelligence about the thoughts and beliefs of Muslims who are not involved in criminal activity.

Guardian, 17 October 2009

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A report published today by the Institute of Race Relations finds that the government’s Prevent programme for tackling extremism fosters division, mistrust and alienation.

Entitled Spooked: how not to prevent violent extremism, the report suggests that the Prevent programme has been used to establish one of the most elaborate systems of surveillance ever seen in Britain.

Moreover, there are strong reasons for thinking that the Prevent progamme, in effect, constructs the Muslim population as a “suspect community”, fosters social divisions among Muslims themselves and between Muslims and others, encourages tokenism, facilitates violations of privacy and professional norms of confidentiality, discourages local democracy and is counter-productive in reducing the risk of political violence.

IRR press release 17 October 2009

Download report (pdf) here.

The report also notes the influence of Ed Husain and his mates on the Prevent programme. It points out that Learning Together To Be Safe: a toolkit to help schools contribute to the prevention of violent extremism (pdf here), produced by the Department for Children, Schools and Families:

“endorses advice from the Quilliam Foundation thinktank about behaviours that ‘could indicate a young person is being influenced by extremists and developing a mindset that could lead them to accept and undertake violent acts’. The indicators listed include: expressions of political ideology such as support for ‘the Islamic political system’, a focus on scripture as an exclusive moral source, a ‘conspiratorial mindset’, seeing the West as a source of evil in the world and literalism in the reading of Muslim texts.

“The Quilliam Foundation is also backing up this advice with its Radicalisation Awareness Programme training for teachers and other local authority workers on how to spot the signs of extremism. The danger with this is that radical religious and political opinions become mistaken for terrorist indoctrination – especially given the potential problems with the Quilliam Foundation’s definition of ‘extremism’.”