TODAY’s Briefing

KEY TAKEAWAYS...

● Prevent referrals reached a record 10,293, but more than half involved no identified ideology.

● Forty-nine asylum seekers removed to France have been recorded returning to Britain.

● France has ordered the expulsion of former RT France chief Xenia Fedorova over alleged disinformation activity.

● Ceuta’s mass crossing exposed both Europe’s reliance on Morocco and the dangers of unsupported conspiracy claims.

T oday’s stories share a common problem: governments are acting under intense pressure while headline numbers risk obscuring what their policies are actually achieving.

Prevent referrals reach highest level on record

▫ WHAT HAPPENED:

A record 10,293 referrals were made to Prevent, the UK programme intended to identify people vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism, in England and Wales in the year to September 2025. That was 39% higher than the previous year and involved 9,957 individuals. Extreme rightwing concerns accounted for 2,103 referrals, up 42%, while 860 concerned Islamist extremism. Crucially, 56% involved no identified ideology.

Children aged 11 to 15 were the largest known age group, accounting for 3,655 referrals. The figures also show that 18% of referred people had autism recorded on their Prevent file, prompting Rights & Security International to question whether autistic people are being drawn disproportionately into a counter-terrorism system.

▫ WHAT IT MEANS:

The record total should not be read simply as a count of extremists. More than half of referrals lacked an identified ideology, and counter-terrorism officials have warned that Prevent was designed principally to deal with radicalisation, not every form of violent fixation or mental-health-related risk. The policy problem is therefore becoming one of triage as well as counter-extremism: directing genuine terrorism risks into Prevent without allowing a rapidly expanding caseload to consume resources needed for the most dangerous cases.

▫ WHO BENEFITS IF YOU MISUNDERSTAND IT:

• Extremist propagandists and far-right politicians seeking simple narratives benefit if the 10,293 referrals are presented as 10,293 confirmed extremists. That interpretation erases the fact that most cases had no identified ideology and risks making Britain’s threat picture appear simpler than counter-terrorism officials themselves say it is. Equally, dismissing the rise altogether would obscure the significant increase in extreme rightwing referrals.