It’s not what anyone would want for a school. As well as educating more than 1,300 children, the teachers at Barclay primary school in Leyton, east London, have been meeting weekly with police to discuss “new evidence of online abuse and criminality”. A bitter row over whether children may wear pro-Palestinian pins, flags and badges on their uniforms prompted a war of words involving parents, with one protester standing outside the school gates with a placard saying: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. The school even had to close early for the Christmas break amid fears over the wellbeing of staff. “Do not let the misguided actions of a disaffected few be the reason [the children’s education] is disrupted further,” parents were urged in a letter from the Lion Academy Trust. To some, the unsettling events at Barclay school, where pupils aged 3 to 11 are taught in what Ofsted described in 2021 as a “friendly” and “outstanding” setting, will be taken as further evidence that Britain has a problem with extremism. Just as the streets of London are said to have been taken over by protesters threatening “mob rule”, as the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, put it last week, so Barclay school is seen by some as held to ransom by extremists using “malicious misinformation”, as the school has described it. Another viewpoint is that the events at Barclay school highlight what can happen when people feel they are losing their voice. The trouble at the school had started when the parents of children who had dressed up in Palestinian colours at a Children in Need day were sent letters threatening referrals to the government’s anti-radicalisation programme, Prevent. They were told not to use their children as “political pawns”. There were then claims, vehemently denied, that an eight-year-old from a Palestinian family had been “bullied” by staff for refusing to remove a Palestine flag patch from his uniform.
The fact that the school had written to parents in February 2022 to express horror at the events that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and to encourage fundraising for humanitarian relief, drew claims of double standards. But, perhaps more importantly for some parents, events were unfolding in a context where ministers have been making headlines by condemning the pro-Palestine “hate marches”, and most recently condemning “mob rule”. “The school essentially just made policy up to clamp down [on] pro-Palestinian sentiment of any description,” said one parent, an NHS surgeon who has three children at Barclay primary. “It’s completely from the top. People at Barclay have been allowed to get away with it because it’s endorsed by the UK government.” Last Friday evening, Sunak made a hastily arranged speech on the steps of Downing Street – an unusual event that signalled gravity and urgency. “In recent weeks and months, we have seen a shocking increase in extremist disruption and criminality,” the prime minister declared. “What started as protests on our streets has descended into intimidation, threats and planned acts of violence.” The comments may have been motivated by death threats against MPs and the recent chaos in parliament over a vote on Gaza – but it was those demonstrating in support of Palestinians under Israeli bombardment that were clearly on his mind. “Don’t let the extremists hijack your marches,” Sunak said. The intervention seemed to go down well among Conservative backbenchers, and some asked why it had taken so long for the prime minister to speak out. Elsewhere, however, it appears to have prompted a different set of questions. Is Britain really in the grip of extremists who are “trying to tear us apart”, as the prime minister suggested? Or, instead, is there an attempt to silence certain voices through false conflations of extremism and passionate protest, leading Britain down a dangerous road? Dame Sara Khan, who was the government’s counter-extremism commissioner and is now carrying out a social cohesion and democratic resilience review for the communities secretary, Michael Gove, is in full agreement with the prime minister that Britain has an extremism problem – but it is nothing new, she suggested.
