Twenty years on: Responses to Islamist terrorism in the UK since 7/7
3 July 2025
July 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings. This is the second part of a series tracing the last 20 years of Islamist terrorism in the UK, with this article focusing on the impact of responses to the threat. The first article, ’Twenty years on: Assessing the UK Islamist terrorism landscape since 7/7’, lays out evolutions to the Islamist terrorist threat.
Catalysed by the shock of the 7/7 attacks, the UK’s counter-terrorism approach was shaped by the early 2000s threat environment, with a focus on formalised Islamist terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. Two decades later, the apparatus is under strain from enormous caseloads and has struggled to adapt to a very different set of threats.
This article analyses the UK’s policy responses to Islamist extremism over the past two decades, examining how they have evolved alongside a shifting threat landscape, as well as how they have redefined the relationship between Muslim communities and the state. It also explores the development of interventions and counter-narratives, and considers the need for a comprehensive, rights-based strategy that addresses the specific threats we face 20 years after 7/7.
The evolving UK counter-terrorism policy landscape
Announced as part of the 2003 counter-terrorism strategy (CONTEST), the development of the Prevent counter-radicalisation policy began in earnest in August 2005, a month after the 7/7 bombings. The Preventing Extremism Together Working Group sought to engage Muslim communities across the country, with a Prevent Strategy relaunched in 2006. Its premise was simple: identifying those committed to a terrorist ideology, reducing their likelihood of violence and diminishing their ideological attachment.
Prevent was police-led, attracting accusations of an intelligence-gathering operation and cementing a sense of the securitisation of Muslim communities. This perception has persisted, even as Prevent’s casework is now dominated by extreme right-wing and non-ideological referrals rather than Islamist extremist cases.
The core aim of Prevent to stop people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism technically has remained, but its remit and delivery has evolved considerably over the past 20 years. A 2011 review broadened its attention to a resurgent far right. It also bolted on a focus on non-violent extremism, aiming to reduce permissive environments that could serve as a recruiting pool for potential terrorists. The 2011 review further restructured the delivery of Prevent: this included the introduction of multi-disciplinary panels from social care and other frontline services to offer tailored support for individuals susceptible to radicalisation. A 2015 update incorporated a controversial statutory duty mandating public sector workers (including teachers and healthcare professionals) to safeguard individuals from radicalisation and prevent them from becoming terrorists.
Reflecting a broader shift towards a ‘public health approach’ to prevention—seen in other contexts such as the Netherlands and the Nordics)—Prevent has, over the past decade, increasingly framed its work in terms of a safeguarding effort. This reflects the understanding that terrorist ideology thrives when individuals are disillusioned, marginalised, and suffer other underlying susceptibilities and unmet needs. By moving away from a narrow focus on terrorist ‘ideology’, Prevent has been able to become somewhat adaptable to an increasingly hybridised threat environment marked by the growth of more amorphous, decentralised groups and non-ideological violence.
Islamist extremist groups such as the Islamic State (IS) blended ideology with a sense of dispossession. However, the largest cohort of Prevent’s casework represents a complex mix of grievances and violence intensified by highly interconnected online extremist communities. Ideology is secondary to broader violent ideation for many individuals in the system, while poor mental health will be present in many cases. This has underpinned surging referral numbers: from a handful in 2006, Prevent now receives more than 6,000 per year.
Twenty years after 7/7, Prevent faces a dilemma as increasing referral numbers call into question its capacity to cope. With counter-terrorism budgets threatened by cuts and public health resources under pressure, one suggested avenue has been to reduce the caseload to focus narrowly on ideological threats, as per its original mission. The most recent Prevent review (in 2023) argued for a renewed focus on ideology and for Prevent to return to its core mission as a pure counter-terrorism programme, but served to downplay the growing threat of the far-right in an attempt to go ‘back to basics’ with a focus on Islamist extremism. ISD has argued that such an emphasis risks downplaying other rising threats and creating the counter-productive perception of a hierarchy of extremism.
Meanwhile, the sheer weight of the non-terrorist caseload risks allowing an ever-increasing number of at-risk individuals to fall through the cracks, leaving hundreds of (mostly young) people with complex needs unaddressed by other systems. In the context of cases such as Axel Rudakubana, who evaded Prevent referrals because of his lack of a clear ideology, ISD has argued for a parallel model to CONTEST. This model would be rooted in broader violence prevention approaches that go beyond a sole focus on ideological threats, aiming to address the evolving challenges faced today.
Challenges and learnings for counter-extremism interventions
Following 7/7, counter-terrorism responses focused heavily on ‘engagement with at-risk communities’, and rolling out targeted interventions aimed at preventing individuals from progressing along pathways of violent radicalisation. In this context, strategic communication responses increasingly sought to disrupt and dislodge Islamist messaging. The targets of these interventions were often young Muslim men, leading to perceptions of securitisation and distrust.
In this post 7/7 context, engagement between the UK government and Muslim communities was increasingly instrumentalised for securitised ends, with a growing gulf between government and wider Muslim civil society. The suspicion placed upon Muslim communities became normalised: mainstream Muslims often bore the brunt of essentialised public perceptions of their community, amplified by hostile media portrayals and politicians. Positive social cohesion and integration programming was increasingly framed as a means to a counter-extremism end, bolstering the sense of securitisation which Muslim communities experienced. Antipathy towards migrant and Muslim people in the UK has grown in the last two decades, becoming particularly pronounced during events such as Brexit and the heightened levels of asylum and immigration prompted by the Syrian civil war. In turn, this has fed into the very victimisation narratives that fuelled Islamist extremism.
