Prevent, the UK’s controversial counter-radicalisation programme, is under fire again. This is because, according to a recent report in the Telegraph, the people in charge of the programme seem to believe that “cultural nationalism”, which is opposed to uncontrolled mass migration and the ideology of multiculturalism, is a Right-wing “terrorist ideology”. It further suggests that anyone who espouses it may be a potential threat to national security.

On the previous occasions when Prevent sparked controversy, it was because it had failed to properly manage the risk of troubled or radicalised individuals who went on to commit acts of terrible violence: a list that includes Axel Rudakubana, Ali Harbi Ali and Khairi Saadallah. This time the critical focus is not on Prevent’s negligence towards threats that were simmering away right under its nose but on manufacturing a threat that doesn’t exist.

According to the architects of Prevent, the extreme Right is made up of three strands or “sub-categories”: Cultural Nationalism, White Nationalism and White Supremacism. Now, you don’t have to be an expert to know that cultural nationalism, which sanctifies the nation-state and its ingrained way of life, is quite different from the belief that non-white people are sub-humans and should be mass-repatriated “back” to Africa.

In the British context, for example, we might want to make a distinction between what can be termed the Alan Partridge Right, personified by Nigel Farage and Matthew Goodwin, and the Violent Extreme Right, personified by Jo Cox’s murderer Thomas Mair and Darren Osborne, who rammed a van into a crowd of Muslim pedestrians in Finsbury Park. The former venerates Churchill, law and order and beer gardens, while the extreme Right loathes the Farage-types, embraces murderous violence and dreams of an apocalyptic race war.

A prevailing theme in Left-leaning advocacy is that the line between two distinct Right-wing tribes isn’t as sharp as it might seem. Concerns voiced by the Alan Partridge Right — over issues like two-tier policing, grooming gangs, or illegal boat crossings from France — are often seen as giving legitimacy to the Violent Extreme Right, which is said to “weaponise” these grievances to sow discord and recruit new members.

Another theme is that the talking points of the moderate Right are characterised as a “rabbit-hole” or “pipeline” that serves to push “vulnerable” people towards ever more extreme Rightist positions, so that one minute they’re agreeably nodding along with Matthew Goodwin on how bloody “bonkers” things have gotten in Britain, while the next they’re thinking that Hitler wasn’t so bad after all. Quite how this dramatic metamorphosis happens no one has ever convincingly explained.

The progressives who hold this view are now firmly in charge of Prevent and it has been like this for some time, as William Shawcross’s 2023 Independent Review of Prevent showed. Indeed, Shawcross expressed concern that a Home Office research unit on extremism had sought to portray mainstream writers like Douglas Murray as Right-wing extremists.

It is alarming that the ideologues who run Prevent can’t see the clear and obvious daylight between these two positions. And it shouldn’t be necessary to point out that cultural nationalism, however you feel about it, isn’t extreme.

Prevent, to my knowledge, has never stopped anyone from becoming a terrorist. It is also politically compromised and functions more as a tool for enforcing the prevailing ideological consensus than for dealing with the violent threats we face. The case for defunding it is now stronger than ever.