One of the Old Dogs in question is our Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper. The Old Tricks are exactly those obsessions to which we are so accustomed from Yvette “raise boys to be confident feminists” Cooper.
The extent to which Cooper is responsible for the contents of the report is not clear, but other Old Dogs within the Home Office certainly are. What is clear is that Cooper commissioned the report as one of her first acts as the new Home Secretary in August 2024. I refer to the report reviewing Government policy on so-called extremism following the “Rapid Analytical Sprint” Cooper instigated.
This usage of “rapid” is familiar in the feminist lexicon. I have in the past attended a “rapid review of inequality”. Don’t ask me to describe the experience. I’m still traumatised.
The report (actually several documents) resulting from this “Rapid Analytical Sprint” of counter-extremism policy has been leaked by a Home Office official to the charity Policy Exchange. Their review of the report is titled Extremely-Confused-The-Governments-new-counter-extremism-review-revealed.
I have long been of the view that feminists of Yvette Cooper’s stripe are more concerned with sating their prejudice against white men than with improving the lot of women and girls. So it is that the Old Dogs who are responsible for the Rapid Sprint report have displayed their usual Old Tricks. Rather than focus on real terrorist threats – those which result in mass deaths – the focus of the Rapid Sprint report is on,
“violence against women and girls”, “spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories”, “an interest in gore or extreme violence”, “misogyny” and “involvement in the online subculture called the manosphere”.
That will be you (and me).
I trust you are happy to be lumped in with mass murderers?
The Rapid Sprint report admits itself that many people in the above categories are not extremists. Whilst it delights in the use of phrases like “extreme misogyny”, this and various other invented “extremisms” have caused no terrorist deaths in Great Britain since 1999, and they fail to meet the test of causing harm to national security – or even the test of extremism.
In addition to bigging-up the above worn-out feminist complaints, the Rapid Sprint report downplays the threat of Islamism, by far the greatest threat to national security. Policy Exchange remind us of some basic facts about terrorism in the UK since 1999: Islamists were responsible for 94% of all deaths caused by terrorism and around 88% of injuries caused by terrorism. In 2024, Islamists accounted for 80% of the police’s counter-terror caseload, 75% of MI5’s caseload and 63% of terrorists in custody.
In recent years the feminist threat-narrative has tended to focus on Incels and online “influencers”. The Rapid Sprint report appears to mark a change in which it is MRAs who are in their cross-hairs. Policy Exchange quotes the report thus: “most individuals in the Incel movement do not advocate violence against women and the greatest risk of violence among incels is self-harm”. Similarly, “while some PUA techniques cross into criminality such as rape and sexual assault… the movement and influencers do not necessarily meet any definitions of extremism”.
However, they add, some MRA groups “have advocated violence against women”.
This is very much an Old Trick. No doubt there are those who adopt the MRA label and could be quoted as (arguably) advocating violence against women. Not that I could name any. But to give the impression that this is typical of MRAs is dishonest. Anyone advocating for men and boys could reasonably be called an MRA despite this including some distinctly “progressive” people. And there’s no shortage of feminists who have advocated for violence against men.
As Policy Exchange note, even if you accepted the Home Office line on misogyny (as extremism) the report is wildly inconsistent. The activities of the so-called “grooming gangs” (itself a euphemism) are surely genuine examples of misogyny in action, and yet the Rapid Sprint report makes very little reference to them. The main mention of the subject in the leaked documents is that “right wing extremists frequently exploit cases of alleged group-based sexual abuse to promote anti-Muslim sentiment as well as anti-government and anti-‘political correctness’ narratives”. Policy Exchange rightly draws the readers’ attention to the usage of “alleged” here. The background of the perpetrators of these crimes is not “alleged”; it is fact.
Policy Exchange notes that the Sprint report, “largely ignores the roles of institutions in spreading and incubating extremism, and particularly ignores the significant power of institutions in Islamist extremism. Another reason why Islamism is Britain’s most serious extremist threat is that it has a significantly greater institutional presence than any other form of UK extremism, influencing or controlling some mosques, private schools, media outlets, charities and pressure groups”. Diplomatically they do not add “and political Parties”, or, I might add, the Home Office itself.
