The UK Government’s Propaganda Department
What is RICU, and how was it ideologically captured by Muslim activists?
In August 2024, riots erupted in Labour constituencies following the murder of three children, and maiming of ten more, by Rwandan terrorist Axel Rudabukana in Southport. The new Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, then instructed civil servants to conduct a “Rapid Analytical Sprint” to rewrite policies on extremism. She gave the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), the parent-body of counter-extremism programme Prevent, this task. Both myself and GB News’ Steven Edginton reported on initial leaks from this document in November last year. The paper warned that “right-wing extremist narratives (particularly around immigration and policing) are in some cases ‘leaking’ into mainstream debates”. Among these narratives were “anti-communism”, “Cultural Nationalism”, and believing that “Western culture is under threat from mass migration”. The rape gangs, which continue to ruin the childhoods of thousands of girls in fifty towns and cities in the UK, were dismissed as a “grievance narrative” invented by “right-wing extremists”: