Robert Lambert

In a succinct and perceptive analysis Mehdi Hasan, the editor of the New Statesman, highlights the extent to which the Government’s revised Prevent strategy fundamentally misreads the al-Qaeda threat to the UK. In doing so the new strategy flies in the face of compelling academic research, practitioner experience and shows continuity rather than disjunction with Labour policy. Instead the strategy relies on flawed advice from a cabal of neo-conservative ideologues who have been influential in the UK since 9/11 and increasingly so since 7/7. In this short response I shall concentrate on the ill-founded decision to exclude and denigrate Islamist and salafi Muslims as “extremists”.

This “extremism” strand of the revised strategy was heavily trailed on 5 February 2011 when David Cameron addressed a security conference in Munich and signalled that an approach to counter-terrorism I have been associated with since 9/11 was finally being abandoned. Writing in the Times, columnist David Aaronovitch applauded Cameron’s decision to exclude salafis and Islamists from a partnership role in preventing violent extremism in the UK. ‘Cameron’ he argues, ‘comes down hard on one side of an argument about how best to combat “home-grown” terrorism’ that has ‘gone on since 2001, and sharpened after the 2005 bombings’:

‘On one side are people such as Robert Lambert, formerly head of the Muslim Contact Unit at the Metropolitan Police and now co-director of the European Muslim Research Centre (EMRC) at the University of Exeter, and the American anthropologist Scott Atran, author of Talking to the Enemy’.

For Aaronovitch, as for long standing critics of what they dub 'Lambertism' at neo-conservative think-tanks including Policy Exchange, Quilliam, Centre for Social Cohesion and the Reut Institute my position is ‘boiled down’ to Aaronovitch’s Times headline ‘set a thief to catch a thief’:

‘As Dr Lambert wrote this week, “effective opponents of al-Qaeda need street credibility: that invariably entails maintaining the same robust opposition to the War on Terror as to al-Qaeda terrorism”. It was this logic that originally had the previous Government’s Prevent strategy team working with and consulting groups whose religious rhetoric was extreme and whose political rhetoric was to encourage armed jihad abroad“.

As Aaronovitch notes, my critics concede that there are ‘indeed examples of wannabe bombers being dissuaded by non-violent Muslim fundamentalists’. However, he accurately observes that they ‘also argue that these salafi and other groups, by their evangelical ideology, are those who often act to radicalise young Muslims in the first place’. According to Aaronovitch ‘the strengthening of such groups through official sponsorship may, as the Quilliam Foundation points out, undermine more mainstream and modernising tendencies within the Muslim communities’. That, succinctly, is the reason why ‘Mr Cameron agrees with Quilliam and not Dr Lambert’ on the basis that ‘non-violent extremists’ are part of the problem’ and not, as I am supposed to argue ‘part of the solution’.

To be clear, I remain wedded to an assessment that the salafis and Islamists I worked in partnership with to tackle al-Qaeda influence in the UK are ‘part of the solution’ and reject the argument Cameron has accepted that they are extremist and therefore unfit partners for police or civil servants. In doing so I fully accept the Policy Exchange argument repeated by Cameron that police and civil servants should not partner groups or individuals who are akin to the British National Party (BNP). It is absolutely fair to say that police should not under any circumstances partner the BNP with a view to ‘de-radicalising’ violent extremists in groups like Combat 18. Rather, as Dean Godson first suggested, when police have to get their hands dirty by talking to extremists they should do so in ‘a dark alley’, a reference to the traditional relationship of police handler and criminal informant, a covert interface managed by police and regulated by parliament that grants no legitimacy or status to the extremist. In truth, I have found no compelling evidence to convince me that my former salafi and Islamist partners are akin to the BNP and much to refute the claim. It is therefore wrong to characterise my approach as wittingly granting status and legitimacy to non-violent extremists – to set a thief to catch a thief, as Aaronovitch puts it.

Given Policy Exchange’s close relationship with the Conservative Party this decision was hardly surprising and widely predicted. Fortunately, May’s announcement had no adverse impact on the outstanding work that continues to challenge and reduce al-Qaeda influence in and around the Finsbury Park Mosque. Although supported by local police and local politicians modest Home Office support for the Finsbury Park Mosque ended over four years ago. That decision, wrong in my view, followed lobbying of the same kind by Policy Exchange. To illustrate the calibre of the work that takes place there, one man I have interviewed who used to adhere to al-Qaeda influenced violent extremism extolled by Abu Hamza (when he and his supporters were in de facto control of the mosque) became fully committed to democratic politics as a result of the de-radicalising influence of the Finsbury Park Mosque and its partnership with Jeremy Corbyn, the man’s active MP. That de-radicalising work receives no government funding or support and relies wholly on the civic mindedness of the mosque trustees – individuals Policy Exchange and Quilliam describe as extremists. Moreover, the mosque trustees remain constantly alert to ill-informed attempts in the media to smear their reputation such as in 2010 when Andrew Gilligan and others wrongly claimed that al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awalki had spoken at the mosque.

In contrast, Home Office support for the Brixton Mosque blossomed into significant funding support for a youth outreach project, Street, a prime target in Cameron’s speech. As a result Street, a flagship project in the Labour government’s efforts to reduce violent extremism and violent gang crime in South London, faces closure. According to the Daily Telegraph, the Home Office has told Street ‘it will have its money withdrawn this year in the first step towards switching funding away from strains of Islam with which the government disagrees’. The report continues:

‘The Brixton project is likely to be only the first to feel the effect of the new policy, with other [Salafi] organisations ..... facing closure. The move follows a speech by David Cameron a week ago in which he declared that the doctrine of multiculturalism had "failed" and would be abandoned.’

Concerned that the Street youth outreach project was being unfairly maligned I wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph that concludes:

‘Apart from the ideological extremists who advise Teresa May [the Home Secretary] the only people rejoicing at the news of Street's funding setback will be al-Qaeda strategists who continue to recruit and inspire British Muslims to kill British civilians in the UK and violent South London gang leaders who kill for fun.’

In the days following May’s announcement Street staff collected their P45s, police were called to deal with a suspcious package sent to the Finsbury Park Mosque and former Prime Minister Tony Blair publicised the paperback version of his memoir A Journey in which he re-iterates his certainty that al-Qaeda represents a continuum of threats that entail challenging Islamist and salafi ideology as well as the tactic of terrorism itself, exactly as May announced in the Commons. Understandably, Cameron and May are keen to present their prevent policy as new yet it is in fact wholly based on Blair’s decade old analysis, deeply flawed as it is.


Robert Lambert is Co-Director of the European Muslim Research Centre (EMRC), University of Exeter and a Lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV), University of St. Andrews. Lambert expands on the issues raised in this article in his forthcoming book Countering al-Qaeda in London: Police and Muslims in Partnership (Hurst, 2011) and in ‘Competing counter-radicalisation models in the UK’, a chapter in Rik Coolsaet’s edited collection JihadiTerrorism and the Radicalisation Challenge: European and American Experiences (Ashgate, 2011).

Dr. Robert Lambert

Co-director, European Muslim Research Centre - EMRC

University of Exeter

Lecturer, CSTPV, University of St. Andrews