In contrast, MRAs – or other denizen’s of the so-called manosphere – have zero representation in any institutions whatsoever. In starkest contrast, it would be hard to find any organisation not happy to declare themselves ‘proudly feminist’ – the Teflon ideology against which no criticisms stick however well-founded.
The Home Office run Prevent, the Government’s counter-extremism programme. The Shawcross report* has already damned the skew in the operation of Prevent away from genuine terrorist threats (instead promoting columnists like Rod Liddle, Melanie Philips and Douglas Murray as a national threat). In fact, Shawcross identified a “concerted campaign” to “undermine and delegitimise Prevent” by those, especially Islamist groups, whose activities might be frustrated by a correctly run Prevent programme. Ian Acheson writing in The Spectator recalls that “William Shawcross found in his assessment that officials there (i.e., in the Home Office) were guilty of sending public money to organisations antithetical to its (Prevent’s) mission and who campaigned for its abolition. I would not take bets with you on the same officials being responsible for this ‘rapid sprint’”.
*My rough notes on the Shawcross report are here.
In respect of the likes of the Southport killer, Axel Rudakubana, the failings are put down to “organisational issues” rather than policy issues. But this ignores that prevailing biases within the security services themselves may influence decisions that then appear to be “operational”. If, for example, the police consistently fail to act against a certain category of crime, that is not an organisational issue but an endemic bias.
The Rapid Sprint report recommends reversing the previous government’s code of practice which “aimed to limit the recording of ‘non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs)’”. This is a direct attack on free speech, without which there is no freedom at all. Although NCHIs do not involve any criminal sanction, and do not formally constitute a criminal record, they may show up on an enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service check, potentially affecting employment prospects. Moreover, “having your collar felt by the law” tarnishes your reputation with most people (much of the public still being unenlightened).
The Rapid Sprint recommends making “harmful communications” online a specific crime, a proposal that was rejected by the previous government. It also recommends reviewing section 175 of the Online Safety Act – presumably to make it more draconian. This section of the Act gives ministers the power to direct the media regulator, Ofcom, to “harden its approach” at times of threat to public safety or national security. In other words, to formally permit censorship by the Government. More Old Tricks with which we are all-too distressingly familiar.
The report claims that “two-tier policing” is a right-wing extremist narrative. As Policy Exchange note, “once accepted within Government, how will the suggestion that ‘two-tier policing’ is a right-wing extremist narrative be weaponised at the local and national level by civil servants, senior police and counter extremism practitioners? There is an obvious risk here of tarring significant swathes of the public as Far Right”. As Ian Acheson writes in his Spectator article Why do Home Office staff think talk of two-tier policing is ‘extremist’?, “this review reveals nothing if not a disdain for the feelings and concerns of ordinary voters. Or, at the very best, a sort of elite obliviousness conceived in the senior common room and marinaded in years of failing upwards in public service, where saying good was more important than doing good.”
It doesn’t matter what the Government does, the PM will be known forever as “Two-Tier Keir”, and there’s nothing they can do about it. The sobriquet is deserved.
The Home Office approach, at least as presented in the Rapid Sprint report, is to conflate “harmful” beliefs with violent extremism. As Brendan O’Neill wrote, “Ask yourself: what is a ‘harmful’ belief? And more to the point, who gets to decide? It is a mere three years since Starmer thundered that it is ‘not right’ to say only women have a cervix. That is ‘something that shouldn’t be said’, he cried … Are we seriously expected to trust a government led by this man to rule on what is a harmful belief and what is an okay belief? Given he once thought basic biology was ‘something that shouldn’t be said’, who knows what perfectly normal, scientifically correct belief he might rebrand as ‘harmful’ in the near future.
A war on ‘harmful’ beliefs would give the government a blank cheque to demonise and shush views that are old-fashioned, possibly unpopular or just not very PC.”
Quite.
