Tory culture wars stoked far right, says ex-adviser

The Conservative government left the UK wide open to far-right violence erupting across parts of the country by ignoring red flags and stoking fires with a culture war agenda, a senior adviser on extremism to Tory prime ministers has said.

- Daniel Boffey

Dame Sara Khan, who was Rishi Sunak's independent adviser for social cohesion and resilience until May this year and acted as counter-extremism commissioner under both Theresa May and Boris Johnson, said the recent administrations had failed the British people.

Repeated and urgent counsel that far-right extremists were exploiting gaps in the law to foment violence on social media were ignored while top-rank politicians over a number of administrations sought to gain advantage by waging culture wars, Khan said, in a damning intervention.

"The writing was clearly on the wall for some time," Khan told the Guardian. "All my reports have shown, in a nutshell, that, firstly, these extremist and cohesion threats are worsening; secondly, that our country is woefully unprepared.

We've got a gap in our legislation which is allowing these extremists to operate with impunity.

"Previous governments have astonishingly failed to address these trends, and they've taken instead, in my view, approaches that have actually been counterproductive and just defy any logical rationale.

"They scrapped the counter extremism strategy [in 2021], including all the resources and funding for local areas across the country who are struggling with extremist activity and extremist actors. And the government, at that time, did not replace it with anything. They left local authorities struggling to deal with consistent extremist challenges in their area.