The omens are not good for Prevent

Peter Black has frequently drawn attention to the financial corruption which surrounds the Johnson government. In particular, the current Covid-19 epidemic has given many opportunities for contracts to be awarded to friends or family members of people close to government and to donors to the Conservative party. Little regard seems to have been paid to the capability of the contractors in question.

There has also been an insidious corruption of the machinery of government by the introduction of advisers and Quango executives on a doctrinaire basis. A recent example has been the appointment of a former director of a neoconservative think-tank to head a review of Prevent, the government's anti-terrorism programme. This was set up as part of the CONTEST strategy established by the Blair-Brown administration and continued under succeeding Conservative prime ministers.

Middle East Eye voices its concerns:

In February last year, the Home Office said it was committed to appointing a reviewer through an open and transparent process after human rights campaigners threatened it with further legal action.

However, the future of the review, which the government first committed to two years ago, has been uncertain ever since. In May the government pushed back a legal deadline for its completion from August last year until August 2021.

Shawcross's appointment is unlikely to be welcomed by campaigners who have raised concerns that Prevent is discriminatory against Muslims and who say that a fully independent review must consider whether the strategy ought to be scrapped altogether. Shawcross is a former trustee and director member of the Henry Jackson Society, a controversial neoconservative think-tank that has been accused of stoking Islamophobia. He is currently a senior fellow at the right-wing Policy Exchange think tank.

During his tenure as head of the Charity Commission from 2012 to 2018 the regulator was accused of unfairly targeting Muslim charities during a period when many organisations were involved in sending aid to rebel-held areas of Syria. The commission denied targeting Muslims or any other religion or type of charity.

Commenting on the appointment on Twitter, Miqdaad Versi, a spokesperson for the Muslim Council of Britain, drew attention to comments attributed to Shawcross in 2012 when he has been quoted as saying: "Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future. I think all European countries have vastly, very quickly growing Islamic populations".

Versi said the MCB, an umbrella group representing about 500 Muslim organisations, had initially welcomed the government's commitment to a review of Prevent and had faced criticism for doing so.

"They were roundly criticised by many for implicitly trusting that this would be done fairly. It seems the critics were right," he said.