CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson: "These appointments are effective at providing a conduit between ministers and what’s happening at street level on issues now so serious that they forced the Prime Minister into a rare Downing Street address on extremism not two weeks ago. They marry intent with capability. Speaking truth to power is easier to achieve when your interlocutors are unencumbered by Civil Service machinery that grinds against unpalatable facts. But this week we will see an effort by ministers to update the work to counter-extremism which requires a ‘whole of Government’ response far beyond the purview of the czar."

"Prof Ian Acheson, senior adviser at the Counter Extremism Project, was commissioned by Mr Gove seven years ago to look into Islamist extremism in prisons.

"He has always been committed to tackling the threat posed by those who advocate hateful ideas in the high-level posts he has held in government as Secretary of State for Education, Justice and now at the department responsible for communities," Prof Acheson told The National."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "No one reasonable wants to see those who aspire to politics, national or local, bullied or intimidated into silence or simply deterred from standing. The pool of talent is shallow enough as it is. Violent extremists across the ideological spectrum want nothing less, of course."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Shoplifting is not a victimless crime. Where it has become a normal feature of criminal impunity now rampant in many poor communities, it forces vital shops to close down. When the lights go out on neighbourhood convenience stores because small businesses are overwhelmed by theft, it’s yet another nail in the coffin for postcodes marooned in crime. The consequences of supposedly minor infractions are immense."

CEP Senior Advisor Ambassador Edmund Fitton-Brown testified before the United Kingdom Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee for hearing, "The UK’s international counter-terrorism policy," 

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "No one is talking about these clandestine arrivals who have melted into the background, traumatised, exploited, enslaved. Yet they will include tomorrow’s violent extremists who do or will pose a threat to national security. We have literally no idea where these people are or the level of threat they pose. We do know that failed asylum seekers who do make it into the system and somehow remain stuck there, sometimes for years, have committed terrorist acts that have stunned this country."