Conservatives left UK wide open to far-right violence, says former adviser

The Conservative government left the UK wide open to the far-right violence erupting across parts of the country by ignoring red flags and stoking fires with a culture war agenda, a senior adviser on extremism to Tory prime ministers has said.

Dame Sara Khan, who was Rishi Sunak’s independent adviser for social cohesion and resilience until May this year and acted as counter-extremism commissioner under both Theresa May and Boris Johnson, said the recent administrations had failed the British people.

Repeated and urgent counsel that far-right extremists were exploiting gaps in the law to foment violence on social media had been ignored while top-rank politicians over a number of administrations sought to gain advantage by waging culture wars, Khan said, in a damning intervention.

“The writing was clearly on the wall for some time,” Khan told the Guardian. “All my reports have shown, in a nutshell that, firstly, these extremist and cohesion threats are worsening; secondly, that our country is woefully unprepared. We’ve got a gap in our legislation which is allowing these extremists to operate with impunity.

“Previous governments have astonishingly failed to address these trends, and they’ve taken instead, in my view, approaches that have actually been counterproductive and actually just defy any logical rationale.

“They scrapped the counter-extremism strategy [in 2021], including all the resources and funding for local areas across the country who are struggling with extremist activity and extremist actors. And the government, at that time, did not replace it with anything. They left local authorities struggling to deal with consistent extremist challenges in their area.

“Political leadership is really important and how our politicians behave is really, really critical, because I’ve seen, and I’m sure other people have seen, politicians who have actually, indirectly or directly undermined social cohesion because they’ve used inflammatory language.”

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Khan, who has previously criticised those who described the pro-Palestine protests as “hate marches”, a formulation of words used by the former home secretary Suella Braverman, said the rhetoric used by some senior politicians in recent years had given a green-light to those holding racist views.

She said: “I went to parts of the country where they were very upfront with me and just said, ‘Look, because of some of the inflammatory language used by politicians, the same language would then be co-opted by, you know, far-right extremists and others, who would then use that to undermine cohesion in a local area’.

“There’s a serious duty on our politicians to not engage in inflammatory language; to not use, for example, dehumanising language about asylum seekers, refugees and, you know, people who are coming to our country.

“Of course, there’s a legitimate debate about immigration, about numbers and all of those things, but there’s a way that you can talk about these issues without using dehumanising and inflammatory language. Because, by using that language, you just see extremists co-opting that. You see people saying, well, if politicians can use that language, why can’t we?”

Khan, a British Muslim raised in Bradford, who published a review for Michael Gove in March this year on social cohesion in the UK known as the Khan review, said there had been growing evidence in recent years of the far-right spreading disinformation to cause unrest, with outbreaks of unrest in Oldham, Knowsley and Barrow.

Khan, who wrote a report in 2021 with the current Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley calling for a change in the law on extremism, said it remained the case that it was legal to stir up racial hatred that is not threatening, abusive or insulting.

“And that’s why we’ve seen lawful fascist and neo-Nazi organisations in this country who are doing precisely that,” Khan said. “There are claims about white genocide, promoting dangerous narratives, which is intended to stir up hatred against a racial and religious group.

“There is a kind of growth and influence, not only far-right influencers, but also other extremist actors. There is the use of disinformation on social media.

“Hateful extremism has evolved significantly in the last decade, and extremists have professionalised and coordinated, locally, nationally, transnationally, they’re using social media to spread their extremist ideology and spreading disinformation.

“Our rules have failed to evolve with this growing extremist threat, there are gaps in our legislation that is allowing them to, in effect, operate with impunity.”

Khan said the political tumult in recent years, with the country having five different prime ministers in seven years, had enfeebled the government.

She said: “I was dealing with three different home secretaries because of the kind of political instability you had. Home secretaries who had different interests and views about how to tackle this problem, and so some were very forthcoming and supportive, but I think others were less so.

“Why it was that they didn’t respond to the reports, ultimately, is a question for them, but it’s just astonishing that they didn’t do anything about it.”

There was also, she said, a lack of institutional knowledge about how to combat disinformation and protect vulnerable people.

She said: “What local authorities were telling me was that the far right would find out where asylum hotels would be before the local authority did, because the communication between the Home Office and them was just not working.”

On Sunday, police clashed with rioters outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham, with demonstrators chanting “Get them out” as they smashed the windows of the Holiday Inn Express.

Khan added: “They’ve (the Conservatives) actually failed those people in communities who are trying to protect cohesion, you know, who are trying to push back against extremist actors.

“Ultimately, unless we address these problems, it will get worse.”