No plans to expand definition of extremism - minister

There are no plans to expand the definition of extremism, Home Office minister Dan Jarvis has said, following reports it could be broadened to cover potentially violent environmentalists and misogynists.

He said Islamist extremism followed by far right extremism were the biggest threats but added that the Southport attack did show a need for "action on those drawn towards mixed ideologies and violence-obsessed young people".

It comes after parts of a Home Office-ordered report were leaked to the right-leaning Policy Exchange think tank, which criticised proposals to look at behaviour over ideology.

Jarvis said the report was "not current or new policy".

Asked about the report earlier, Sir Keir Starmer said the government was "looking carefully" at how to approach the issue.

"It's very important that we are focused on the threats so we can deploy our resources properly and therefore we're looking carefully where the key challenges are."

The prime minister said there was the "additional challenge" in the aftermath of the Southport attack of "a cohort of loners who are extreme and they need to be factored in".

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper commissioned Home Office officials to conduct a rapid review of the UK's approach upon entering office and the work was sped up in the wake of the murder of three young girls in Southport and the subsequent riots across the UK.

The review was tasked with shaping a new counter-extremism strategy, addressing online and offline threats from Islamist and the far-right alongside a broader spectrum of extremism.

The government's current definition of extremism is the promotion of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance that aims to destroy the rights and freedoms of others or undermine liberal parliamentary democracy.

Leaked sections of the report, published by Policy Exchange, recommend the government's counter-extremism strategy shift focus to "behaviours of concern" rather than "ideologies".

Behaviours of concern include violence against women, spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories, fascination with gore or involvement in the online subculture called the "manosphere" - which promotes misogyny and opposition to feminism.

The think tank has not made public the leaked version of the Home Office report, but published its own assessment which quoted extensively from the document.

The BBC has not seen a full copy of the report.

Currently counter-extremist officers focus most of their efforts tackling Islamism and right-wing extremism - the two most dominant threats to the UK.

MI5 Director Ken McCallum said in October that UK counter-terror, external efforts deal 75% with Islamist threats and 25% with far-right extremists.

The report urges expanding extremism's definition to cover, alongside Islamists and extreme right-wing:

Speaking in the Commons, Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp said counter-terrorism policing should focus on "those with extremist ideologies and not risk diluting attention with these much wider issues".

In response, Jarvis said: "His remarks refer to a leaked report, which, as I could not have been clearer about, does not and will not represent government policy."

Privately, government sources have strongly criticised the report and said certain elements of it were shocking, despite it having been conducted by the Home Office's own officials.

However, the government will need to work out a way to deal with violent individuals and ideologies.

In response to the sentencing of Southport killer Axel Rudakubana last week, the prime minister said terrorism "has changed" in Britain and a review would be carried out into "our entire counter-extremist system".

While in the past he said "the predominant threat was highly organised groups with clear political intent", alongside that there were now also "acts of extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom".

Rudakubana was referred to the Prevent anti-terrorism programme three times but the referrals were closed due to his apparent lack of a clear ideology.

Some people responded to the leaked report by arguing that the activity it identified was already covered by the government's definition of extremism.

Lord Walney, the government's independent adviser on political violence, said what the report had in effect proposed was not a call to widen the definition but to "deprioritise" the "vital focus on Islamist and far-right ideological drivers".

Others are questioning the implications of the home secretary publicly disowning the work of her officials.

One senior source said the situation was now "a mess" and criticised Cooper for asking internal officials to conduct the review in the first place, rather than commissioning external experts.

Government sources insisted they still had confidence in the work of their officials on extremism, despite rejecting their report.

It is unclear when precisely ministers decided to reject the report.

Asked by the BBC on Thursday about the status of the "sprint" report, a Home Office spokesperson said that it had "concluded", but the government was "continu[ing] to refine recommendations from our learnings".

Separate from the report, the government has commissioned a public inquiry, not only to look at what went wrong in how public bodies like the police, Prevent and the NHS handled Rudakubana, but also to look at the wider problems of youth violence and extremism.

In the meantime, the Home Office is conducting a review of how Prevent interacts with other agencies like the NHS and the police when somebody is not seen as suitable for Prevent, but clearly has neurodivergence or mental health difficulties and poses a risk of violent behaviour.

On Sunday the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper wrote in The Times that there is "a serious problem when cases don't pass the Prevent threshold but still need urgent action and instead just go into a void".

The government seems to be moving towards a plan that leaves the existing terrorism and extremism structures largely intact, but bolsters how public bodies handle people who have no clear ideology but pose a risk of serious violence due to obsessions with things such as school massacres.

A pilot scheme will launch next month.

Danny Shaw, a former adviser to Cooper, told the BBC's Today programme he had seen a summary of the report and backed one of the recommendations which said "the counter-extremism function should take an approach based on behaviours that cause harm rather than one based on definition".

"That approach was not taken in the case of Axel Rudakubana because he didn't fit a definition that meant he could have intervention by Prevent so he was transferred away and passed from one agency to another," he added.

Appearing on the same programme, Nick Aldworth, a former detective chief superintendent in counter terrorism, expressed concern about police resources, adding: "If you have a definition or legislation that can't easily be policed it is probably not worth doing."

The Policy Exchange authors, who released the Home Office findings, said the review "runs in the wrong direction".

Former journalist and government advisor Andrew Gilligan and Paul Stott, the head of security and extremism at Policy Exchange, said: "The purpose of counter-extremism and counter-terrorism is to defend the security of the country, its democratic values and institutions against those whose beliefs and acts intentionally threaten them.

"Such threats come overwhelmingly from those with an ideological or political motive, principally Islamism but also far-right and other forms of extremism."

The report's recommendations "risk swamping already stretched" security services, while redefining extremism "threatens free speech," the authors said.

Additional reporting by Home Affairs Correspondent Daniel Sandford and Sam Francis