From novelists to political cartoonists, artists have long approached important social and political issues with unique viewpoints. Shakespearean tragedies such as King Lear and Macbeth dramatise political leadership and the lust for power. David Simon’s hit TV Show The Wire has been described as a “Greek tragedy for the new millennium,” a story about “the triumph of capitalism over human value”; and as a chronicle of “the decline of the American empire”. Likewise, Informer is more than just a crime drama; it’s a scathing critique of our Government’s anti-terror strategy.
The Show follows Detective Sergeant Gabe Waters and his partner, new recruit DC Holly Morten who, together, work with informants to foil terror plots for London’s Counter Terrorism Special Unit (CTSU). Raza Shar, played by impressive debutant Nabhaan Rizwan, is on a night out with his girlfriend when he is arrested for drug possession and subsequently blackmailed into becoming their latest informant. Set in inner-city London, Informer is a gritty thriller which addresses the terror threats facing Britain in a courageous and intelligent manner.
“I don’t know any terrorists, bruv!”
“Well you’re not that kind of informant. You go to the places I can’t.”
“What, like Ministry of Sound and Cargo? Or like mosques and pan wallahs and that?”
Spoiler alert. Raza isn’t sent to “mosques and pan wallahs” but, instead, to a poverty-stricken and drug-laden estate in East London to score from a small-time dealer by the name of Dadir Hassan (played by the excellent Roger Jean Nsengiyumva) in the hope he can gather information which may eventually lead to scuppering a future terror attack. The implication here being an obvious one: that terrorists will be found not among observant Muslims but among those engaged in criminal activity.
Informer dismisses the ‘conveyor belt’ theory of radicalisation which is at the heart of our government’s current anti-radicalisation strategy. The conveyor belt theory asserts that the more conservative a Muslim is in their beliefs, the more fundamentalist they will become, which will ultimately lead to radicalisation and then to terrorism.
Empirical evidence suggests that there is no linear, unpreventable progression from “non-violent extremism” to “violent extremism”.
In July 2010, a leaked memo prepared by officials for ministers on the cabinet’s home affairs subcommittee concluded that it was wrong “to regard radicalisation in this country as a linear ‘conveyor belt’ moving from grievance, through radicalisation, to violence … This thesis seems to both misread the radicalisation process and to give undue weight to ideological factors”.
Then there is the 2008 study by MI5’s behavioural science unit. It emphasised that the several hundred terrorists it analysed “had taken strikingly different journeys to violent extremist activity”; few had followed “a typical pathway to violent extremism”.
Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer, agrees that the “conveyor belt” theory is flawed. In his 2008 book Leaderless Jihad, based on an analysis of more than 500 terrorist biographies, he argues that radicalisation shows no such linear progression, and that “one cannot simply draw a line, put markers on it, and gauge where people are along this path to see whether they are close to committing atrocities”.
Nevertheless, the Home Office vouches for the ‘conveyor belt’ theory of radicalisation, and it forms the basis of the government’s flagship counter-terrorism policy Prevent.
One of the most interesting characters in the show is Akash Williams played by Kaine Zajaz. A young, frustrated juvenile radicalised by the internet and the product of a broken family and a failed social care system. Akash’s character demonstrates how Britain’s homegrown religious extremism threat is rooted more in various social factors like poverty and not in ideological factors per se. And poverty, wrote Aristotle, “is the parent of crime.”
“Prevent? The only thing it has prevented is our internet access!” – Akash’s incredulous career-grandparents disclosing how the Government’s Prevent Officers had blocked their internet access due to Akash’s suspicious online activity.
Informer also draws interesting parallels between religious extremists on the one hand and right-wing extremists on the other. Through its exploration of Detective Sergeant Gabe’s past as an undercover officer investigating hate crimes perpetrated by the far right, Informer portrays the threat from radical right wing extremism as very real and deeply rooted in white supremacist ideology. This is, of course, a view backed by experts.
The former head of the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism unit, Mark Rowley, warned that the UK has not “woken up” to the threat posed by the far right. He recently urged politicians, the media and communities not to underestimate the threat of far-right groups, citing how National Action, a proscribed neo-Nazi organisation, has “a strategy for a terrorist group” with online materials advising on how to sow tension and discord in communities and evade police surveillance.
The far right are becoming increasingly radicalised by white supremacist ideology and this is a worrying trend right across America, Western Europe and the UK. “For the first time since the second world war we have a domestic terrorist group, it’s rightwing, it’s neo-Nazi, it’s proudly white supremacist, portraying a violent and wicked ideology,” Rowley told BBC Newsnight.
An analysis of social media content has found right-wing extremists and Islamists share fundamental similarities. The racism of the far-right and religious beliefs of the Islamists result in similar viewpoints. Between 2013 and 2017, researchers from the Jena Institute and the London Institute for Strategic Dialogue examined more than 10,000 pieces of Islamist and right-wing extremist Facebook content, as well as more than 1 million German Twitter contributions. The analysis of the social media content found the mobilization and radicalization strategies of the two groups were similar, but anti-Muslim contributions by comparison were “more radical and more widespread.”
BBC Dramas have recently been used as a tool to shed light on various political and societal ills; from the depiction of British politics in Bodyguard to the depiction of the police as internally corrupt in Line of Duty (widely judged to be a convincing picture of the modern force).
Art and literature have thus long been a forum for expressing opinions about the state of politics and society and Informer brings a refreshing perspective to the discussion surrounding counter-extremism.
Syed Aun Mohammed 