Charles Farr on Countering Extremism

The Guardian yesterday reported on Charles Farr (director-general of the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism) and a briefing he gave on 26th February this year to MPs on the topic of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy. It appears to have been online for a while but only recently to have been picked up on by the media.

The transcript of his briefing (at least a redacted and approved version thereof) is available online and it’s well worth a read. Here are some highlights (with emphasis added by me):

On RICU (the Research, Information and Communications Unit):

RICU has two functions within our organisation. It is responsible for advising the rest of government but actually, not just government, officialdom, from a brigade commander in Helmand province through to a chief constable in Yorkshire, about how they may wish to characterise the threat we face and describe the response that we are making and, secondly, rather different, they are responsible for challenging the propaganda which comes to us from al-Qaeda and associated groups—generally not from people in this country; usually from the incessant 4,500 websites that are in one way or another associated with radical Islamist terrorist organisations around the world. That is a very difficult task and it has only been going really substantively staffed for a year, about 35 people, across government, and a bit of the private sector in there to advise us on aspects of communications. [...] It is pretty small in the overall scheme of things, 35 people.

On his own role:

I am the SRO for CONTEST, the senior responsible official, which means, in government speak, senior civil servant responsible for the strategy. We provide, we aim to provide, we were set up to provide a policy and strategic framework for the activities of delivery organisations working on counter-terrorism in this country and overseas. That would include the police, Communities and Local Government, the Foreign Office, but it would also include the agencies. We provide them with parameters, a strategic framework—it is as simple as that—within which we expect them to be operating. Once we have established that framework, the day-to-day conduct of the operations is not my business; it is their business and, in pursuit of those operations, fulfilling their operational mandate, they do not report back to me. They report respectively to the Home Secretary in the case of the Security Service and to the Foreign Secretary in the case of GCHQ and SIS. We will certainly keep an eye that their operations are within the strategic framework and objectives that we collectively have set and established.

[...]

My role with the police is to provide them with a policy framework in which their operations should take place. I then have oversight of the operations and I know what they are but I do not run the operations.

On foreign intelligence agencies (especially the CIA) being active in the UK:

Do those organisations from outside have representatives here? Most certainly, yes. Are they declared? Yes. They are in regular dialogue with our agencies here. The cornerstone of much of this, of course, is the American relationship. Why? For two reasons, I think, above all: because of the huge American capability that can be brought to bear on counter-terrorism, and has been since 9/11. Secondly, as you well know, because people who pose a threat to this country are six hours away from the eastern seaboard, something which the Americans are acutely aware of, as are we, and therefore take a very close interest in. Operations that we are conducting here, people we are investigating and the whole counter-terrorist strategy that we have is intimately connected to and relevant to their own national security. So the relationships are very close.

On the need to challenge Islamism even when it stops short of promoting violent extremism:

No-one is suggesting that we criminalise extremism. We are not arguing that extremist views should somehow now be criminalised; nor are we necessarily saying, “By the way, challenging extremism is part of the counter-terrorism policy”. I am not sure that it is. I think it may be part of the community cohesion policy but that is rather a different thing. However, it does seem to me from where I sit entirely appropriate that this Government, and I think probably any other government, will want to challenge aspects of what we might call Islamism which fall short of espousing violence—to give you an example, reporting from CIVITAS, the think-tank, the other day about views in some quarters here that western culture is evil and that Muslims living in this country should not engage with western cultural organisations, for want of a better term, with western culture itself. There is nothing violent about that and it is not necessarily going to lead to terrorism, but it does seem to me to be unreal for this or any other government not to say that they are going to challenge that, and that is no more nor less than what this Government is now saying. It is saying, “Yes, we will challenge violent extremism and, by the way, we will criminalise it and we will proscribe groups who espouse it, but we want to go a bit further. We are not going to sit on the sidelines and listen without responding to either Islamist extremist views or indeed to the far right” [but] the risk is that by saying that we want to challenge these views we are going to alienate the communities or parts of communities on whom we necessarily depend for our key objective, which is to challenge violence and the ideology of terrorism, but I think any government in this country is going to face this challenge.

On promoting shared values:

This is about promoting the values on which this society depends, whichever government is in power, and there is more about that than counter-terrorism.

[...]

The way we want to put this is not about defending anything, by the way; it is about promoting our shared values. What we have tried to say on the strategy is, “Yes, we are about attacking the ideology of violent extremism but we are also about promoting the basis on which our society depends, whichever government is in power, and we will challenge people who are attacking those values”, and your definition of extremism, which I think is otherwise very difficult, relates to people who are challenging values. In a sense that is what we are saying extremism in this context is. I think it is very difficult to define extremism in another way. I do not know whether I have been clear about that.

