We pay Prevent £50m a year to keep us safe yet they have missed seven deadly jihadists in the UK

IF you were hunting for extremists, the first place you’d search is in The Sun newsroom. Natch.

Rod Liddle’s killer wit can wipe out a nest of poseurs in three paragraphs. Douglas Murray fires lethal ideas at 1,000 words a minute. Fifth columnists are a clear and present danger to national security.

Or at least they are to the swivel-eyed “Prevent” loonies employed by the taxpayer to root out brooding young jihadists before they actually try to destroy the country they call home.

Their biggest scalp is Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who conspired to put the entire UK at risk by campaigning for Brexit. UKIP hero Nigel Farage was just too blatantly obvious to get away with it.

It is supposedly the job of Prevent, the Government’s anti-radicalisation squad, to seek out budding terrorists and de-radicalise them before they put their thoughts into action.

We pay them £50million a year to help keep us safe.

So far they have missed seven of the deadliest jihadists, even though all of them popped up on Prevent’s radar.

They include the killer of Tory MP Sir David Amess, the fanatic who stabbed three friends in a Reading park and the bomber of Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

Yet these blinkered jobs- worths have been uncannily alert to what they consider to be right-wing radicalisers or extremists — or, in Rod Liddle’s case, soggy Social Democrat extremists.

Rod, a former Labour Party member, who now occupies his time away from the keyboard campaigning for a political faction with about three supporters up North somewhere, is understandably incandescent.

For one thing, he is against almost everything the Tories stand for and the only thing that really makes him feel murderous is the woke loonies and gender warriors who infest universities, the BBC and such bureaucracies as Prevent.

Dangerously serious

Yesterday he exploded: “It’s an absolute absurdity that people who might read my columns are in danger of being radicalised. Yes, they might fall about laughing, but pick up a machete or a suicide vest, never.”

Last night Douglas Murray was too busy firing off subversive columns about free speech to comment.

In any other circumstances, this Whitehall farce could be a hilarious episode from ’Allo ’Allo! or an Inspector Clouseau movie starring Peter Sellers. But as the gentle Rees-Mogg explained, this is “dangerously serious”.

“Prevent officials were clearly so infected by wokery and metropolitan political correctness that Brexit was considered an extreme, far-right idea,” he stormed.

“According to this blinkered, misguided view, the 52 per cent of UK voters backing Brexit weren’t exercising their democratic right to regain our national sovereignty — they were entering the path to right-wing extremism.

“This is bonkers and those responsible hold democracy in contempt.”

Mr Rees-Mogg and our newspaper columnists are actually lucky they were not rounded up and detained for Soviet-style psychiatric realignment.

This is what Prevent prescribed for the few young Islamist radicals they did manage to identify. They were diagnosed as disturbed and vulnerable and sent off for mental health assessments, a burden on the NHS.

Some, like the London Bridge killer, went on to real acts of homicidal madness.

There have been right-wing terrorist attacks, including at North London’s Finsbury Park Mosque in 2017.

But MI5 is clear Islamist terrorism remains the main threat, accounting for 75 per cent of their caseload. Yet only 16 per cent of Prevent referrals in 2021/22 were Islamist.

Last week’s Shawcross Report into Islamist extremism and Prevent’s role in preventing it was scathing.

It denounces the focus on right-wing threats from the Liddle Faction and Doug’s Army, as “out of kilter” and driven by the fear of being accused of racism and Islamophobia.

Furtive extremism

This has alarming echoes of the Rotherham police response to evidence of rape and kidnap of under-age white girls by men of mainly Pakistani origin.

It is also an indictment of Tony Blair’s hastily cobbled-together “hate crime” laws in the wake of mass immigration.

Perhaps with the best intentions, it created a culture of furtive extremism among young men regarded as “untouchable” until after they had committed hideous atrocities against innocent men, women and children. By which time their terrorist acts were too late to prevent.

We do ourselves — and all law-abiding Muslims — no good whatsoever by ignoring the evidence of our eyes.

And we insult everyone else by smearing as “racists and fascists” all those who disagree.