Yvette Cooper to reject call to broaden extremism definition
Yvette Cooper to reject call to broaden extremism definition
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Home Office to maintain focus on Islamist and far-right threats despite report’s call for behaviour-based approach. Yvette Cooper will reject internal Home Office advice to potentially widen the definition of extremism to include violent misogyny and conspiracy theorists, the Guardian understands.
A report commissioned in the wake of violent riots after the Southport murders last year suggests authorities should adopt a “behaviour-based and ideologically agnostic approach” to combating extremism rather than “ideologies of concern”. But the home secretary is understood to believe the Home Office should continue its focus on Islamist and far-right violence, which currently make up the vast majority of terror cases.
The report, leaked to the right-leaning thinktank Policy Exchange, says the government’s approach to extremism should no longer be based on “specific ideologies of concern but on behaviours and activity”. It comes amid deepening scrutiny of the government’s approach to extremism. On Sunday it emerged that counter-terrorism officers had not believed that the Southport killer Axel Rudakubana was “in danger of being radicalised”.
One area of the report that has drawn criticism is the suggestion that claims of “two-tier policing” are a “rightwing extremist narrative”. Senior Conservative politicians have used this language to describe a number of areas of their concern, including the policing of pro-Palestinian protests.
