• 1 Barry Buzan, Ole Weaver and Jaap de Wilde, Security, A New Framework for Analysis, (Lynne Riener an (...)
• 2 Ibid.
• 3 U.N.O., (2003).

1According to an influential definition of “securitisation” by the Copenhagen school, we can talk of securitisation when the security imperative is used in political discourse and decision-making to justify an expansion of state powers, often at the expense of human rights.¹ “Security” itself is a contested notion, originally meant to designate the security of the state in an international relations perspective. It has been gradually broadened in scope to encompass other dimensions. “Societal security” designates the security of a society, understood as physical security against threats of violent attacks, but also as social cohesion and collective well-being.² Human Security is generally meant to highlight the potential conflict between state or societal security and the well-being of individuals, in the context of mounting concerns over the extensive use of security by a variety of political actors as a justification for a growing list of policies with often dubious implications.³

• 4 Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia, Frontiers of Fear, Immigration and Insecurity in the United States and (...)
• 5 Christopher Rudolph, “Security and the Integration of Immigrants in Europe and the United States”, (...)

2The security-integration nexus is apparent in the ways in which the ability of the state to control migration flows – border control, asylum restrictions, deportation orders, criteria for citizenship acquisition – are conceptualised and justified with reference to both state and societal security. While issues related to immigration already prompted concerns in the last decades of the 20^th century, after 9/11 these concerns intensified and turned into fears.⁴ This development is the prolongation of a long-term shift from comparatively liberal immigration regimes in the post-war decades to the construction of immigration as a problem and a risk, as suggested by Christopher Rudolph.⁵

• 6 Steve Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf, The Multiculturalism Backlash, Europe discourses, policies a (...)
• 7 Ibid.

3Dominant approaches to migrant “integration” – understood as state strategies to facilitate the settlement of migrants and their descendants in their host societies – have undergone a parallel trajectory, from a differentialist, multiculturalist phase in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, to a “neo-assimilationist” phase since the late 1990s. In this phase of “backlash” against multiculturalism or “retreat” from it, European political discourses suggest that too much has been done to allow ethnic minorities to express their cultural singularities, and not enough to ask them to adjust to the values of their host society, as underlined by Vertovec and Wessendorf as well as by Joppke.⁶ Their incapacity or unwillingness to abide by shared national values, usually defined with reference to the rule of law, democracy, tolerance, human rights, is now presented as a threat to social cohesion and as the source of an identity malaise in Western national communities. This often results in the “illiberal” tightening of criteria for inclusion in the national community, for example through restrictive reforms of settlement and naturalisation.⁷

• 8 Didier Bigo, « L’Europe de la sécurité intérieure, penser autrement la sécurité », in Anne-Marie Le (...)

4The parallel between the securitisation of migration and border control, on the one hand, and migrant integration, on the other, can be captured by analogy with the notion of a “continuum of threats”, an expression coined by Didier Bigo to designate the expansion of the remit of police cooperation in Europe to terrorism, drugs, organised crime, mafias, human trafficking, and asylum seekers, presented as closely related problems.⁸ It draws attention to the social and political construction of “threats”, the product of professional strategies of police organisations that have had an interest in seizing new issues and incorporating them in their policy remit. So, while there is no denying the reality of threats like terrorism or various types of criminality, the ways in which they are defined, analysed, and which types of solutions are proposed and at what level of policy-making these solutions should be implemented, take different shapes according to the interests of a variety of actors. They may be international organisations, governments, political parties, as well as experts, academics, consultative panels or representatives of professional organisations.

• 9 Will Somerville, Immigration Under New Labour, (Bristol, The Policy Press, 2007).
• 10 Didier Lassalle, « Le Post-multiculturalisme de David Cameron », (Paris, Revue Française de Civilis (...)
• 11 Home Office, Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain, (HMSO, 2002)

5In the policy areas touching on “integration” – State-church relations, local community partnerships, naturalisation, citizenship – the shift to increasingly securitised understandings of ethnic diversity has been driven by the desire to maintain the legitimacy of governments in the context of economic globalisation, continuing migration flows, and welfare cuts. In the UK, this is vividly illustrated for example by the white paper Secure Borders, Safe Haven (2002), which spelled out the rationale for the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act adopted the same year. The white paper sought explicitly to balance the inevitability of future migration to the UK (and in fact the deliberate strategy of opening UK borders to specific types of migrations, as underlined by Somerville⁹ and Lassalle¹⁰), with the anti-immigration sentiments of large sections of the press and of the Conservative party. Hence the bill contained the proposal, which was groundbreaking at the time in the UK, of a citizenship ceremony including an oath of allegiance for naturalisation applicants.¹¹

• 12 See Bigo, op.cit. and Derek Mc Ghee, Intolerant Britain? Hate, Citizenship and Difference, (Maidenh (...)

