A leaked government document has named “vetted” organisations in receipt of £1.2 million in Prevent counter-extremism funding.
According to the advocacy organisation CAGE, a Home Office document titled “Local Delivery Best Practice Catalogue” leaked by Public Interest Investigations names organisations and projects vetted and funded by the government to deliver the controversial Prevent strategy nationally.
Prevent is widely considered to be a monitoring and spying exercise which targets the Muslim community.
Produced by the OSCT (Office for Security and Counter Terrorism), the document reveals four projects, part of the so called “national counter narrative,” which appear to acknowledge that each was part of a British government covert propaganda strategy.
Each of the projects claim to be independent “grassroots” campaigns tackling extremism, however, the leaked document appears to show that each is a “RICU product,” in a reference to the Home Office strategic communications agency the Research Information and Communication Unit.
The four projects are Faith on the Frontline, Families Against Stress and Trauma, MakingAStand (a campaign launched by an organisation called Inspire) and A Tale of Two Cities. Each of these projects involved covert direction and funding from RICU and its communications agency Breakthrough Media Limited.
Prevent-funded organisations
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Other organisations and individuals mentioned in the document include:
Upstanding Neighbourhoods (Birmingham) including training input from third parties like Salaam Institute (not to be confused with Al-Salam Institute run by Shaykh Akram Nadwi) and Radical Thinking CIC
British or Muslim: Providing Positive Messages (London Tri-borough) – Third party provider London Tigers
Reach (Blackburn with Darwen)
FIDA Management: Capacity & Resilience (Waltham Forest) – Third party provider FIDA Management
Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities (London Tri-borough)
Supporting Families (Blackburn with Darwen)
Raising Voices – Third party provider STR!VE (Leicester)
Tackling Extremism through Women & Families (Derby)
Young Leaders (Redbridge, Waltham Forest and Crawley) Third party provider currently Active Change Foundation
Community Outreach & Engagement – Active Change Foundation (Waltham Forest)
Building Community Resilience – Third party provider London Tigers (Tower Hamlets, Redbridge and Barking & Dagenham)
Powers of Persuasion – third party provider Second Wave (Lewisham)
Challenging Extremist Narratives in Schools (High Wycombe) – Third party provider EqualiTeach
Respect for One Another (Leicester) – contact Will Baldet
Choices: Alternatives to Extremism (Bradford)
Choices: Mainstreaming Prevent Education (Bradford)
Walk on By (Newham) – contact Ghaffar Hussain
GAME ON (Stoke-on-Trent) – Third party provider Reveal Theatre
One Extreme to the Other – GW Theatre (Blackburn, Liverpool, Leeds & Luton)
Tapestry (Birmingham) – Third party provider The Play House Theatre Company
Supporting Schools ( Blackburn)
Identity, belonging, extremism – FIDA Management (Waltham Forest)
Digital Resilience (Waltham Forest)
Internet Safety (Blackburn with Darwen)
Web Guardians (Haringey, Luton,and Crawley) – Third party provider JAN Trust
Mosque resilience and capacity building (Ealing) – Third party provider Faith Associates
Supporting Madrassahs (Brent) – HA9 Consultancy Limited
Pathwayz (Birmingham) – Third party provider KIKIT Pathways to Recovery
Muslimah Matters (Ealing) – Third party provider not listed.
Government’s “deceptive strategy”
Despite being dated March 2015, the document highlights that the projects will be used to produce a best practice catalogue once the evaluation period is completed in March 2016.
Asim Qureshi, CAGE Research Director, said: “These revelations call for a serious dialogue within the Muslim community on the legitimacy of government-sanctioned activism. It also highlights the government’s deceptive approach in engaging with Muslim communities and again calls into question the failing Prevent policy and its shadow, the global CVE campaign.
“This document also conclusively demonstrates the relationship and oversight the Home Office has over ostensibly community-led projects. CAGE’s earlier report ‘We are completely independent’ and the Guardian revelations, have previously highlighted these points and demonstrated how RICU was in effect directing and attempting to manufacture consent for Prevent amongst Muslim communities.”
