By Alex Klaushofer
The cohesion minister has called on councils to take a tougher line against extremism as part of the government’s new counter-terrorism strategy.
The cohesion minister has called on councils to take a tougher line against extremism as part of the government’s new counter-terrorism strategy.‘Councils, when they’re giving funds to local groups, need to ask what the groups are and do we know them,’ Sadiq Khan told Public Finance on March 24, the day the Contest strategy was launched.
The strategy is a three-year plan to counter the threat of terrorism through prevention and education, along with more policing and conventional intelligence work.
Khan said it was important for local authorities to establish how far the views of groups they fund coincided with their own, as well as assessing their potential ability, through their connections with Muslim communities, to combat extremism. Councils funding activities for young people, for example, needed to ensure that they were not inadvertently supporting groups that glorified terrorist activities abroad.
Khan suggested that the government’s previous approach to counter-terrorism had been too soft. ‘In the past, they’ve turned a blind eye, not taken them on,’ he said. ‘There’s been a nervousness to do so.’
But he added that — while government expected councils to ‘challenge’ extremist views – it would not be telling them how to work with their communities. ‘Some local authorities around the country are doing innovative work,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to lose that by being control-freakish; it’s about giving them autonomy and flexibility.’
The strategy puts a stronger emphasis on challenging people who reject the ‘shared values’ that define British society, such as respect for the law and tolerance of other faiths and sexualities.
The success of the strategy, the document states, requires ‘close co-operation between a wide range of organisations’, including local authorities and the police. A Public Service Agreement will be attached to counter-terrorism work for the first time.
