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”.