On banning extremist speakers:

Q158  David Davies: What influence then do you have over people coming into this country whom you might or might not think are appropriate visitors? We have seen recently the Dutch politician Geert Wilders was banned, but I read today that a senior member of Hezbollah is due to speak at a university and there seems to be an inconsistency here. Do you have any influence over that and should you not have an influence over it, given your role in defending our values?

Mr Farr: Yes, we do have influence. Decisions on these issues are made by the UK Borders Agency in consultation with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and up to the Home Secretary, sometimes the Foreign Secretary and sometimes the Communities Secretary. It is a complicated landscape, necessarily, and into that, yes, OSCT will put a view. That is the policy framework. The practical issues are quite complicated. If you look at the person concerned, Ibrahim Moussawi, who is, as you rightly say, a member of a part of Hezbollah, things get a little bit more complicated. Not all of Hezbollah is a proscribed organisation. As you know, it is a very complicated movement. It is a parliamentary organisation, and the person concerned, from memory, operates in the Hezbollah television station al-Manar.

Q159  David Davies: He may not be a good example. I take your point entirely: there are elements of Hezbollah and Hamas who are more moderate than others, I fully accept that, but there have been people who have come over here who are clearly not in that moderate section. I suppose the question for you is, how much influence do you have and do you use it?

Mr Farr: We do have it and we do use it, and if you notice inconsistencies, which to a degree I plead guilty to, I think it is partly because consistency is so difficult. Every case is a bit different.

On Qaradawi:

A notorious Islamist preacher operates on al-Jazeera, Qaradawi. You may remember Qaradawi came to prominence in this country when he came here and met Ken Livingstone. Qaradawi highlights all the difficulties of this for us. In some ways Qaradawi holds views which are certainly extremist by the definition that we suggested earlier. In other words, they are critical of the values on which our society rests.

Q160  David Davies: Women, gays, all the rest of it.

Mr Farr: Correct, all of those things, reprehensible. Equally, Qaradawi is one of the most articulate critics of al-Qaeda in the Islamic world. I think for any government, and I really passionately believe this, this is a real problem. If we refuse him a visa people will come back to us and say, “Hang on a moment. This person is coming here to speak against the organisation which most threatens you. Surely you need to operate within a degree of latitude which allows that”. I do not say that is a compelling argument.

David Davies: It is a moral dilemma; I agree.

Q161  Ms Buck: It is a fantastic example of the dilemma but it did not come out at all.

Mr Farr: No.

Chairman: You mean it was not communicated?

Ms Buck: No.

Q162  David Davies: But, actually, if it had been communicated, it would have come over as being rather cynical anyway—we are only letting him because he is attacking our enemies.

Mr Farr: I do think that is, by the way, a perfectly good argument and Qaradawi is a current issue for us: should we just refuse him a visa? By the way, his programme on al-Jazeera is probably the most watched programme on al-Jazeera and, of course, he will go on al-Jazeera as well and say he has been refused a visa to the UK. We could live with that, but certainly, when we put advice out to ministers, we have to say, “That is what is going to happen and you need to weigh this in the balance”.

On radicalisation:

It has become a huge issue for the academic world as well as the intelligence and security world, what drives radicalisation. I have two or three remarks. One, there is no consistent answer to the question: what drives radicalisation? It varies significantly from country to country. Two, it varies most significantly from one terrorist organisation to another and even within a terrorist organisation what drives the leadership as opposed to the foot soldiers is very different. There is also a lot of rubbish out there, you have probably read some of it, which collapses all those things into one big basket and comes up with a generalisation or several generalisations which are often the source of some despair to us and can be very misleading in policy development terms. In simple terms, for us, subject to those criteria, we think of three factors driving radicalisation, some political, some psychological and some behavioural. Political factors driving radicalisation certainly include foreign policy, or rather, more strictly, a perception of foreign policy. They certainly include people living overseas, the experience of living in failed or failing states. They certainly include the experience of conflict. And, going back to your second question, they include the experience of deprivation, inequality, and, as it were, missed opportunity; I put it like that, and we can talk about that. There is a range of psychological issues driving radicalisation which I think are particularly relevant in non-Muslim societies where there are issues about identity and the relationships between individuals and their families, their communities and the state itself. In very simple terms we think of radicalisation as having political drivers, psychological drivers and behavioural drivers. Amongst the political drivers are, as I have said, foreign policy and certainly economics. If you then look at the impact of the recession in this country, of course, it could be quite problematic. There is no doubt that under-employment and under-achievement can drive radicalisation. There is some very interesting literature around on how radical Muslim organisations in this country have recruited people. We have done some research on that and some academic research has been done which is really good. These organisations have talked about how they recruit people and have told us that there are two real drivers—a sense of thwarted ambition and racism. Those two things encourage people to join that group. It does not make them terrorists but it does get them on the track. It is a long answer to your question. We look at radicalisation under the three headings—political, psychological, behavioural. Under “political”, yes, foreign policy creates grievances, or the perception of foreign policy, and the recession could do so too.

