The British media traditionally refers to the month of August as ‘silly season’, but apart from the blanket coverage of the sad fate of Cecil the lion, this silly season has been notable for being remarkably un-silly. Received wisdom has it that with Parliament away there are no political stories for the media to report […]
The Henry Jackson Society (HJS) heard from Lloyd Randle, Former Prevent Engagement Officer, Hampshire Constabulary, Dr Usama Hasan, Senior Researcher at the Quilliam Foundation, and Rupert Sutton, Director of Student Rights at The Henry Jackson Society. The speakers discussed the findings of the recent Student Rights report ‘Preventing Prevent: Challenges to Counter-Radicalisation Policy On-Campus’, on-the-ground […]
Tom Wilson, Resident Associate Fellow at the Centre for the New Middle East, writing in The Journal for International Security Affairs, outlines the key geopolitical challenges facing Israel. In a region convulsed by the turmoil of civil wars, revolutions, and insurgencies, Israel stands out as an island of relative stability, one that has successfully weathered […]
One sign that people are bereft of policy-proposals is when, in the face of a huge political challenge, they focus on their opponents’ language. Perhaps it is a symptom of the fact that we are sliding into ‘silly season’ in the UK, but the reporting of the migrant crisis has reached a nadir of silliness. At […]
Yesterday, The Henry Jackson Society (HJS) welcomed Prime Minister David Cameron’s bold speech outlining the government’s five-year plan for tackling extremism. Principles central to the Prime Minister’s vision closely resemble the ideas and policy recommendations consistently put forward in HJS work, while many of the manifestations of extremism referred to by Mr Cameron have been […]
Over the years that the P5+1 negotiations with Iran were going on, the US government often attempted to quell the concerns of its citizens by claiming that it recognised that no deal was better than a bad deal. This week they went back on that logic, signing up to a bad deal. Britain, of course, […]
A new report reveals the extent of extremism on UK university campuses. Across British universities, the government’s counter-radicalisation strategy, Prevent, is being prevented from functioning effectively due to widespread student opposition, reveals Preventing Prevent? Challenges to Counter-Radicalisation Policy On Campus. This is in part influenced by the narrative of extremist groups targeted by the policy, […]
As the latest deadline in the international negotiations with Iran expires today, millions of Iranians are on the streets. They are not marching because of the talks, nor are they marching because it is the last Friday of Ramadan. They are marching because this latest ‘final’ day of negotiations is also ‘Al-Quds Day’ and thus […]
So this is the house that Edward Snowden built. The introduction of the Freedom Act last week has now reined in the NSA’s powers, particularly regarding the collection of telephony metadata. As part of this, phone records are now in the hands of private companies, rather than the state. This puts the US in the […]
This week the UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon mooted the idea of bombing Islamic State (IS) targets inside Syria as well as Iraq. The suggestion came after the massacre of 30 British tourists on a beach in Tunisia. The British government is said to be waiting for final confirmation that there was a link between […]
The borders of Europe are coming under severe strain. As we predicted here earlier this year, the migrant ‘crisis’ is no such thing. It is, rather, an ongoing situation of continent-wide turbulence with no foreseeable end. European ministers this week met to discuss the situation, but even they will find themselves unable to solve the […]
Conspiracy theory is one of the most curious phenomena of the modern world. Everybody has access to so much myth-busting information that you wonder why anybody thinks some of the things which may have been more excusable in less information-drenched times. And yet the vast and overwhelming amount of information now available for people to access […]
A political row is once again brewing over data and privacy. This week David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation published his report into the future of surveillance legislation. In it he accepted that our intelligence agencies need to carry on being able to access data in bulk and he remained open to […]
Some scripts are so perfect and so perfectly predictable that they write themselves. One such example cropped up this week. Of course the National Union of Students (NUS) in the UK can be relied upon to be predictable, if nothing else. Far from representing students, the organisation some time ago fell back onto only representing […]
More words have been spilled about the Snowden affair than almost any other story of recent years. The fall-out may disappear from the daily papers for weeks at a time, but on the internet in particular debates on ‘government spying’ and the leaking of government secrets, it has probably exceeded any other story of our […]