But I, and readers of this blog, will be concerned in particular that the Rapid Sprint report is continuing to pursue the narrative against men and boys. This is a focus that neutral commentators are beginning to be more comfortable opposing. In Yvette Cooper wants to lock up your sons Toby Young wrote,
“Sir William Shawcross warned that something had gone very wrong with Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy. Instead of focusing on Islamism, Prevent was wasting its time investigating complaints of ‘far-right’ extremism from left-wing teachers, e.g., 14-year-old boys ‘caught’ watching TikTok videos of Nigel Farage…If you think Yvette Cooper is going to rectify this, think again. …Her priorities have evidently taken root in her department…”
To address the alleged growth of ‘misogyny’ among teenage boys, the solution according to Cooper’s feminist Home Office is to encourage teachers to refer boys who make sexist remarks to Prevent. So, writes Toby Young, “don’t be surprised if your son is referred to Prevent for claiming that women’s football isn’t as exciting as men’s. It’s a slippery slope between such ‘everyday sexism’ and ‘rape culture’. And if he points out that Islamic extremism is more likely to lead to sexual violence than watching Match of the Day, a ‘safe-guarding officer’ will throw in an accusation of Islamophobia when turning him in to the local Stasi”.
So, what is to happen next? James Heale quotes Dan Jarvis, the Security Minister, as saying that he and the Home Secretary had rejected the report’s recommendations, despite having commissioned the review. But, he adds, “the complicating factor for ministers is that the report mirrors much of Keir Starmer’s earlier rhetoric on grooming gangs…When the grooming gang scandal erupted again three weeks ago, the Prime Minister claimed that ‘far right’ talking points had leaked into the mainstream; this report does the same. That could make it more difficult for the government to distance itself from a report whose recommendations are clearly politically toxic”.
Isn’t rapid … sprint a tautology?
‘Overhasty generalisations’ might be a better description for Yvette Cooper’ report.
rapid sprint is indeed a tautology
One of the problems is that government itself will always be protected from measures to stop “spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories”, such as they put out over the 7/7 bombings; regularly spout about educational inequality against girls; the idea that “involvement in the online subculture called the manosphere” has any connection with terrorism; or even that ‘extremism’ (which seems to increasingly mean “having thoughts we don’t like”) is the same as terrorism.
Whatever the ‘manosphere’ is (there is no government definition of the word, nor is it a legal term) the best anyone can say is that it is anti-feminist – and even in that, I don’t think they are correct, since PUAs don’t seem to give a damn about ideology nor politics yet are apparently a part of the manosphere, along with charities and women’s groups fighting for men’s and boys’ interests.
This isn’t a matter of the pot calling the kettle black. In that proverb, the kettle IS black.
Meanwhile, there are admissions today that domestic abuse against women and girls is now worse than ever.. and the only response is to do even more of the same, funding the same feminist groups even more. If it really is worse (which is questionable) then the logical thing to do would be to listen to, and fund, other people. People who don’t have extremist viewpoints like Marxism and feminism.
Very many thanks yet again William, for your very well founded comments. At one level 2020 was a very good year; June, as it was, seeing the decommissioning by the MOJ of the RESPECT “accredited” DAPPs. (Dr Louise Dixon had pointed out in 2011 their total lack of an evidential base and you have taken the Duluth stuff apart on On Record and in your blog ) – http://empathygap.uk/?p=1849 3.2 3.3 The downside was that Jo Todd, the RESPECT CEO, was awarded a CBE for her efforts to help women. Similarly Ms Thangham Debonnaire (Lab), who lost her Bristol West seat to a Green, was elevated to the Lords this year by two-tier-Keir.
To save others the immediate efforts of finding what was said about Liz and how Natty also got a mention p a bit of page102 of the aforesaid is here. The first sentence is nicely contradicted by Mike Bell’s efforts to get a fringe meeting at the Truss Con-Par-Conf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0Qx_vhOyPI&t
“Whilst sexism and misogyny remain endemic issues in the UK, organised political movements that are
primarily focused on these ideas remain small and at the political fringes. Fringe party Justice for Men and
Boys (J4MB) are the most active organised element of the British manosphere. Active mainly in London
and led by former Conservative Party consultant Mike Buchanan, J4MB is electorally marginal and in practice functions as a pressure group whose main activities are to coordinate anti-feminist activity in the UK and in collaboration with fellow activists abroad. Their activities this year remained largely online,
consisting of blogs on their site. Offline, the group also took part in the annual International Conference
on Men’s Issues (ICMI), the key international meeting of anti-feminist activists. The 2019 ICMI was held
in Chicago and was organised by the Honey Badger Brigade, a Canadian anti-feminist organisation.
