Does Britain need new laws to tackle extremism?

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

News, Daily News, Politics

4.4 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2024

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michael Gove is expected to announce a tougher definition of extremism in response to a rise in radical ideology, since the Israel-Gaza war. Are new laws really needed? Or could the current laws, if enforced properly, be the best way to tackle a decline in social cohesion? Natasha Feroze speaks to David Shipley, a film producer and writer and Professor Jonathan Githens-Mazer from the University of Exeter who specialises in counter-terrorism and extremism.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is sponsored by Canacord Genuity Wealth Management,
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0:10.0	It's navigating today for a brighter tomorrow.
0:13.3	Visit can do wealth.com.
0:15.3	Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of coffee house shots.
0:22.0	I'm Natasha Fros and I'm joined by
0:23.6	Professor Jonathan Gythons major from Exeter University who specializes in
0:28.4	counter-terrorism and extremism and David Shipley a film producer who has writes a lot about prisons and has spent time in prison himself.
0:37.0	So there's been a lot of discussion recently in the past couple of weeks about extremism.
0:42.0	The Tory party is currently divided over what is the definition of extremism.
0:46.4	Michael Gove is keen to take a tougher stance on the definition.
0:50.1	Jonathan, as someone who's specialising this, I wonder if you could just talk us through what the current
0:54.9	definition of extremism looks like and what could be changed in the coming days, weeks.
1:01.4	When we talk about extremism and the policy definitions of extremism, we really have to go back to at the very least the 7-7 attacks or before that.
1:14.0	Because the government has struggled for what is almost 20 years to define what this means.
1:22.0	It's also struggled to figure out how to take a definition and make a policy
1:28.8	around it. And one of the main problems with the definition is that how long is a piece of string and part of that is the power, the power of who gets to make that definition and implement that definition and one of the main problems is that for
1:46.6	practitioners the police the security services for civil servants they can have a fairly clear idea of what is extremist in a specific context.
1:59.5	When it becomes politicized, it then becomes about whose political vision of Britain or what British society
2:07.9	should look like should be the basis for that definition.
2:12.4	And when we talk about extremism at the moment, obviously the Israel-Gazah war has made a lot of people talk about Islamism, but is it mostly Islamism that we're talking about?
	...

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