6The shift is also justified and theorised by a variety of sub-political actors, such as civil servants, academics and experts, who can be viewed as intermediary actors (neither frontline deliverers of public services nor political actors) or as agents of “institutional reflexivity”.¹² They contribute powerfully to shaping dominant discourse and approaches, both reflecting and reinforcing government strategies. This is particularly the case in the United Kingdom where the last decade has seen a flurry of new concepts, vocabulary and approaches launched into the public debates by ministerial reports. It is this type of discourse that this paper analyses, focusing on two policy areas: (a) the discourse on social cohesion and community, which has become the official guideline for a wide range of policy areas touching on immigrant integration since 2001, (b) and the preventive dimension of the CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy, the PREVENT programme.

• 13 John Clarke and Janet Newman, The Managerial State. Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of (...)
• 14 Clarke and Newman, op.cit., p.133.
• 15 Maggie O’Neil, Asylum, Migration and Community, (Bristol, The Policy Press, 2010), p 84.

9Both the Labour governments of the 1997-2010 period and the Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition that replaced them sought to move away from the multiculturalist approach by emphasising citizenship, organised around shared values and social cohesion. Although the specific language and some of the policies differ, the central tenets of the integration policies for both regimes are predicated on the same ideological premises. At the core lies the idea of community. This was evident when the term was used by Tony Blair and his allies to coin new concepts such as “community cohesion”. The assumption of the communautarian vision of society is also discernible in the various pro-religion strands of the Big Society and localism, which both inspired the coalition’s approach. The contradictory impulses of community – the inclusion of individuals into a group, and the simultaneous exclusion of others through the very process of delineating the contours of the group – therefore lie at the heart of much British policy-making in fields pertaining to immigrant integration. This can be traced back to the common roots of both New Labour and coalition approaches: New Right ideas and the “New Public Management”. Their influence has been a constant in British politics since the 1970s and has been closely correlated to the transition to a managerial state.¹³ The idea of reimagining local government as a coordinator and participant in partnerships with local communities originated in New Right thinking about “a minimalist role for local government which would create the conditions for others to engage in service provision”.¹⁴ As they either re-organise or directly dismantle the welfare state, governments are compelled to provide new narratives to paint a coherent picture of early 21^st century society at a time of challenge for one of its traditional backbones, state redistribution. Discourses on community and cohesion justify the transition of state-society relations from a model of hierarchical and direct linkage between policies and citizens to a model of triangular relation between policies, individuals, and “communities”, which are both recipients of and participants in the implementation of the policies in the context of “partnerships” between government organisations and “the third sector” or “civil society”. Some authors have written about government through communities as a technology of citizenship which, applied to community empowerment programmes, encourages active citizenship in the provision of social services in order to reduce the public’s dependence on services once these are rolled back.¹⁵

• 16 Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, (London, Polity Press, 1998), p 13 (...)
• 17 Arun Kundnani, “The death of multiculturalism”, (London, Institute of Race Relations, April 2002). (...)
• 18 Bhikhu Parekh, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi- (...)

10Here we retrace the history of the various policies in which the logic of community has been evident since 1997 in policy areas related to immigrant integration, as shown in the writings of Anthony Giddens who argued in 1998 that though “entirely laudable” multiculturalist policies and their aim (“to counter the exploitation of oppressed groups”) could not be fruitful without “the support of the broad national community” and had to “stretch beyond the claims and grievances of any specific group”.¹⁶ Likewise, the identification of “institutional racism” following the MacPherson inquiry (1999) has sometimes been interpreted as having signalled the end of “identity politics”¹⁷ that is, favouring the recognition of ethnic minority cultures over binding national community ties, at a time when Lord Parekh still positively defined Britain as “a community of communities”.¹⁸

• 19 Sir Herman Ouseley, Community Pride not Prejudice – Making Diversity Work in Bradford, The Ouseley (...)
• 20 Ted Cantle (Independent Review Team), Community Cohesion, A Report of the Independent Review Team, (...)

