British politicians are demanding the Home Office re-focus a counter-terrorism program to include unvaccinated people who question the safety of the Covid-19 vaccines.
SNP politician Kirsten Oswald said the Prevent program was too preoccupied with the Islamist threat and risked stigmatizing and marginalizing Muslim communities. Instead of focusing on jihadi terrorists, the scheme should add unvaccinated people to the terrorist watchlist and focus on them, she said.
Oswald was speaking as Home Secretary Suella Braverman promised a “major reform” of the scheme following a long-awaited and damning report.
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Yahoo report: In the Commons, Home Secretary Suella Braveman told MPs the scheme needed to focus “on security, not political correctness.”
Ms Oswald welcomed the publication of the review but said “there do remain questions about the focus of what we see.”
She told MPs: “For instance, we need to see this report in the context of the Met’s head of counterterrorism pointing out that three in four advanced terror plots disrupted in 2021, actually involved right-wing extremists and 41% of counterterrorism arrests in 2021 were of extreme right-wing suspects.”
Ms Oswald said it would “be wrong and indeed damaging to stigmatize or marginalize Muslim communities, and that the risks posed by ideologies such as right-wing extremism, and antisemitism, as well as Islamic extremism, must all remain central to any UK counter-terror strategy.”
She added: “I also wonder if she feels a shift in focus is needed to take into account more recent forms of extremism that have emerged since the report was commissioned, things like the QAnon ideology imported from the United States or incels or the anti-vax movement that sprung up during the pandemic.”
