United Kingdom

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"The number of far-right, white supremacist fight clubs is exploding. The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) published a recent report that pinpointed at least 100 in the USA, Canada, and Europe.

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Alexander Ritzmann, the CEP report’s author, said recently: 'This is an unprecedented growth. I’ve never seen a network in right-wing extremism grow so fast. Usually, it takes years to build a transnational network. It’s concerning.'"

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October 16, 2023
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CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "As the scale and barbarity of the Hamas terrorist assault on Israel begins to unfold, to no-one’s surprise Iran has leant its formal support to the insurgents. While thousands of rockets rain down on Israeli civilians and and Iran’s proxies pull men women and children out of their homes — murdering them in the streets — it’s worth remembering that the United Kingdom still has not proscribed that regime’s state terror exporters, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps."

Date
October 7, 2023
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CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Soldiers are trained in war fighting and they have no powers of arrest so it is likely that they could only be used in very limited circumstances, for example during a raid on suspected terrorists. It is plainly a necessary but insufficient stop gap to ensure that we are still able to respond to an attack by violent extremists, still judged by our security services to be ‘highly likely.’"

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September 25, 2023
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CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "My organisation, the Counter Extremism Project contributed a submission to the review, which delivered its analysis in February this year. Shawcross delivered a pretty devastating critique of the way we manage people reported to be at risk of being drawn into ideological violence. He said the strategy had lost focus on its core mission – to stop people getting into terrorism. Motivation was looked at through the lens of vulnerability, not agency. Double standards applied to the interpretation of Islamist and extreme right wing ideologies, the former being tightly prescribed, the latter on a mission creep that threatened to stifle legitimate political discourse."

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September 14, 2023
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CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson write: "Given the ease with which eco-activists invaded their family home yesterday morning, this slice of actuarial science will be of limited comfort to the Sunak family – and, indeed, to North Yorkshire Police. And while Greenpeace themselves offer no threat of violence, the fact they were able to breach such a site so easily will surely have piqued the interest of far more nefarious actors."

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August 4, 2023
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CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "There has been excitable, not to say sometimes unhinged, reporting around the introduction of draft legislation to require private venues to toughen their defences against the threat of bombers and marauding gunmen. ‘Martyn’s Law’ was finally introduced by Government after a concerted campaign by Figen Murray who lost her son in the 2015 Manchester Arena atrocity. The initiative bears his name and is testimony to one woman’s determination to make some sense from the senseless murder of her beloved son by making it a legal duty for providers of venues of over 100 people to take steps to reduce the risk of a terrorist attack."
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June 29, 2023
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Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Maintaining Momentum: The Prevent Review and Future Threats

On May 17, CEP hosted an insightful event to discuss the future of the UK Prevent Review, its implementation, and the challenge of combatting terrorism in a liberal democracy. The Prevent Review is a comprehensive assessment of a key strand of the UK's counter-terrorism to stop people becoming violent extremists. This event brought together subject experts to examine the evolving landscape of the terror threat and explore new ways to enhance the effectiveness of the Prevent strategy in addressing ideologically motivated offending. Our aim is to keep the Independent Review of Prevent in the conversation and to constantly assess and reassess its recommendations against future threats and challenges.

Panelists: 

  • Liam Duffy, Strategic Advisor for the Counter Extremism Project
  • Ian Acheson, Senior Advisor for the Counter Extremism Project
  • Sir John Jenkins, Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange
  • Dr. Julia Rushchenko, Consultant at the United Nations/International Organisation for Migration

Moderator: Lucinda Creighton, Senior Advisor for the Counter Extremism Project

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"Liam Duffy, an adviser to the Counter Extremism Project, said Islamist extremists should be perceived as 'more than a terrorist threat'. He said the UK should not fall into complacency despite no deaths from terrorism being recorded last year. 'There are long, long periods between terrorist attacks, between recruitment flows to overseas conflicts, where to our eyes nothing happens,' he said. 'But that’s not the case. There is a lot happening and we need to know what is happening.'"

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May 17, 2023
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CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "It is impossible to imagine how frontline staff operating in this squalor could raise their game enough to manage the inevitable confrontation of denying extremist prisoners the material they need to spread their hateful ideologies. They can’t even keep the bins empty. Taylor observed that ‘there is no better sign of decline in a prison than a lack of cleanliness’. He’s right. It’s one thing to remove any ambiguity in the rules to avoid staff being bamboozled and intimidated by people using religion as an excuse to undermine security. It’s quite another to make sure staff enforce these rules and deal with the kickback."

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May 3, 2023
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Daily Dose

Extremists: Their Words. Their Actions.

In Their Own Words:

We reiterate once again that the brigades will directly target US bases across the region in case the US enemy commits a folly and decides to strike our resistance fighters and their camps [in Iraq].

Abu Ali al-Askari, Kata’ib Hezbollah (KH) Security Official Mar. 2023
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