CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Shawcross has now disagreed publicly. The Home Office had, he said, ‘ignored’ key recommendations to beef up Prevent’s performance and the glass remained only ‘half full.’ I have some experience of bureaucratic sleight of hand at work when it comes to reviews and recommendations. When I was tasked by the Government to look into the Prison Service’s colossal and unforgivable failures in containing Islamist extremism a few years ago, I made 69 recommendations which were mysteriously repurposed into 11 without my consent; eight were finally accepted."

CEP Strategic Advisor Liam Duffy writes: "Really, Prevent’s statistics tell us more about those making the referrals than they do about the nature of the terror threat to Britain. Prevent uses the public sector — especially education — as its main vector of delivery, which will always skew referrals towards the kinds of people with whom those institutions and services interact. This has led to confusion and mission creep even among Prevent practitioners who, as William Shawcross warned in his 2023 review of Prevent, have viewed terroristic radicalisation primarily through a lens of vulnerability."

CEP Strategic Advisor Liam Duffy interviewed: "EXCLUSIVE: Over half of all counter extremism referrals are children. Counter terrorism expert Liam Duffy: "Very few of those referrals will go on to be channel cases... Prevent was turning into a bit of a clearing house, where any kind of vulnerability is referred."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "My organisation, the Counter Extremism Project contributed a submission to the review, which delivered its analysis in February this year. Shawcross delivered a pretty devastating critique of the way we manage people reported to be at risk of being drawn into ideological violence. He said the strategy had lost focus on its core mission – to stop people getting into terrorism. Motivation was looked at through the lens of vulnerability, not agency. Double standards applied to the interpretation of Islamist and extreme right wing ideologies, the former being tightly prescribed, the latter on a mission creep that threatened to stifle legitimate political discourse."

CEP Strategic Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "With each new blasphemy controversy in the West, from The Satanic Verses to Charlie Hebdo, the corrosive effect on free expression worsens. In Wakefield, we see just how low the bar for blasphemy allegations has fallen, and how readily complaints are legitimised by our own institutions."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Shawcross found a prevalence of ‘extreme antisemitism’ in the Channel cases he dip sampled. What’s striking is that antisemitism is an equal opportunities hatred. It is mobilised by extreme left, right and Islamist ideologues and their followers. Perhaps this explains a pre-eminence of obsessive, ‘fanatical’ violent hatred towards Jews in the cases he examined – behaviour that included the professed desire to murder and bomb Jews and the burning of synagogues."

CEP Strategic Advisor Liam Duffy writes: "In his independent review of Prevent, published last week, William Shawcross came to the same conclusion: the overemphasis on vulnerability in the process of radicalisation strips individuals of their agency, obscures reality and sucks the politics out of political violence."