Opinion: Prevent doesn’t just assume we’re terrorists, it assumes we’re idiots
In May, just after the general election, PM David Cameron said something that truly scared me: “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone’”. This sentence, threatening law abiding citizens who don’t have quite the right shade of ‘British values’, has since been paraphrased by super villains. What happened next however is far from fiction.
The Prevent legislation, which was made mandatory earlier this year, attempts to root out potential radicalisation among students by offering guidelines and powers to universities who think their students may be at risk. The consequences have been what the National Union of Students has called ‘state-sponsored Islamophobia’, and a threat to freedom of speech. Anti-tuition fee activists have been monitored for domestic extremism, Mohammad Umar Farooq, a counter terrorism student, was questioned on his attitudes to Al Qaida and homosexuality for reading course literature, and an Islington student found themselves under scrutiny for mentioning ‘ecoterrorism’ in a French class. We like to think we live in the kind of liberal country where people can speak freely, but this kind of mindless scapegoating only serves to show Britain’s ugly side.
What a way to deal with issues that – at least in part – stem from alienation. Prevent, which has been accused of demonising Muslim BME students, encourages universities to look out for those ‘seeking political change’ and those who seem ‘withdrawn’ as potential radicals. This offers up a disgusting catch 22 for anyone who feels ostracised by our increasingly polarised country, and particularly victims of Islamophobia: both trying to change the world around you and feeling despondent about it are reasons to get flagged. The only option is to keep calm and carry on- advice better kept to awful tacky mugs.
The government is scared. So scared in fact that they’re running to the kind of paranoid, neighbour-watching tactics of the cold war. Prevent has been branded as the new Mccarthyism, which would be a strong retort if it weren’t for the fact that communism didn’t overrun the west, and therefore it didn’t ‘not’ work. And when you have something that doesn’t ‘not’ work then why change the formula?
However the times have changed and Prevent risks causing more harm than it does help. As more people are told to shut up and stop asking questions by a system that suspects them of terrorism, more and more will go to the internet for answers – exposing them to a much broader range of idealogical threats.
Our universities are places where debate and speech should be completely free. We should be able to speak in hypotheticals without risk of reprisals, or have strong political opinions. Had Gandhi, disputably a City alumni, been singled out for ‘seeking political change’, we could be living in a very different world right now.
The sad fact is that Prevent oversteps assuming that students are terrorists in the making. It assumes we are unable to hold a dissenting opinion, or disagree with a radical speaker. It assumes we are far too impressionable to think independently, despite that being exactly what our time at university is about. For as long as government legislation stops us from speaking freely, it is also stopping us from learning.
