Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)

My Lords, extremism is not what it used to be. In October 2024, MI5’s director Ken McCallum said: “Straightforward labels like ‘Islamist terrorism’ or ‘extreme right wing’ don’t fully reflect the dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see”. My current experience as Independent Prevent Commissioner confirms his analysis. Young people, often disturbed by family trauma or personal grievances, seek comfort in the rigid hatreds of their offline or online tribe, often with added misogyny or anti- semitism. Their minds are inflamed by geopolitical events, dehumanising computer games and the malign algorithms of social media into an unpredictable mash-up of resentment, rage and normalised violence. Conspiracy theories are promoted by hostile states. Fragments of ideology are packaged as video clips. The boy drawing Nazi symbols on his arm may, the next week, be seen shouting sectarian slogans, refusing to interact with female teachers or posing as a suicide bomber. The terrorism statistics record violent offences that were motivated by a single, consistent ideology, most commonly—as the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, has rightly said—a perverted version of Islam. Extremism in its broader sense, however, motivates many attacks of equivalent seriousness, including those perpetrated by the multiple killers Danyal Hussein, Jake Davison and, in Southport, Axel Rudakubana. These violent expressions of extremism represent, of course, only a small part of the social problems caused by its non-violent outworkings. The single point I want to make today is that while the word extremism is a convenient label for drawing attention to a vast bundle of problems, it is not a satisfactory key to solving them. The normal meaning of the word is dauntingly broad. In the libel case Shakeel Begg v BBC, Mr Justice Haddon-Cave said: “What is ‘extreme’ is, by definition, something which is not ‘moderate’”. Attempts by successive Governments to narrow it down have been inconsistent and hard to translate into consistent policy. Phrases such as “opposition to British values” and “creating a permissive environment” are too wide to form a reliable basis for rules or coercive action. Confronted with so large a target, counterextremism strategies have been diffuse and ineffective. The 2015 Counter-Extremism Strategy was diagnosed by Professor Clive Walker, our greatest academic authority on terrorism, as suffering from “inexact and contested meanings, objectives, and mechanisms which generate dynamics of suspicion as much as persuasion”. The rapid analytical sprint leaked last January was said by Policy Exchange to have confused extremism with “any shocking crime, bad belief or nasty social phenomenon about which we are worried”. Overbreadth is particularly dangerous when accompanied by harsh sanctions. The counterextremism Bill of 2016, which I was privileged to see, would have allowed the penalisation of “extremist activity”, defined to include huge swathes of otherwise perfectly legitimate political and religious speech. It was, at least to me, a relief when, after being announced in two successive Queen’s Speeches, it blew up on the launch pad. Parliament and the courts have calibrated our laws over the centuries with extraordinary and rather impressive care. It would be a lazy and illiberal error to overlay those laws with vague and contested notions such as extremism or—I agree—Islamophobia. Let us promote integration, critical thinking, social media literacy and awareness of our civic rights and duties. Let us research harmful belief systems and challenge divisive or intolerant narratives wherever we find them. If our laws on online safety, public order, hate crime, counterterrorism, hostile state activity—