I thank the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, for his contribution. He has asked a number of questions and I will do my best to answer to them all.
Before I do that, I join the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, in applauding the work of the security services and the various agencies that keep us all safe, and thank them for it. I include in that the officials in the Home Office, who are often rather overlooked when we are handing out praise to our security services, but who do a considerable amount of work and of thinking about how best to apply these rules in an operational situation. I re-assert that the core objective here is to strengthen the Prevent system, which is a vital component of the counterterrorism apparatus, and in giving my answers I will endeavour to explain why.
The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, asked me about public confidence and trust in the system and raised the issue of the Dover attack. Of course, the Independent Review of Prevent was led by Sir William Shawcross. He was an independent reviewer, so he decided on the content of the report. I am unable to comment on why he made that decision or what prompted it.
It is perhaps worth digressing and looking at the state of play regarding the extreme right-wing threat we face, because that does feed into this subject. We have accepted the Independent Review of Prevent’s recommendation to ensure that a consistent and proportionate threshold is in place across all the Prevent workstreams. Prevent is now guided by the principles of the new security threat check, which is recommended in the IRP. This series of principles informs our strategic approach, which asks us to consider whether actions are proportionate against the UK’s current terrorism and extremism threat picture. That means that the Home Office approaches and products clearly show how they are relevant to meeting Prevent’s objectives and responding to the threat of terrorism.
We are also rolling out updated training so that practitioners can better understand the threat and in particular the ideological causes of terrorism. The Home Office has undertaken research on Prevent referrals to better under understand them and to improve how they are recorded. Better understanding of the threat, strengthened training and improved processes ensure that we tackle disparities.
However, the primary domestic terrorist threat comes from Islamist terrorism, which accounts for approximately 67% of attacks since 2018, about three-quarters of the MI5 case load and 64% of those in custody for terrorism-related offences. The remainder of the UK domestic
terrorist threat is driven almost exclusively by extreme right-wing terrorism, which amounts to approximately 22% of attacks since 2018, about one-quarter of the MI5 case load and 28% of those in custody for terrorism-connected offences.
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Interestingly, left-wing, anarchist and single-issue terrorism currently represents a significantly smaller terrorist threat to the UK than Islamist or extreme right-wing terrorism and is not currently present in the UK on any significant scale, although some activity has met a terrorist threshold in recent years and MI5 investigations continue into those cases.
The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, asked about the current situation and the state of security as influenced by what we are seeing in Israel with Hamas. Of course, as noble Lords will be aware, the UK condemns the terrorist acts by Hamas against Israeli and international citizens. It needs to be restated that Hamas alone is responsible for this conflict. As the Foreign Secretary tweeted,
“The death of any civilian is a tragedy. Palestinian or Israeli—Hamas is the cause of this loss”.
We support Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself and take action against terrorism.
Sadly, experience indicates that whenever Israel is attacked, legitimate Israeli defensive measures are used by some as a pretext to stir up hatred against British Jews. Following hostilities between Hamas and Israel in 2021 and other flare-ups in recent years, multiple incidents were targeted at and designed to increase fear within the Jewish community. They included vandalism of Jewish businesses, desecration of memorials and religious sites, physical and verbal abuse of Jews on the streets, convoys driving through Jewish neighbourhoods hurling anti-Semitic abuse, and proliferation of anti-Semitism online. There is an obvious risk that this pattern will be repeated during the current conflict. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that that is already the case.
The Government have been clear that we will not tolerate anti-Semitism, and the Prime Minister has announced an additional £3 million for the Community Security Trust to protect schools, synagogues and other Jewish community buildings. Unfortunately, extremist exploitation of conflicts involving Israel is something with which we are all now too familiar. Escalations in extremist rhetoric, both online and offline, are likely to continue to raise tensions and fear within communities, so we must also be alive to the risk that this has the potential to radicalise and exploit those susceptible to Islamist or extreme right-wing narratives.