Further to my article (links below) earlier today on two tier policing which touched on the use of Prevent reports potentially based on information by some very bad actors in order to get the State to harass people, I’d like to draw readers attention to a post that appeared in The Critic recently. This post is all about how the Prevent Scheme is being abused by Jihadist groups in order to silence critics of Islam.

Max Thompson writing in The Critic on the 16^th October 2026 said:

“This week, the Muslim news website 5Pillars revealed that Robert Jenrick, Reform UK’s Shadow Chancellor, had been reported to both the Metropolitan Police and Prevent over comments he made about Islam on Dan Wootton Outspoken on 6 October. The complainant asked the police to assess whether his remarks fell foul of Part 3A of the Public Order Act 1986 by meeting the threshold for stirring up religious hatred. They also asked Prevent to consider whether the framing of his comments fell within its definition of extreme right-wing ideology.

What, then, did Mr Jenrick say? That: “Radical Islam is a threat to everything that we hold dear in this country. That it has to be fought and destroyed. It has to be eradicated from our country. And that we can’t allow the creeping Islamification of the United Kingdom.” And that: “Wearing the burka, Shari’ah courts, hate preachers. End every one of these as quickly as possible, then maybe we’ve got a fighting chance of saving our country from going down the same path as France has clearly gone down.” “

Mr Thompson said that the police complaint is liable to go nowhere because the words Mr Jenrick used are not ones that meet the criminal standard of proof. However on the subject of the Prevent referral Mr Thompson added:

“A referral carries no criminal sanction, and that is precisely what makes it so useful to those who wish to punish speech, because it still places the target’s name before a counter-terrorism system. To accuse someone of being an extremist for perfectly acceptable speech is a waste and an abuse of an important mechanism, one that should be dedicated solely to identifying those at risk of radicalisation and preventing them from committing acts of terror on our streets. The increasing weaponisation of this programme will call its integrity into question and undermine public safety.”

Mr Thompson is correct there. It’s an insidious weapon that can be used to silence and punish speech. A Prevent referral can turn up in all sorts of places such as medical and social services records as well as being on police intelligence files. A Prevent referral can lurk beneath the surface causing trouble for the subject of the referral without the individual knowing what’s going on, unless they go out of their way to look.

It appears that the lessons of the Shawcross Report have not been learned by Prevent. The Shawcross Report found that Prevent was concentrating too much on those who were not ‘far right’ but merely those who held mainstream conservative views. Worst still it had shifted its focus away from what is a primary terror and extremism threat, which is radical Islam, onto the alleged ‘far right’ even though this particular grouping is a relatively tiny issue when compared to the danger posed by radical Islam.

It appears that Prevent is in just as much of a politically corrupted mess as our police and criminal justice system has become. Prevent should focus on real problems and not let themselves become the tool of those who wish to silence debate.

Links

The Critic article about the abuse of Prevent.

https://thecritic.co.uk/prevent-is-becoming-a-complaints-desk-for-the-offended/

Previous article by me about two tier policing and Prevent misuse.

https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2026/10/18/a-expected-its-more-two-tier-policing-results/

and

https://peakd.com/britain/@mrfahrenheit211/a-expected-its-more-two-tier-policing-results

Shawcross Report

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-prevents-report-and-government-response