Home Secretary letter to Michael Gove on extremism in schools - News stories - GOV.UK
Nick Robinson had the 10 past, and outlined what had happened.
Gove and May had been at a meeting of the "Extremism Task Force" where Gove had lost the argument over whether you should wait, or not, for people to actually threaten violence before you try to de-radicalise them. The context was discussion of voluntary code of practice for "supplementary schools", which is code for after-hours Madrassas.
I think, as a free-speech advocate, that it's perfectly reasonable to say that not only should it be legal to advance unpopular ideas, but that in general arguing for violence should not be illegal. After all, plenty of vanguard parties of the hard left argue for non-democratic revolution, and they are not proscribed organisations, nor should they be. However, even if you think it should be legal to call for the execution of the Prime Minister, that doesn't make it wrong for the state to attempt to argue you out of it: there's a massive, massive gulf between the state locking people up for advancing vanguard ideas and the state putting "how democracy permits you to change the government without an AK" lessons into schools.
Whatever, it turns out that Gove believes that the Home Office has been reluctant to tackle extremism, and argued for the threshold for action being lower, while May went for the current "there has to be evidence of plausibly threatened violence" threshold. Gove apparently lost the argument. So far, I'd incline towards Gove's position as outlined: waiting until people are actually radicalised before intervening seems a high risk strategy, and even if you do manage to catch the people with AKs, you're left with a lot of people who aren't actually dangerous, but form an ecosystem within which those who are dangerous go unchallenged.
Whatever, it turns out that Gove believes that the Home Office has been reluctant to tackle extremism, and argued for the threshold for action being lower, while May went for the current "there has to be evidence of plausibly threatened violence" threshold. Gove apparently lost the argument. So far, I'd incline towards Gove's position as outlined: waiting until people are actually radicalised before intervening seems a high risk strategy, and even if you do manage to catch the people with AKs, you're left with a lot of people who aren't actually dangerous, but form an ecosystem within which those who are dangerous go unchallenged.
However, Gove then went to Cameron, having lost, and attempted to re-open the debate. May found out, was unhappy, and went nuclear. She writes:
The first question is inane: the MCB's a legal organisation, and there is absolutely no reason why someone should not be a school governor and a member of a pressure group. If you want to proscribe the MCB, say so, but retrospectively arguing that membership makes you unfit to be appointed as a governor is simply silly. But the rest is toxic, and for those that don't follow Birmingham education, the intervention of the head of Queensbridge is a massive thing, because Tim Boyes is one of the most respected heads in the area, and will have some of the primaries involved as feeders. He has cast-iron evidence that he presented the issues in 2010, which sounds about right, and that leaves the DfE in a very exposed position. It's less clear that BCC were warned in 2008, but problems at Moseley around then were common knowledge; it went into special measures for other reasons, but it seems unlikely that under the governance arrangements of the time the IEB didn't know what had been going on.
The allegations relating to schools in Birmingham raise serious questions about the quality of school governance and oversight arrangements in the maintained sector, not just the supplementary schools that would be signatories to this Code of Practice. How did it come to pass, for example, that one of the governors at Park View was the chairman of the education committee of the Muslim Council of Britain? Is it true that Birmingham City Council was warned about these allegations in 2008? Is it true that the Department for Education was warned in 2010? If so, why did nobody act?
Robinson went on with some gossip about Charles Farr, who has the counter-extremism brief in the Home Office, having had an affair with May's SPAD who's now leaking about him, which is vaguely amusing. But he appeared to completely miss the real story: the two key candidates for the Tory leadership if they lose next year, having a massive, public row which boils down accusing each other of being soft on terrorism.
"Soft on immigration" would be toxic enough, but "soft on terrorism?" I love it when the Tories tear themselves apart.