This month, the Commission for Countering Extremism published the findings from its public consultation. Seeking to better understand what extremism is, how it finds form, and most importantly what can be done about it, the commission visited more than 20 towns and cities across England and Wales, facilitating numerous roundtable discussions and reviewed more than 3,000 submissions from a range of different individuals and organisations. It also published 19 academic papers, specially commissioned to investigate different aspects of extremism or groups that propagate extremist ideologies. One of those was my paper investigating the proscribed far-right group National Action.
Titled “Challenging Hateful Extremism”, the commission’s report set out the contemporary landscape of extremism in England and Wales, noting its scale and prevalence as also the range of expressions and forms it currently takes. Commendably, the report also offers a number of new insights into how the radical right in particular is exploiting socio-political issues to garner support and create divisions. Interestingly, the report also calls on the government to ditch its current approach to countering extremism and focus on what the commission describes as the rather more pressing issue of ‘hateful extremism’. A wholly new approach, there is potential for it to close the loopholes in the government’s current approach to countering extremism that some within the radical right are known to be exploiting.
At present, the government defines extremism as “the vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs…calls for the death of members of our armed forces [are also] extremist”. While so, the commission found that three out of four people felt that definition was not only far too broad but so too largely unhelpful. In addition, the commission’s report claimed the existing definition also had the potential to hinder rather than protect the right to be offensive and radical through failing to satisfactorily distinguish between credible, democratic debate and more hateful forms.