11From 2001 onward, new forms of unrest in inner-city areas in the North and the Midlands and Islamist terrorism (across the Atlantic first, then in Spain and the UK) led to the sudden and dramatic rhetorical discarding of multiculturalism and, simultaneously, to the framing of “cohesion” policies (although arguably such changes had been underlying since 1997, or indeed since the Major years). The riots (in Bradford or Oldham, e.g.) therefore shook the multicultural settlement to its very roots, just like the ensuing reports, both local¹⁹ and national²⁰ and the frontal criticisms expressed for the first time by Labour figureheads (e.g. David Blunkett, Jack Straw). In Bradford, the Ouseley report emphasised residential and school segregation and an overall sense of “separateness” resulting both from the flight of middle class people (whites, Hindus and Sikhs) out of certain areas and from a neat tendency towards self-segregation amongst certain Muslim communities.

• 21 Sir Herman Ouseley, Community Pride not Prejudice – Making Diversity Work in Bradford, op.cit., p.  (...)
• 22 Ted Cantle (Independent Review Team), Community Cohesion, A Report of the Independent Review Team, (...)

12Although the “community cohesion” concept was to be presented for the first time in the Cantle report five months later, certain values praised by the Ouseley commission were already consistent with it, as shown in the following passage: “What is now desperately needed is a powerful unifying vision […] social harmony, rejection of racial hatred, civic pride, a single common identity.”²¹ The Cantle review team, commissioned by the Home Office after the disturbances of summer 2001, gave no ready made definition of community cohesion, although what it had meant in Canada since 1996 under the name of “social cohesion” was made clear.²² The report insisted on “common values and a civic culture”, “common aims and objectives”, “common moral principles and codes of behaviour”, “inter-group co-operation” etc. Although community cohesion could apply to economic considerations (e.g. “Social solidarity and reductions in wealth disparities”), it especially meant encouraging commonality, shared values and interaction, which, it was implied, had been overlooked by “multi-cultural” (sic) policies.

• 23 See for example Arun Kundnani, The Death of Multiculturalism, (London, Institute of Race Relations, (...)

13Among the report’s seventy recommendations, citizenship occupied a central position. In particular, the idea of citizenship ceremonies, inspired by those in existence in Australia or Canada under the same name, came to the fore. Another key recommendation was citizenship education, which was introduced in the national curriculum as early as 2002 so as “to stress integration rather than separation”, as underlined by Tony Blair in December 2006. Community cohesion, though loosely-defined, quickly became a buzz word. That sudden promotion, which perplexed many Britons, should be contrasted with the timid or indeed, non-existent promotion of “multiculturalism” in its prescriptive acceptation in the 1980s and 1990s, although it had become Britain’s de facto policy since the inner-city riots of the early and mid-1980s. The rejection of multiculturalism was reinvigorated by the materialisation of the terrorist threat in Britain (“7/7” attacks in London) and was articulated by the Conservative opposition as well as by the Labour majority. More surprising still, were the criticisms formulated by members of the ethnic minority intelligentsia.²³

• 24 Communities and Local Government, Creating the Conditions for Integration, (London, Crown copyright (...)

14With the change of government in 2010, and the replacement of Gordon Brown’s Labour government by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition led by David Cameron and Nick Clegg, the concept of “community cohesion” lost currency and some changes were introduced. Significantly, it was replaced by “Integration and Race Equality”, when Liberal-Democrat Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State Andrew Stunnel left the government in 2012. But the central tenets of shared values and citizenship were not challenged, and actually were reinforced, to such an extent that the accusations of unreconstructed assimilationism by stealth have become increasingly convincing. Some aspects of the new policies proposed, at least at the level of stated intentions, have also propelled the Church of England to the centre-stage of local partnerships with community organisations, reinventing an older pattern of religious management of British inter-racial relations (one example being the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the mid-1960s). The trend towards deepening neo-assimilationism has also been evident in the moves by Theresa May, the Conservative Home Secretary of the coalition and of the current Conservative government, to harden the requirements for the acquisition of citizenship, building on or indeed extending David Blunkett’s 2002 initiative. The “Life in the UK” test, which, after much debating in the early years of the millennium, had remained pointedly devoid of any material on British culture and history, now contains a whole section on key aspects of British history. Generally, the term integration has been given an increased prominence. In 2012, the coalition published a document entitled Creating the Conditions for Integration, which has pushed further the move away from multiculturalism that had been started by Labour, at least at the level of discourse.²⁴ The overall objective was to enhance five factors contributing to integration: tackling extremism and intolerance; social mobility; participation; responsibility and “common ground”. In its preamble, the document denied any social or racial dimension to the 2011 riots, blaming instead “criminality” and “lack of social responsibility”. It criticised past government interventionism along racial or faith lines, adding that other factors such as location or socio-economic status also shape local societies. It criticised anti-discrimination policy, which so far had remained unchallenged by the critics of multiculturalism:

• 27 David Cameron, Speech on the King James Bible, (Oxford, 11 December 2011).
• 28 Therese O’Toole, Faith and the Coalition: a New Confidence to ‘Do God’? Muslim Participation in Con (...)
• 29 Lewis Smith, “Former archbishop Lord Carey attacks David Cameron for aggressive secularism in the G (...)

