If you look at the way the U.K. government has tackled this problem, it has made some mistakes. Post-2005 and the terrorist attacks in London, we developed a strategy that was called preventing violent extremism.
The governments at the time decided they would initially centralize and provide in the region of £80 million to £90 million and then focus that money locally through local councils and local governments to try to get people to work locally, and to empower a number of organizations to do the research locally and on a national level as well.
In 2010 when the last coalition government was formed, there was a review of that strategy, and it had changed from “preventing violent extremism” to “prevent”. That was to undertake a global, holistic approach to the way we tackle this problem, de-radicalize not just the violent side, when it becomes much more difficult to try to de-radicalize somebody, but to try to prevent somebody from becoming radicalized.
Unfortunately in 2010 and 2011, following a global economic crisis, the British coalition government decided to considerably cut the amount of funds they were going to provide in this area, all the way down from £80 million or £90 million a year to £1.7 million last year. That was a significant decrease, and many organizations had their funding cut.
Many organizations were in desperate need and looked for alterative ways of surviving. Some of the organizations went to countries in the Middle East and then eventually ended up buying into their philosophy and so actually became part of the problem and not necessarily part of the solution.
One thing we've had recently, since the development of ISIL and the foreign fighters who are going down to join ISIL and al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria, is the re-emergence of the belief that governments need to do more. Just before Parliament was dissolved, we had an instruction by our Home Secretary to increase the amount of funding and to increase the size of the “prevent” bureaucracy.
Herein still lies the mistake. They're still trying to increase the bureaucracy and keep everything in-house rather than going out to the community, and that is a serious mistake.