In fact, RICU has actively become biased against entirely mainstream right-wing beliefs. According to the 2023 Shawcross Review into Prevent, while its ‘products related to Islamic terrorism focus on the most serious material relating to violent Islamist ideology…much of the material covering Extreme Right-Wing falls well below the threshold’. Shawcross mentioned that he ‘saw one RICU analysis product from 2020 on Right-Wing terrorist and extremist activity online which referenced books by mainstream British conservative commentators as “key cultural nationalist ideological texts”.
The same document listed “key texts” for white nationalists as including historic works of the Western philosophic and literary canon’. Shawcross also describes RICU analysis of a ‘cohort of social media users it termed “Actively Patriotic and Proud”, listed a prominent Conservative politician and former member of the government as being among figures “associated with far-right sympathetic audiences, and Brexit”’ (who I understand to be Jacob Rees-Mogg). This then, is RICU now. An organisation which seeks to ‘counter extremist narratives’ and maintains ‘contingency communication’ materials ‘for rapid deployment after major incidents’. The methods they deploy are ‘never published’.
If you look for something hard enough you will find it. Whether it exists or not.
Worth reading the whole article. A body set up to tackle Islamic extremism, now targeting harmless patriotism, manipulating the families of victims of immigrant crime and gaslighting the public.
RICU isn’t the nudge unit. It goes far beyond nudge. The nudge unit is now the Behavioural Insights Team and is a standalone business developed from the original one which was within government. BIT has a website and will sell its services. It’s a bit creepy and a lot arrogant. But RICU is downright sinister and totalitarian.
Related to the UK nudge unit:
Southern Ireland government to start campaign against “manosphere” and “tradwives”
Never mind how much of this is a response to the pressure the establishment puts on men to think of themselves as broken women and on women not to see motherhood as being important.
But being forced to work outside the home in order to pay the salaries of the sort of slime who dream up “national strategies” (you’re the “far-right” crypto-fascist, remember) isn’t restrictive at all, oh no.
All bureaucratic bodies are easy for leftist to control – for bureaucracy is the natural environment of the leftist.
Of course the “RICU” became a leftist agitprop outfit – out to smear and undermine conservatives, and the reaction of conservatives that it should be reformed in-such-and-such-a-way shows ignorance.
Do not try and reform such bodies – get rid of them.
I am reminded of the BBC – Conservatives have been complaining of its leftist bias since at least 1963, yet in office they never abolish it.
Truly pathetic cowardice.