17In another speech delivered later the same year, on the occasion of the 400^th anniversary of the King James Bible, he asserted the willingness of the coalition to place Christianism back at the heart of government policy, declaring that “the values we draw from the Bible go to the heart of what it means to belong in this country”²⁷. In concrete terms, this translated for instance into the “Near Neighbours” programme which made local Anglican parishes key actors in the funding of local partnerships with community organisations, including ethnic minority ones. Typically this meant that local groups and projects, whether Christian, secular, or of other faiths, were now required to obtain the counter-signature of the local vicar to benefit from this programme.²⁸ Paradoxically enough, this has not prevented leading Church of England figures from accusing the UK government of fostering “aggressive secularism” over certain issues, such as same sex marriage.²⁹

• 30 Gerard Delanty, Community, (London, Routledge, 2003), p.192.
• 31 Mary Hickman, Nicola Mai and Helen Crowley, Migration and Social Cohesion in the UK, (Basingstoke, (...)

18This policy displays elements of continuity with Labour, which, despite Alastair Campbell’s famous assertion (“We don’t do God”), had displayed a clear pro-religion bias in many aspects of its integration policies. In the area of local community partnerships, New Labour had already emphasised the role of the Church after the 2005 London bombings. The novelty after 2010 was that the coalition promoted the role of the Church of England only, thus dispensing with the pluralism that was evident in New Labour’s attitude to religion: dialogue with a broad array of Muslim organisations, legislation against incitement to religious hatred (a long-standing claim of Muslim organisations), or extension of public funding to minority schools in 1998. The relationship between community and citizenship is ambiguous. On one level, communities are presented as inclusive. They respond to a security imperative: “Community offers people what neither society nor the state can offer, namely a sense of belonging in an insecure world”.³⁰ Thus, the community is both an antidote to the destabilising forces of the globalised economy that threaten the social compact and an ideal goal of policies. It refers to an elusive golden age, which is usually the first half of the twentieth century, when the working class was supposed to be organised harmoniously around trade unions and networks of solidarity at the local level.³¹ As a remedy to destabilisation, communities are meant to replace the bureaucratic welfare state by new patterns of neighbourhood organisations, based on reconstructed understandings of British values –however defined.

• 32 Maggie O’Neil, Asylum, Migration and Community, (Bristol, The Policy Press, 2010).
• 33 Ibid.

19The convergence with governmental approaches to international migration is clear. The globalising forces that shape today’s world have been relocated beyond national borders, which threatens the state’s legitimacy and seems to make social decay uncontrollable, threatening traditional forms of social cohesion. In Britain, this has been explicitly put forward as the backbone of the ideological refoundation of the Labour party by Lord Glassman as part of the Blue Labour agenda supported by Ed Milliband in 2010-2011. Blue Labour was meant to encapsulate both a nostalgia for the golden age of the working class and an anti-immigration stance in the name of the stability of communities. Yet at the same time, the notion of community is often used to designate “troubled” populations.³² The reasons why traditional forms of organisation longed after by the nostalgics of trade unions, Parish Churches and working-class political parties is that they have given way to the individualisation of society, which in turn brings personalised anxiety and scapegoating.³³ Hence, the relation between the onslaught against the welfare state and the rise of backlash against women, racial and sexual minorities, as well as migrants.

• 34 See in particular Cantle, op. cit (2008).

20Crucially, this was evident in the community cohesion discourse that evolved out of the 2001 reports on the Bradford and Oldham riots, which as shown above tended to construe South Asian communities as self-segregating and closed to the values of the wider national community. In this aspect of the community discourse, there are two types of communities pitted against each other: the minority community, deemed divisive and antagonistic to British values, and the majority, national community, which promotes inclusive values of human rights, tolerance and democracy. In this way, and although this is denied by the architects of this discourse³⁴ the 2001 reports constructed minority communities of migrant origins as part of the “continuum of threats”.

• 35 Zygmunt Bauman, Community, Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, (Cambridge, Polity, 2001).
• 36 Ibid.

