Disagreement is not terrorism

The UK government is playing word games to demonise political opposition.

Words are slippery critters. You might describe yourself as being on the ‘left’, be a lifelong Labour voter, and yet if you believe that there are only two sexes it won’t be long before strangers online are branding you ‘far right’. You can be profoundly opposed to racism, and still be accused of being ‘racist’ if you don’t accept the claims of activists to have detected the presence of ‘systemic racism’ even in the absence of any evidence. And now, if you believe that ‘Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups’, you are officially a terrorist.

That’s according to the government’s anti-terrorism ‘Prevent’ programme, which has listed ‘Cultural Nationalism’ - defined as the belief that national identity is threatened by cultural or demographic change - as a ‘terrorist ideology’. At the stroke of a pen, millions of law-abiding UK citizens are now having to adjust to their new identities as terrorists. Indeed, this definitional shift has birthed so many new terrorists that it may qualify as a protected characteristic.

We’ve been here before, of course. The phrase ‘stochastic terrorism’ has often been deployed as a means to reinterpret non-terrorism as terrorism. Specifically, it has been applied to those whose speech can be said to inspire the demonisation of minority groups. It’s always been a nonsense phrase; similar to ‘dog whistle’, which is a label used to insinuate that someone has secretly communicated something that they have not actually said out loud. Culture warriors have always been prolific amateur telepaths.

In July 2021, I interviewed the Reverend Dr Bernard Randall, a school chaplain at Trent College in Derbyshire, who told me about training sessions in which staff were instructed to chant ‘smash heteronormativity’. When he delivered a sermon about the importance of respectfully challenging such ideological viewpoints he was reported to Prevent. (Dr Randall returned to my show Free Speech Nation in October 2024, and you can watch that interview here.) When a school chaplain is under suspicion of terrorism for encouraging civil debate, we can be sure that the word has lost all meaning.

The culture war has always been about language, and who gets to define the meanings of words. For the postmodernist mindset, our understanding of reality is wholly constructed by language, which means that describing something as ‘terroristic’ automatically makes it so. In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871), Humpty Dumpty says to Alice: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less’. He is the prototype of the woke activist, and similarly fragile.

Consider the use of the term ‘social justice’. When most of us use this term, we mean the concept of equality under the law, opposition to prejudice and discrimination, and equal opportunities for all. When social justice activists say ‘social justice’, they mean an emphasis on group identity over the rights of the individual, a rejection of social liberalism, and the assumption that unequal outcomes are always evidence of structural inequalities.

The ambiguity is the point. It comes down to a matter of supply and demand. The woke movement has depended upon the perpetuation of the myth that we live in a culture swarming with racists. Unfortunately for these ideologues, every reputable study shows that the UK is among the least racist societies to have ever existed. And so the word ‘racist’ had to be redefined so that it could apply to as many people as possible and justify the woke cultural revolution.

So we should hardly be surprised to find that reasonable concerns about mass immigration, and the failure of assimilation that is the inevitable outcome of a blind fealty to multiculturalism, become rebranded as ‘terrorism’. It means that the authorities can justify further censorship and suppression of criticism. It is sleight-of-tongue of the most sinister kind.

Such rhetorical manoeuvres cannot go unchallenged. The Prevent programme has been a failure, largely because the authorities keep insisting that far right white nationalism represents the most prominent risk to our security, even though 75 per cent of MI5’s counter-terrorism work relates specifically to Islamist threats. While I am certainly concerned about the creeping rise of the far right, we need to be honest about where the most pressing danger lies. For all the word play of those in power, to be concerned about terrorism does not make one a terrorist.

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