Five years on, it’s time to push back against the damage caused by the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act

On the anniversary of the much-reviled ‘Prevent’ strategy becoming national law, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan examines how everyone from activist groups and migrants to vulnerable people and minorities have been affected, and how a coalition can be built to bring change

Extinction Rebellion has been added to the state's list of 'extremists' (Getty)

On 12 February 2015 the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act formally became British law.

Overnight, the much-reviled counter extremism policy, called “Prevent” became a statutory duty. It made public sector bodies legally responsible to stop “people being drawn into terrorism” and every employee obliged to “look out for signs of radicalisation”.

In other words, those working on the frontline of the principal institutions of the British welfare state – doctors, nursery carers, teachers and nurses – now found themselves forced to serve on behalf of the British security state instead.

In the years since the act passed, this has led to consistently outrageous cases of children, toddlers, patients and other groups being reported to Prevent on the most questionable pretences, as well as regular warnings of the danger posed by this endless state of suspicion for civil society and freedom of speech.

But the impact and intent of Prevent cannot be reduced to the stories alone.

Rather, it is a structure that is tangled up in wider policies of surveillance and security that have taken hold over the past decade, from a host of policies that constitute the “hostile environment” to the expansion of policing powers and the prison industrial complex.

It becomes especially obvious that concerns about counter extremism policies like Prevent are much more than merely a niche “Muslim issue” when talking to activists campaigning on behalf of marginalised groups across the UK.

Helen Brewer of the Stansted 15 is one such individual.

In December 2018, Helen and 14 others were found guilty of “endangering airport safety” when they took action to stop a mass deportation flight, hoping to stop human rights abuses of the 60 vulnerable migrants on board. However, in chaining themselves to the aircraft, they were deemed to have committed a terror-related offence under the 1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act. Helen explained that their protest being designated a “security” issue meant that their sentencing “set a precedent that is rapidly set to expand with continued labelling of peaceful protest groups as extremists”.

Last month’s news of Extinction Rebellion’s inclusion on an official “extremist ideologies” list, for the purposes of Prevent, confirms this. It demonstrates that the state’s capacity to clamp down on civil liberties, freedom of protest and free speech has escalated dramatically since February 2015. Counter-terror legislation is directly connected to the suppression of all kinds of dissent. In Helen’s words, it “provides an ever-growing tool for the state to criminalise activists and deter solidarity and direct actions like the one we took.”

The experience of other groups that use non-violent direct action protests such as demos, ad-hacking, and occupations also attests to this.

North London Sisters Uncut told me how policies borne on the back of two decades of Islamophobic and often xenophobic fear-mongering of a “terrorist threat” have created a “coercive environment” which is gradually dissuading people from organising and taking direct actions due to “fear of what the state can do to those who dissent or put themselves on the line.”

They added that this same fear also deters organisations and individuals from extending solidarity between struggles. For them, this illustrates how counter-terror legislation is directly attempting to “divide, isolate and dull resistance movements”.

This is especially damaging given how many grassroots struggles in the UK are inherently connected.

Border security and counter terrorism intersect to characterise migrants as undesirable threats – justifying violent detention and deportation. And North London Sisters Uncut note how security policies are used to fill the void caused by austerity. Instead of welfare averting social problems, people facing those problems are policed by powers of indefinite detention without charge, passport removal and surveillance.

Community Action on Prison Expansion (Cape), a network of groups fighting prison expansion, echoed the sentiment. Instead of making people safer, focus on “state security” has put people at further risk – from increased stop and search, imprisonment and risk of being shot by armed police. A year after the CTS Act, the plan to build 10,000 new prison places was announced – to Cape this highlighted the government’s real agenda: increasing control over society, “using ‘public safety’ as a smokescreen”.

This evokes the issue of the cynical rebrand of Prevent as a “safeguarding” tool since 2015. The language of “safety” and “security” has allowed the government to justify violation of basic human rights and dignity.

Evidently, draconian “security” legislation has been doubly coercive for all activists. It has endangered the wellbeing of vulnerable people, but also, the threat of state surveillance and punishment has undermined people’s right to protest injustices and mobilise resistance.

In short: “security” policies like Prevent have had nothing to do with keeping communities safe from harm – or even responding to the root causes of violence – but everything to do with keeping the state insulated from critique.

A policy like Prevent is so much more than an isolated issue.

It is part of the attack on all who hope for better, safer futures, those who seek to challenge the government’s agenda, or indeed those who just want to live in a genuine democracy.

The anniversary of the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act must not, therefore, pass unmarked, but neither should we commemorate it with despondency. The only way to challenge the consensus on such policies is to build broad solidarities between our grassroots struggles. We need a renewed and organised push-back against policies of surveillance across the board, and to reclaim the idea of our right to safety, divorced from security programmes.

Five years on let us build a new consensus that the safety of poor people, black people, brown people, migrants, undocumented people, Muslims and all who are persecuted is more important than the “security” of one of the most militarised, securitised and wealthy nation-states in the world.