This country still has a problem with a radical ideology. News that the government’s anti-radicalisation programme, Prevent, now classifies concerns about mass migration, or ‘cultural nationalism’, as a potential ‘terrorist ideology’ reveals the magnitude of this problem. And the problem in question is hyper-liberalism, a radical ideology that remains endemic in Prevent and elsewhere in the arms of the state.

Far from dying out, this ideology, otherwise known as wokery or radical progressivism, has become normalised and embedded, especially in areas of government. The ideology has literally graduated from the academy and into the state sector.

Charges of racism are never far behind

According to the reports, an online training course hosted on the government’s website for Prevent identifies ‘cultural nationalism’ as one belief that could trigger someone being referred to the deradicalisation scheme. This term encompasses a conviction that ‘Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups’.

Critics of this wording have pointed out that such a sweeping definition, covering an arc of perfectly respectable opinions, could lead even Sir Keir Starmer and Robert Jenrick, the shadow home secretary, to be theoretically included in such an ‘extremist’ category, on account of their recent comments. Yet this is not the first time Prevent has widened its definition of ‘extremism’ to alarming levels of risibility.

In February, Michael Portillo told GB News viewers how back in 2023 his BBC television series, Great British Railway Journeys, was singled out by Prevent for being capable of ‘encouraging far-right sympathies’ (other programmes also named by Prevent included House of Cards, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Yes, Minister). Portillo’s disclosure came the same week a leaked internal Home Office review on extremism suggested that claims of ‘two-tier policing’ were a ‘right-wing extremist narrative’.

Radical progressivism remains endemic – or ‘systemic’, as its purveyors might say – in the halls of power and in the apparatus of the state. The language used by Prevent merely mirrors the real-life actions by the police and the judiciary of late. Last month The Sunday Telegraph uncovered the case of the wrongful arrest of a Kent pensioner for a supposedly anti-Semitic remark on Twitter. This week a man was given a criminal sentence for burning the Quran.

What unites all these instances is a suspicion the British state now has for free speech and freedom of conscience. In the field of counter-terrorism it used to be the norm for agencies to monitor high-risk people with dangerous intent – as is still the remit of M15 – rather than keep an eye on those with awkward opinions. But this has changed.

In this we see an obvious influence of hyper-liberalism and one of its key tenets: the idea that words are dangerous and must be policed – in our case today, literally. This is why woke activists have for years harped on about ‘offensive’ words, ‘microaggressions’ and even obsessed in a seemingly trivial way about pronouns. Hyper-liberals believe words can cause damage, especially when employed by those not sufficiently educated to use them.

That invariably entails supervising the language of ordinary people with unfashionable viewpoints. That’s why targets tend to be pensioners with ‘Brexity opinions’, or unsophisticated white people who aren’t overly keen on the state of Britain after decades of state multiculturalism and recent accelerated rates of immigration. The over-educated classes who sneered at the hoi polloi for not understanding their jargon are the same overclass who deride them now for their ‘cultural nationalism’.

Charges of racism are never far behind, levelled at those who might speak the language of ‘indigenous’ Britons or a ‘native’ culture. But assuming there is a reflexive love of this country’s past among cultural nationalists, there is indisputably a corresponding and eternal mentality among members of the British intelligentsia: a knee-jerk embarrassment and hatred of their own country, often accompanied by an indulgent attitude towards cultures of the exotic or the ‘other’. Romantic primitivism goes back to Rousseau, but it became endemic in academia in the 1960s, reaching epidemic proportions in the 1990s, and thenceforth seeping out into the real world.

It is a motor of top-down politics today. Asymmetrical multiculturalism informs Prevent’s lopsided approach to terrorism, one that overplays the threat posed by the far right and underplays the one posed by Islamists. It was behind the ‘double standard’ that the damning Shawcross Review on Prevent spoked of in 2023, with the programme’s ‘expansive’ definition of right-wing extremism that included ‘mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, right-wing leaning commentary that have no meaningful connection to terrorism or radicalisation’.

Little has changed in the intervening two years. That’s because ingrained attitudes can’t be altered by legislation. Culture cannot be changed by fiat. But understanding the mentality of those who issue diktats of their own is a good place to start.