On 13 July Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May announced the government’s plans to conduct an ‘urgent review’ of counter-terrorism and security powers and the dismantling of the Labour government’s ‘Prevent strategy’. The Preventing Violent Extremism Programme (known simply as Prevent) provided funding for surveillance, intelligence and counter-terrorism against Muslims in Britain, with specific focus on a number of areas, including mosques, community centres, prisons and universities. Whether the change in government will in practice signal a reduction in such activity remains to be seen.
At University College London (UCL), the Provost, Malcolm Grant, is currently heading a new university-wide commission on how to ‘best protect academic freedom while taking appropriate action to prevent violent extremism’. Following the failed Christmas Day bombing allegedly involving former UCL student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the UCL student union handed over the details of over 800 members of the Islamic Society and Medical Islamic Society to the Metropolitan Police. This information will now be shared with international intelligence agencies. This means that innocent citizens have been placed on watch lists and no-fly lists.
In a meeting on 9 June titled ‘Combating Extremism on Campus’, the UCL Dean of Welfare announced a new permanent ‘embedding’ of counter-terrorism officers on campus, as part of Prevent. He also set out details of new plans for ‘managing’ student activities, including setting up informant lines, training for university staff and union officers from counter-terrorism units and ‘advisory’ guidelines on invitations to outside speakers. It is clear that this programme is mainly aimed at targeting young Asian students with an emphasis upon people involved in Palestine solidarity, Islamic Societies and left wing groups – ‘anyone opposing our shared values’. In reality this means anyone who will oppose Britain’s imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and its continuing support for the murderous Israeli state. Malcolm Grant, (who earned a staggering £404,000 in 2008/9) has no qualms about attacking his own students and getting rid of those who don’t suit his agenda. Indeed he recently called publically for a cut in student numbers to preserve elite universities.
The Prevent programme has not only been concerned with monitoring and isolating radical students, but has functioned as a central propaganda arm of the state. A recent study by the Institute of Race Relations has shown that the Prevent guidelines have in practice turned community groups into surveillance platforms, embedding ‘counter-terrorism police officers within the delivery of local services, the purpose of which seems to be to gather intelligence on Muslim communities’. (Report available at http://www.irr.org.uk/spooked/)
UCL was chosen as a pilot for plans to push the programme to universities in London, and eventually to cover universities and schools nationwide. This programme has a very clear agenda – to silence dissent and close down activism, permitting only debate and discussion within parameters prescribed by support for imperialism.
UCL has a small but resilient base of active solidarity campaigns, from Friends of Palestine to the Living Wage Campaign, which will resist crackdown on student activism and the attempts to isolate student activists both on campus and by reducing their ability to make links with movements outside the university environment. Whatever the new government puts in place of Prevent, this type of political policing is unlikely to end in the near future. Students will have to organise to fight the attacks by uniting with all those targeted by government surveillance and criminalisation measures.
