Who are the real extremists? The people challenging injustices or those trying to shut down our rights? | George Monbiot

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

69% : In 2021, the government appointed William Shawcross as its reviewer of the Prevent programme, a state anti-radicalisation project widely accused of unfairly targeting peaceful Muslims and other non-violent people.
66% : The report was widely trailed - including by Woodcock himself - as treating the non-violent campaigns Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action as if they were terrorist groups, and proposing they should be banned.
61% : Previously, he worked for the Centre for Social Cohesion, which was founded by the rightwing demagogue Douglas Murray, and was notorious for stirring up anti-Muslim paranoia.
54% : It happens that Woodcock works for lobby groups that represent both arms manufacturers and fossil fuel companies.
46% : Simcox worked at the society for a few years, then moved on to Heritage Foundation in the US, a hard-right lobby group funded by a grim assortment of billionaires and fossil fuel interests.
46% : This appears to enable him to align his work with government policy, as an "independent" commissioner never should.
39% : Look at a new report proposing horrifying clampdowns on protest - and ask where the threat to our society truly lies It's not hard to spot the extremists inflaming public passions in Britain and disrupting our lives.
30% : The new report by the government's "independent adviser on political violence" and crossbench peer, John Woodcock (Lord Walney), is bad enough: horrifying in fact.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.