21The essential pathology of the community discourse is that a society based on community cannot escape the question of the boundary of the community, and that this leads to increasing polarisation between the “ins” and the “outs”.³⁵ As Bauman points out, we miss community because we miss security.³⁶ The solution proposed, the creations of new communities such as reconstructed Britishness or the local communities of the Big Society, is flawed, because the criteria for inclusion or exclusion into these communities create new insecurities for outsiders.

• 37 Therese O’Toole, Stephen H. Jones and Daniel Nilsson DeHanas, The New Prevent, Can It Work? Will It (...)
• 38 Charles Husband and Yunis Alam, Social Cohesion and Counter-terrorism, a Policy Contradiction? (Bri (...)

27Actors of the public debate engaged in the criticism of PREVENT are varied and represent a broad cross-section of the British intellectual and professional world concerned with anti-Muslim discrimination, inter-cultural relations in policy-making, policing, and foreign policy, as well as grassroots Muslim organisations. Some of the local authorities required to implement the policy also disapproved of it to the extent that they refused to do so or did it under different names.³⁷ In one of the first sources of funding available as part of PREVENT, some local Muslim community organisations who could have been expected to apply decided to boycott the programme (although they later changed their mind).³⁸ Even though they represent a wide array of political standpoints, these criticisms and initial refusals to participate in PREVENT are strikingly convergent around a few central points.

• 39 Husband and Alam, Social Cohesion and Counter-terrorism, a Policy Contradiction?, op.cit.
• 40 Arun Kundnani, The end of tolerance, racism in 21^st century Britain, (London, Pluto Press, 2007), p (...)
• 41 Husband and Alam, op.cit., p.170.
• 42 Ibid, pp. 145-151.
• 43 Roger Hewitt, White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism, (Cambridge University Press, 200 (...)
• 44 Steve Fenton, Ethnicity, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2003; Sveinsson, Kjartan Pal, Who Cares About the (...)
• 45 Charles Husband and Yunis Alam, Social Cohesion and Counter-terrorism, a Policy Contradiction? op.c (...)
• 46 Arun Kundnani, Spooked! How Not to Prevent Violent Extremism, op. cit.
• 47 Jonathan Githens-Mazer and Robert Lambert, “Why Conventional Wisdom radical fails: the persistence (...)

28As noted earlier, the programme was first mooted in the early part of the 2000s, at a time when the new language of community cohesion was omnipresent in government thinking on ethnic minorities, and its initial ambition was to apply the community cohesion approach to the prevention of terrorism. However, this is a contradiction in terms, as Charles Husband and Yunis Alam have shown.³⁹ Attempts to use a concept designed to promote inter-cultural or inter-religious dialogue and encourage interactions between people of different backgrounds became problematic when it appeared that such attempts were essentially directed at just one community, namely Muslims. In 2008, the funding for most of the programme was allocated authoritatively by central government to local authorities on the basis of the percentage of Muslims in their total population. The correlation between the amount of funding and Muslims was tight and showed that this was by far the predominant factor in the allocation of funds.⁴⁰ This is all the more problematic as the focalisation on Muslims springs from a cultural and religious reading of the determinants of extremism which seems to proceed from culturalist prejudices against that particular religious minority. Many attacks against PREVENT have related it to the wider context of anti-Muslim prejudice that pervaded public discourse on Islam and Muslims in the post-9/11 context, which PREVENT has built on and reinforced. In so doing, the programme has triggered a series of negative feedback effects. Muslim community organisers or activists refuse the funds for fear of participating in a stigmatising system and losing credibility and respect within their community.⁴¹ PREVENT has also been accused of using social work and local partnerships with community projects and organisations to enhance police surveillance of these communities, with the negative, unintended effect of reinforcing the suspicion of local communities towards social workers or local organisers who are viewed as potential police collaborators. Arun Kundnani’s report Spooked!, one of the first full-fledged works on PREVENT, insisted on that particular point. The contradiction in terms between cohesion and anti-terrorism is again apparent here, because the trust between the social worker and the community, which forms the basis of social work, is eroded by the suspicion among the community that he or she is in fact participating in the collection of sensitive information for the police.⁴² The focalisation on Muslims also has lent credence to the suspicion among other communities that Muslims end up being somehow privileged as recipients of public funds. This is particularly problematic in the context of the “white backlash”⁴³ and the politics of resentment of the white working-class in the face of perceived preferential treatment of minorities by the British state.⁴⁴ In its extreme form, this line of reasoning produces the resentful belief that it is useful to be a problematic, dangerous community in order to attract public support.⁴⁵ The broader assumptions that inform PREVENT have also come under heavy criticism. Behind the focalisation on Muslims lies the idea in particular that cultural/religious alienation is a key factor in leading would-be terrorists down a pathway of radicalisation. This culturalist or theological approach to radicalisation makes light of its political dimension, assuming Islamic terrorism to be largely driven by purely religious motivations. Yet much evidence in the UK suggests that there is considerable anger directed at British foreign policy (invasion of Iraq, conflicts in the Middle-East) among Muslims and that this constitutes a favourable context for the violent radicalisation of some individuals. The refusal to address this point, which has been a mainstay of British government policy, has weakened the relevance of PREVENT and has only served to further reinforce the sense of estrangement of disaffected Muslims from the democratic process.⁴⁶ Finally, radicalisation is a rather loose concept that obscures the variety of factors that may contribute to driving an individual to violence, and the complexity of the process that leads to terrorism. It obscures the fact that these processes are largely individual – explaining why some members of one given Islamic network may gravitate towards violence, while others will not.⁴⁷ This is related to the fact that radicalisation is used to designate the trajectory towards both “extremism” and “violent extremism”. The distinction between the two justified the allocation of PREVENT funds to organisations viewed as “extreme” but that do not advocate violence. The dialogue between mainstream society and these organisations that PREVENT sought to organise was meant to bring them into the fold of mainstream society, thereby undercutting and isolating violent Islamism. But this has exposed PREVENT to accusations of religious engineering, with the British state attempting to create authoritatively its own acceptable version of Islam instead of engaging in a political dialogue over issues such as foreign policy.