There was a 2013 government extremism taskforce and a 2015 counter-extremism strategy. Then Khan’s 2021 report, Operating with Impunity, made further calls for action, lamenting the gaps in legislation that allowed neo-Nazi organisations such as Combat 18 to exist and the Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary to allegedly “motivate at least 70-100 people to turn to terrorism”. He was eventually convicted in 2016 for the terror offence of inviting support for the terrorist group Daesh. But, Khan said, it was vital to be clear about what the government wanted to target – a clarity that was missing in some of the commentary, she suggested. “I think it’s really important that we don’t conflate those protesters, somehow saying or portraying them as somehow as being all extremists,” she told the Guardian. “What I’ve been really uncomfortable with over the last couple of weeks is the kind of argument that they’re all Islamist extremists on these demonstrations. I think that’s actually outrageous. Some are not even pro-Palestinian people, just anti-war. There are clearly Jewish people there, there’s a whole range of people there, and to try to frame these demonstrations as Islamist extremism is completely far-fetched and untrue.” She went on: “It’s about precision of language. If you are not concise about it, you’re just going to further anger people, if you are not listening to what people are saying.” Claims of rampant criminality at the demonstrations, often attended by hundreds of thousands of people, also appear to be at odds with the facts on the ground. At the last pro-Palestine march in London there were just 12 arrests. This compares with 36 arrests at the Glastonbury music festival in 2023. According to the Metropolitan police, of the 238 arrests made by police at pro-Palestine protests between October and December last year, only 35 have been charged, while three penalty notices and four cautions were also issued. Jude Lanchin, a solicitor for Bindmans who has represented 23 people arrested at the protests, said that many of the cases were “questionable and not based on sufficient reasonable suspicion that an offence has actually been committed”. “Out of 23 cases from October to date, only two of my clients have been charged,” she said. “A number have had the investigation dropped and others are subject to unreasonably long bail periods, although charges are unlikely to be brought. Other clients have been threatened with arrest when their actions clearly do not constitute a criminal offence.” Sunak had suggested in his Downing Street speech that a dearth of arrests of those at pro-Palestine protests may be due to a lack of rigour by the police. The Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley this week responded that “to suggest that we are not where the law permits, as the law allows, policing robustly is not accurate”. The perception of some that the government is seeking to make political capital out of the crisis in Gaza, by drawing dividing lines between those who support the “extremists” offering support for Palestinians, and the rest, has been strengthened by the fact that ministers are expected next week to announce a new definition of extremism, determining the organisations that Whitehall will be prohibited from engaging with. According to leaked drafts, it will include groups active in “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on intolerance, hatred or violence that aims to undermine the rights or freedoms of others”, including “those who seek to undermine or overturn the UK’s liberal system of democracy and democratic rights”. It is not a move that Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said he was comfortable with.
“If you say a touchstone of British values is, for example, tolerance towards gay people then you end up saying that people who are religiously committed to saying that homosexuality is a sin are extremists,” he said. “Then you end up creating a situation in which the UK’s … famously pluralist tolerance towards different belief systems is not tolerant towards that belief system. So it’s really hard to try and work out what are the touchstones for British values.” Among the organisations that the government has suggested will remain in the cold is the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). Links were first suspended in 2009 in a row over comments by one its leaders about Gaza. But why aren’t conversations happening now, the organisation asks. “How can we move past things if you’re not talking to us?” asked Zara Mohammed, who was appointed as the MCB’s first female secretary general three years ago. “I’m a new secretary general, we’re in 2024. What is the issue now? We are the largest and most diverse represented body in the country. Who are you talking to when it comes to Muslims?” Back at Barclay school, tensions remain high. “There has been no ‘heavy handedness’ towards any religious, cultural or ethnic sector of the broad and diverse community we serve,” a spokesperson for the school said. “The very vast majority of parents are happy to comply with the school’s uniform policy – and only a tiny minority of adults who sought to exploit Children in Need for their political views have caused this disruption.” Some of the 200 protesting parents have said they are considering taking her children out of the school. Sunak’s comments on the steps of Downing Street had only confirmed to some, they said, that they were not to be permitted a voice. Sir David Ormand, a former director of GCHQ, the UK’s intelligence, security and cyber agency, who was a key player in designing Britain’s counter-extremism and terrorism strategies in the 2000s, said upset and angst was the goal of the enemies of a multicultural Britain. “The acid test of Sunak’s statement is, do people now feel less angry?” Ormand said. “Do the people, the communities concerned, feel less frightened [after his speech] and are we all less cynical that the public interest is being sacrificed to party management interests? The answer is probably [he is] failing on all three.”