Conservative MP Philip Davies, who has previously spoken at ICMI, spoke there again in 2019, as did
British far-right vlogger Carl Benjamin (AKA Sargon of Akkad). Elisabeth Hobson from J4MB also took
part in the Battle of Ideas, the annual debating festival put on by Brexit Party MEP Claire Fox’s
Academy of Ideas organisation, in November, and Hobson co-hosted the Messages4Men conference in
London in the same month alongside anti-feminist activist Natoya Raymond.”
It’s always disturbing – but sadly not surprising – to see so many Politicians thinking it’s somehow ok for people to be indoctrinated to see the world through the distorting lens of a very biased and questionable ideology. I guess I would expect nothing less from a mediocre self-serving Politician like Cooper: “Oh no, I hear boys are saying things about women and girls that girls and women have been taught by feminism for years to say about men and boys. This is misogyny and it has to stop!”
Children have an innate sense of fairness, and the more they try and artificially make boys think things that their own life experiences will contradict, the more genuine haters they will create. The Andrew Tates of the world exist because of what feminism has denied boys / men, not despite it. The ideologues never seem to get it.
If they were honest, they would have to admit that the ‘femosphere’ contains as much – if not more – sexist content, than the so-called ‘manosphere’, They never ever mention it though, which is the biggest tell of all. A group of bigots is getting the powers that be to try and outlaw another group on the basis that they are – according to their own biased opinions – bigoted.
Being in an “exemplar” Local Authority in terms of community services for people who would otherwise be in institutional care in the form of medium secure and low secure Hospitals, i was involved in the Government policy following the “Winterbourne” scandal. This was an “interesting” experience in how the Civil Service works. The Minister at the time was Norman Lamb, he was well meaning and appeared genuinely to want to make a difference. He tasked two “Secretaries” from the Civil service to lead developing a policy and plan to reduce dependence on such secure hospitals (often privately run). The two were obviously Oxbridge educated and knew absolutely nothing at all about the subject. After a couple of years it became clear that they had no real intention to achieve anything at all and devoted their efforts to producing reports and events that pleased the Minister while in fact presiding over an increase in such placements nationally. They eventually produced a Green Paper for Norman Lamb that was so foolish it sank without trace in the Lords were it was “savaged”. This set of reports has all the hall marks of of the Civil Servants producing something they believe will please their Ministers by rehearsing the Ministers desires back to them. With non of it based on any reasearch, data or even previous learning. Thank goodness it was “leaked” and I suspect had this not happened, and this also occuring while the “Pakistani Grooming Gangs” had yet again got an airing . The ministers would have in fact insisted on the recommendations being adopted! On the quiet. I think the public would be amazed at how little the Civil Service uses data, research and indeed the Governments own information and data assets to formulate policy. They really do seem devoted to bending everything to produce a politically pleasing result.
Indeed. I stopped laughing at the sitcom “Yes Minister” many years ago on the same basis.
It would be awful if *all* this meant was that our good sons would be increasingly bullied and alienated in school, and treated like menaces by the woke stasi. At worst their career prospects would be unjustly limited for life, education derailed, and relationships damaged (perhaps even ‘going forwards’ as a result of the betrayal/s of trust many must feel when teachers who know them shop them to terror investigators). At best, the righteous indignation could incite some future great British reformers.
But it’s not *just* that. We’re choosing that *over* the protection of innocent lives. And when Ms. Cooper et al see a people traumatised by watching daughters drugged, raped, tortured, and murdered – they say to us “and if you want to protect your sons, you better make sure they keep their fucking mouths shut.”
Did you know that you are mentioned in the linked 2020 Hope Not Hate report? (That is, of course, an accolade).
I was, and remain, pleased with that!
I think it proves beyond all doubt just how these people have become, when they can’t even see that any alleged “misogyny” of which they accuse young boys would more likely be caused by their own attitude towards them.
If you advocate for treating half the population like 3rd class citizens, in the name of the other half, it’s not rocket science that they may end up resenting it.
Just decent ordinary law abiding people who probably never had misogynistic thought in their lives, potentially being made resentful by the very people who tell them they mustn’t be.
It takes some serious mental gymnastics to avoid seeing the madness of that.
Just as senior feminists are well aware that domestic violence is perpetuated by only funding programs to end violence against women and girls (and inflating what ‘violence’ is), so I think they understand that misogyny is inevitably increased by not caring about misandry and inflating what hatred of women actually is.
These are not accidental outcomes caused by stupid people; not at the top level. This is social engineering to achieve the breakdown of society as we know it.