• 48 Robert Lambert, “Neo- Conservative Ideology Trumps Academic Research and Practitioner experience”, (...)
• 49 Derek McGhee, “New Prevent: Different is not necessarily better”, (Muslim Council of Britain, “Soun (...)
• 50 Home Office, The New Prevent Strategy (TSO, 2011); Lord Carlisle, Report to the Home Secretary of I (...)

30Arguably, this represents a greater “securitisation” of Muslim groups, which then became viewed with greater suspicion. The government was widely criticised for wasting an opportunity to improve the programme by taking into account the liberal criticisms outlined above. The decision to exclude from the programme some Islamist and Salafist groups, such as the STREET project in Brixton that had previously been used as a means of reaching disaffected Muslim youths exposed to violent Islamist ideology, was viewed by some practitioners of Prevent as particularly counter-productive and as a direct result of neo-conservative bias.⁴⁸ Others pointed out its contradictory and unclear logic.⁴⁹ However, some aspects of the New Prevent strategy that was unveiled later in 2011 displayed a willingness to hear at least some of the earlier criticisms outlined above.⁵⁰ As noted by O’Toole et al., two points stand out. The first one was the proposal to distance the prevention of terrorism from the community cohesion agenda, and, more broadly, from the issue of immigrant integration. As a result the New PREVENT was less directly associated, at least in its official framing, with Muslim communities as a whole. The funds were now targeted to areas defined not essentially in terms of the size of their Muslim populations, but according to more precise information on the potential for violent extremism.

• 51 Vincent Latour, “Muscular liberalism, surviving multiculturalism? A historical and political contex (...)

31In relation to this, there was also a new willingness to counter extremism as such, including from far right groups which have also emerged as a possible vector of radicalisation in British society. Interestingly, one of the most visible such groups in British media and politics is the English Defence League (EDL), which has defined itself largely as an anti-Muslim organisation determined to combat the “islamisation” of the United Kingdom. In 2011, David Cameron’s Munich Speech was deemed insensitive by vast swathes of the Liberal Democrats, including by the then Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, as the speech, which mostly dealt with the question of Islamism, was delivered simultaneously with an EDL march in Luton.⁵¹

• 52 Therese O’Toole, Stephen H. Jones and Daniel Nilsson DeHanas, The New Prevent, Can It Work? Will It (...)

32As pointed out by O’Toole et al., the motivations for these changes were not just to accept the arguments of a mostly left-of-centre milieu of academics, social workers and local community leaders and activists, but also and perhaps most importantly to suit the Conservatives’ programme of budget cuts and traditional hostility to social work.⁵² In particular, the idea of “community cohesion”, so dear to New Labour governments, was dropped. It is also this context that may explain the new dissociation between counter-terrorism and social work. Yet the lively policy debate around PREVENT in the UK has led to at least a partial attempt to tone down some of its most controversial aspects.