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There is a group of people that have been radicalised and are committed to violent extremism and the only solution to that group of people in this country is criminal investigation and prosecution. There is a much larger group of people who feel a degree of negativity, if not hostility, towards the state, the country, the community, and who are, as it were, the pool in which terrorists will swim, and to a degree they will be complicit with and will certainly not report on activity which they detect on their doorstep. We have to reach that group because unless we reach that group they may themselves move into the very sharp end, but even if they do not they will create an environment in which terrorists can operate with a degree of impunity that we do not want. By the way, that generalisation applies in other countries as well. We have to reach that group. That is to a degree what Prevent is all about.

Radicalisation in prisons:

Q175  David Davies: There is radicalisation going on in prisons; we think there is. Are you aware of that and, if so, what role do you have in preventing it?   

Mr Farr: We are very aware of it Muslims constitute a disproportionate percentage of the total people in prison in this country, somewhere between 12 and 13%, from memory. That is over 8,000 people; it is a very significant group, and we know that once they get inside prison there is a danger that they will be radicalised. It is not a danger just in this country; it is a danger throughout every prison system in the world, including the United States and prisons in the Muslim world as well. There is an additional risk that, for entirely legitimate reasons, people can get converted in prison to Islam. We are very aware of the risks. Since we were created, and it was one of the priorities we were given, we have worked very closely with the Ministry of Justice to develop a counter-terrorist programme inside prisons. I do not think you are taking evidence from the Ministry of Justice but if you had more time it would be well worth doing, if I may say, because I think it is not yet a success story but it is a story of real progress. We have certainly enhanced the intelligence infrastructure in prisons; we have created an intelligence infrastructure, in fact, working very closely with the police as well. Of course, we are anticipating—which is already happening—what we are going to do when people who are convicted of terrorist offences are released; that sounds very odd but it is already happening, and when they back into the community what are we going to do about that? There is a very large complicated programme run by NOMS, the National Offender Management Service, under the strategic framework that we have provided. We are funding it. They do not have enough money so we have transferred some of our programme budget, and it is a good thing that we are able to do that, into the Ministry of Justice to enable them to get it off the ground.

[...]

there is a direct relationship between criminality and radicalisation and it is not just in this country; it is overseas as well. In other words, people who have criminal records, and criminal records not related to terrorism, appear to be vulnerable to radicalisation more than many others. We think this is because they find in terrorist networks a refuge from the blame that otherwise gets attached to them in the community as a result of their criminal activity. They may not have been convicted but simply the isolation and alienation that can happen in a community as a result of their criminal activities can drive them into a terrorist network and can drive them towards Islam as a sort of solution to some of the problems they face. I am simplifying it hugely, but criminality and radicalisation—there is a causal relationship there that greatly interests us.

On the Olympics:

Q186  Chairman: Just coming back briefly, if we may, to the Games, what do you think the major threat is to the Games?   

Mr Farr: We have got four threats, we believe. One is terrorism, of course. Another is public disorder. The third is serious crime and the fourth is what I would call non-malicious hazards, which could be anything from heat or flood to epidemic. Globalisation and globalisation movements could yet prove to be a very big challenge for us. Even with non-malicious hazards, if you are looking at the sorts of crowds we are expecting for the Olympics, the task is immense. I am sure you know the figures, but you are talking about an event which is 20 times the size of a World Cup. Simply crowd control, without public order problems or terrorism problems, is a great challenge, so we have got those four areas.

And then a discussion at the end that reveals how classified material was removed from this transcript prior to its publication.

Q191  Chairman: May I ask for guidance, please, and discussion if we need to, very briefly? How much of this could we have done not in camera?

Mr Farr: My problem about not being in camera is that for every answer that we give there is often a bit that is classified and you cannot separate unclassified questions and answers from classified questions and answers. The classified and the unclassified are mixed together. That is the difficulty. When you see the transcripts you can split off the classified bit and you are left with an unclassified answer, but what you cannot easily do is break the session in half because you then end up having to go over every question again, saying, “I want to add this to that, that to that, that to the other”. That is why, I am afraid, we suggested it was easier to have the whole lot in camera and then to look at the transcript and deal with it through the transcript rather than through the evidence session.

Q192  Chairman: Ms McGregor?

Ms McGregor: Yes, and if the transcript can come to me in the first instance we will discuss it with Charles and then we can quickly separate out those things. There are quite a number of things that were said that we could not have said in a public transcript.

This is the first time I’ve read about the government’s approach to Prevent and come away reassured.