Brent Council meeting on 'extremism' leaves community voices off the platform

As a respected community and voluntary sector organisation doing valuable work in the borough, we are writing to you to make you aware of the second of a series of events called It’s Time to Talk - focussing on important matters affecting our local community. The event will take place at Brent Civic Centre on the 3^rd of October 2016 at 6pm, discussing the challenging issue of extremism in all its forms.  We would like to take this opportunity to invite all members of the community and voluntary sector in Brent to the event.  

There will be a number of high-profile speakers attending including Alex Krasodomski-Jones of the think-tank Demos, Dr Sara Silvestri of City University London and a number of other speakers who will participate in a ‘question time’ style event on this challenging but important issue. Attendees will be asked to submit their questions online prior to the event.

This event is part of the Council’s wider It’s Time to Talk campaign which aims to empower residents and community leaders to talk about difficult issues like this one and work together with partners to tackle them. If you would like to have your say on the issues, please come along to this FREE event and help us create a stronger, safer Brent.

The Prevent duty to report extremist behaviour is today’s equivalent of internment in Northern Ireland – a policy felt to be highly discriminatory against one section of the community. 

  That single event  (9/11) shocked us out of the optimism and unity that had been so tangible just five years before. That is exactly what it was designed to do, just like the Manchester bomb, but this time, instead of building bridges, we seem to have slipped back into the language of division, suspicion and alienation.

Early Day Motion 425

That this House welcomes the Government's strong commitment to keeping Britain safe from terrorist attacks; believes that the Prevent strategy is no longer fit for purpose to serve this agenda; notes that there is little evidence to support Prevent or the conveyor belt theory of radicalisation; further notes that no impact evaluations or indicators are available that show Prevent has been successful; further believes that the severe lack of transparency with the Prevent strategy strongly undermines it; notes that Prevent has had a worrying impact on freedom of expression at schools, colleges and universities; believes that the behavioural indicators of possible extremism are vague and unhelpful; believes that the rhetoric of British values is alienating to many who already believed in those values and encourages ministers to adopt a more inclusive approach and rebrand these as universal values; is strongly concerned that the British Muslim community has been particularly stigmatised by Prevent; encourages ministers to engage with affected communities and their relevant grievances, including around foreign policy issues; further encourages ministers to engage with community actors and organisations that have grassroots credibility; believes that ultimately extremism is best tackled by the Government working in partnership with communities and engendering genuine two-way trust, neither of which Prevent has enabled; and therefore calls on ministers to scrap the Prevent strategy in its entirety and replace it with a community-led programme that builds institutions and resilience for tackling social problems, has grassroots credibility and empowers communities rather than alienating them.

Alex is a researcher of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media. His primary research interest is political extremism and its reportage on social media. He also manages CASM’s analytics capability, including data collection, analytics and visualisation. 

Alex is a frequent media commentator, and writes regularly for the Huffington Post and Spectator. He led Demos’ project mapping the political Twittersphere ahead of the 2015 General Election, which was launched on BBC Newsnight

Dr Silvestri has directed the Islam in Europe programme at the European Policy Centre (Brussels) and has been a research consultant to the British Council, Ethnobarometer, the European Commission, and the British Government. Prior to that, she had worked in the Cabinet of the European Commission President and had been an Associate Fellow with Chatham House (London).

As an expert on Islam in Europe, religion, and intercultural relations, Sara serves in the advisory board of the British Council's 'Our Shared Future' programme, the ESRC 'Radicalisation Research' portal, and the EuroMediterranean Foundation Anna Lindh (for which she contributed to the first Gallup opinion poll of the EuroMediterranean region).

She is also a member of the scientific committee of GIERFI (a network for the study of Islam and women in Europe) and is a member of the UN Alliance of Civilizations' Global Experts group.

  I combine normative political theory and political science to examine the theory and practice of fostering unity amongst the culturally diversity citizens of modern polities. My theoretical work examines what unity amongst the citizens of a polity is, how it differs from similar ideas like loyalty and belonging, why such unity is important and how it can be fostered ethically. My empirical work utilises archival and elite interview data to examine how the governments of two parliamentary democracies, Britain and Canada, have attempted to foster such unity as well as the role that Muslims often play in contemporary debates about unity.

The issue of extremism, and how best to prevent it, is a complex, emotive, and highly debated one.

Here in Brent, our aim is to use this event to really involve the community and create real, community-led solutions to tackle the issue of extremism, in all its forms, in our Borough. I hope that residents from all backgrounds will come along and share their ideas.