Prevention of Terrorism in Britain: Fighting Violent or Non-violent Extremism? The Influence of the Quilliam Foundation

Abstract

In December 2006, Tony Blair made a speech in which he linked the radicalisation process¹ at the root of the 7/7 bombings to a form of failure of the British multicultural experiment (Blair 2006). In other words, the 7/7 bombers seemed to have become terrorists due to a lack of integration in the British social fabric. The prime minister’s speech, with its emphasis on the ‘duty to integrate’, was representative of the turn taken by the Labour party with regard to ethnic minorities in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 7 and 21 July 2005. The 7/7 bombings constituted a major trauma for British people because of the profile of the culprits, who were ‘British-born suicide bombers who had lived and been brought up in this country’. What appeared puzzling in their deeds was that they seemed to be ‘integrated at one level in terms of lifestyle and work’, which made an explanation of the radicalisation process in terms of lack of social and economic integration irrelevant. However, according to the prime minister, they did not meet the criteria of a more demanding form of integration, that is, an integration which ‘is not about culture or lifestyle’ but, rather, ‘about values’ and more specifically about ‘shared, common unifying British values’ (Blair 2006). Integrating would thus mean adopting ‘essential values’ such as ‘the belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all’.