The Development of UK Counter-Terrorism Policy and Legislation

The former prime minister of the UK, David Cameron, in 2010, spoke at a conference in Munich about security, radicalisation, and multiculturalism, sparking a controversial debate about how the UK monitors and deals with extremism. This chapter will examine counter-terrorism legislation that dates back to the response to 9/11. It will also explore the current UK Prevent Strategy 2011 and examine the role of the CTSA and new public sector duty (which will be discussed in further detail in a later chapter). In 2010, the UK government review of counter-terrorism legislation and policy included examining the broader counter-terrorism strategies, that is, CONTEST/CONTEST 2. The focus of CONTEST is to reduce the risk to the UK from international terrorism, and the CONTEST has four key strands, which include Prevent. The others are Pursue, which aims to stop terrorist attacks; Protect, which endeavours to strengthen systems against terrorist attacks; and Prepare, which aims at preparing against a terrorist attack by mitigating its impact. For the purposes of this chapter, we will be examining the Prevent strand of CONTEST whose origins lie contextually in post-9/11 and 7/7 when Muslims became a ‘suspect’ community. This chapter, however, will now also argue that wider counter-terrorism policies in the UK have led to an erosion of trust. Furthermore, such strategies are driven by state-led policies, embedded within vague and ambiguous local initiatives that lack both clarity and detail, and in effect, people act as informants and provide intelligence on each other and identify would-be extremists and terrorists. This chapter will detail the emergence of counter-terrorism policies and provide a review of some case studies that have involved counter-terrorism legislation.