‘Extending Prevent guidelines to primary and secondary schools will be counter-productive.’

PRESSURE on teachers to root out radicalism among pupils will prove ‘intolerable’, Lapido Director Dr Jenny Taylor said last night.

Home Office Prevent guidelines are being issued by the Education Department to schools and colleges today (Wednesday) which will have the force of law.

Taylor said in an interview for RT TV's news bulletin:  ‘I don’t think that we can tell who is being radicalized.  It’s perfectly obvious we cannot tell.  We are all going to become increasingly securitised, and alienated from one another.’

She said teachers would not know what they were allowed to teach or discuss because ‘it’s all such shifting ground’.

And she added that Lapido itself was being ‘inspected’ by the Charity Commission, as ‘high risk’ under anti-terrorism guidelines, simply for writing about Islam.

While sympathising greatly with the government’s need to appear to be responding to the growing problem of radicalisation, she said more law was not the answer. 

She called instead for a ‘root and branch look at what we are doing to people in this individualistic society.’

Taylor has commented elsewhere on the spiritual hunger that goes unmet in Western societies, and the sexualisation that provokes a backlash in the Muslim world. 

She said last night that ‘Laws do not make us good.  They do not make us free.’