Mahmood must take responsibility for Prevent’s blatant indoctrination programme
BRUCE NEWSOME
A VIDEO game funded by the Home Office warns children that researching mass migration is sufficient for referral to Prevent, its programme for tackling extremism.
Pathways invites 11-to-18-year-olds to make choices for a teenage character to avoid being reported for ‘extreme right-wing ideology’. You can see it here. https://www.shoutoutuk.org/game/story.html
Players begin by choosing whether ‘Charlie’ is a boy or girl. Either way, Charlie is described as ‘they’. And ‘they’ is always white. All of Charlie’s bad influences are white.
Early on, Charlie encounters a controversial video shared on a gaming platform. Options include reporting it to an adult (colour-coded green for ‘good’), sharing it, or discussing it to ‘find out more’ (both colour-coded in red for ‘bad’). The game’s message is: autonomy, thinking for yourself and discussion are bad.
Similarly, if Charlie engages videos claiming that the government is ‘betraying white British people’ by prioritising ‘Muslim men’ over homeless veterans for emergency accommodation, and that citizens must ‘take back control’, the player is warned ‘that some of the groups they were engaging in were actually illegal’.
In another scenario, players choose whether Charlie should accept being outperformed academically by a black student, attribute it to immigrants ‘stealing jobs’, or research the topic independently. Only acceptance is ‘good’.
If the player chooses for Charlie to attend a protest against ‘the changes that Britain has been through in the last few years and the erosion of British values’, the player learns that the protest was ‘more about racism and anti-immigration than British values’.
Throughout the game, the player’s progress is displayed on an ‘extremism meter’.
Moderate missteps result in a teacher referral to Prevent. There, Charlie attends workshops to learn right and wrong politics. After more ‘radical’ choices, Charlie attends private counselling against ‘ideological thoughts’. After all the wrong choices, Charlie is referred to Prevent’s Channel programme, reserved for those deemed to be not just extremists but terrorists.
Pathways was developed by Shout Out UK (SOUK).The company’s founder and CEO, Matteo Bergamini, says the game equips young people with ‘life-long tools and skills’ against extremism.
On the evidence of its own website, SOUK should have been barred from public work under statutory prohibition of partisan teaching. For years it has pushed partisanship as if it is countering extremism. The only partisanship it pushes is left-wing, the only racism is from white people. The only religions it depicts as victims are Islam and (less often) Judaism, both of which are blamed on right-wing whites. The only extremism it admits is ‘far right’. And under ‘far right’ it smears popular views and parties.
One of its videos warns that ‘cowards’ of the ‘extreme right, far right, and alt-right . . . aim . . . to spread hatred and incite violence’ from ‘behind computer screens’. The video continues: ‘They pretend science says having more melanin means being less evolved.’
A separate video says ‘raw information’ is the least reliable, while ‘journalism’ is the most reliable, because journalists are ‘accountable’. In between, you’re supposed to check with fact-checkers: the suggested list includes only left-wing fake-checkers. As I’ve reported, trolls pretend to be fact-checkers. The video is suppressing independence of thought and pushing far-left narratives.
SOUK’s justification for its one-sided content leads with the myth that right-wing extremism is dominant. SOUK’s only evidence for this is Prevent’s own reporting that more people are referred to Prevent for right-wing extremism than Islamism.
Most referrals to Prevent are officially categorised as ‘no identified ideology’, which is where the government hides Islamism. In the year to March 2024 (the most recent year for which the government reported – in November 2025!), Islamism accounts for 10 per cent of referrals, right-wingers 21 per cent.
So how to explain why about 75 per cent of MI5’s terrorism suspects and 60 per cent of our prisons’ terrorists are Islamists, while right-wing terrorism almost never happens?
In both 2023 and 2024, an independent reviewer, Sir William Shawcross, reported that Prevent is over-focused on right-wing extremism to the neglect of Islamism.
For SOUK, ‘far right’ is a low bar. SOUK’s video on the subject claims that telling you that ‘your current politicians . . . are all weak’ is a marker of far-right extremism. That’s pretty convenient for a woeful political class – and for the contractor dependent on work from that political class.
Prevent itself has fuelled this incestuous contractor-government complex. Prevent is both the source and the customer for the myth of predominant right-wing extremism.
In 2025, we learned that Prevent had listed concerns about mass migration or integration of immigrants as forms of ‘cultural nationalism’. and thence ‘extreme-right-wing activism’.
Meanwhile, for Prevent, ‘left-wing’ terrorism ‘encompasses a wide range of ideologies’, of which only one is specified: anarchism. Without any other specification, almost nobody is coded in the left-wing category.
So, in 2025, when the government categorised Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation after its supporters vandalised an RAF base, it did not categorise it as left-wing. And even though Palestine Action is blatantly ethno-centric and anti-Semitic, the only ethno-nationalism in Prevent is white supremacism.
Prevent is not balanced, fair or objective. Nor is SOUK, in this ridiculously circular relationship, where each is supplying the other with the same data and biases.
When questioning migration policy is treated as extremism, the government and its co-partisan contractors are no longer Preventing terrorism, they’re indoctrinating far-left followers.
Prevent is directly accountable to the Home Office and therefore to the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. She must take full responsibility for such poor supervision of Prevent and the indoctrination and misinformation being put out under its name. If she does not insist that this video is withdrawn and all those directly responsible for making it sacked, she should be sacked herself.
This article (Mahmood must take responsibility for Prevent’s blatant indoctrination programme) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Bruce Newsome
Leave a Reply