Around the 10-year mark after 7/7, as the IS group ramped up its media campaign to lure Muslims to travel to Syria and Iraq, messaging to disrupt the spread of Islamist ideas became an increasingly ubiquitous element of counter-terrorism responses. Governments thought that by tackling the arguments of Islamism, they could dissuade potential terrorists, including by working with credible community figures. This was tested with the 2014 AbdullahX campaign using animated videos and responses to YouTube search queries to reach intended audiences, eliciting a response from the IS group itself. In practice however, such approaches proved difficult to replicate and scale. Government-led counter-messaging was anaemic, poorly targeted and not credible. A stark example of this was the failure of the US State Department’s “Think Again, Turn Away” campaign, ridiculed for its clumsy contestation of IS ideologues online, leading to trolling campaigns which only amplified extremism.
It became clear that successful counter-messaging campaigns require credible messengers, surgical targeting and recognition of the legitimate grievances which sometimes lay the foundations for extremism. However, even this is not necessarily sufficient: despite greater credibility, many programmes have been hampered by ideological disagreements and tainted by government associations and funding streams. Examples of more successful efforts delivered by British Muslim communities include the Radical Middle Way, Not Another Brother, and the Jan Trust.
The initiatives that have had the most success are those which sought to empower Muslim communities, creating opportunities and shifting perceptions. For example, the increasing participation of Muslims in political, business, journalism, arts and culture spaces has helped build bridges and celebrate inter-cultural exchange. Public figures including Olympian Mo Farah, chef Nadiya Hussein, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, journalist Mishal Husain, politician Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, and actor Riz Ahmed merged personal stories with their professional success, helping change perceptions about Muslims’ contributions to culturally enriching British society.
The fraught endeavour of counter-extremism over the past 20 years has shown that effective prevention and intervention require doing much more to build trust with communities and deliver on their needs. This requires targeted local support to communities around safety and security (such as protection from hate crime), as well as responding to legitimate concerns regarding extremist mobilisation (whether far right, Islamist or other). The recently announced UK government initiative to invest millions of pounds in a multi-year, civil society driven Combatting Hatred Against Muslims Fund is an important step forward. Collaborative efforts are needed build outcomes that are genuinely productive, with communities needing to feel they are benefiting from interventions and that their problems are being addressed.
Looking ahead: The future of counter-terrorism policy
As the terrorist threat picture continues to evolve, policies must address both persistent ideology-based threats such as Islamist extremism and the rise of ideologically hybridised forms of extremism, along with the growing phenomenon of extremism-adjacent but ultimately non-ideological mass violence. A clear and notorious example of the latter in the UK was the stabbing attack in Southport in July 2024, which catalysed anti-migrant riots.
There has been a robust debate among academic and policymaking circles in the past few years on the prevailing centrality of ideology in extremism. Ultimately, each individual is mobilised towards violence by their own mix of grievance, ideology and social vulnerabilities: there is therefore no single approach to tackling extremist violence. As such, a more holistic prevention infrastructure is required, which is able to respond to the increasingly thin line between ideological and non-ideological based violent threats.
A holistic strategy must balance the vital security measures needed to stop attacks with a broader framework of prevention that addresses the root causes of extremism, including strategic efforts to strengthen community cohesion, societal resilience and digital literacy. Narrow efforts that focus solely on the ‘sharp tip’ of terrorism fail to address the broader harms of mainstreamed extremism (including Islamist extremism) on communities. Extremism needs to ultimately be understood as a human rights issue, and addressing the harmful impact of extremist activity requires providing legal and victim support to those targeted not just by violence but by intimidation, dehumanisation and the undermining of rights by extremists.
Domestic, community-rooted approaches must also recognise the deep linkages between extremism and the geopolitical arena. Foreign policy is often cited as a primary grievance by extremists to mobilise action, while partnerships with authoritarian governments—in the name of tackling violent extremism—have led to failures to challenge the silencing of dissent and the undermining of human rights. We are also seeing an increasingly close relationship between Islamist extremism and hostile state-linked threats, with Iran and its proxies in particular blending information operations, violent extremism and threats to critical infrastructure in the UK. Recent announcements of new laws to allow the government to ban state-based groups behind violent plots (such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), speak to a previously recognised need for a parallel CONTEST for state threats.
With the average age of perpetrators decreasing, approaches must combine violence prevention with a serious programme of upstream prevention that engages meaningfully with young people. Adapting a post-9/11 counter-terrorism apparatus aimed at adults to a dramatically different (online) threat landscape has left vulnerable children wrestling with a harshly punitive system. Younger profiles demand safeguarding approaches accounting for additional vulnerabilities associated with young people and a recognition of their dual victim-perpetrator role.
Finally, with the intrinsic interconnectivity of the offline and online threat landscapes, traditional counter-terrorism approaches must be effectively integrated with emerging social media regulatory structures. The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), in codes of practice set out in December 2024, compels platforms to protect users from illegal content–including terrorist content. It also requires them to reduce the risk of the spread of this content on their services. ISD research has shown dozens of teenagers engaging in unofficial online IS support communities, including using generative AI to produce content. In such a rapidly evolving threat environment, regulation must be sufficiently agile to mandate platforms to take proactive action and protect users from emerging threats (beyond just mandating the takedown of official propaganda material from proscribed groups).
It is impossible to know what form Islamist extremism will take in two decades time. However, looking back on counter-extremism policy responses in the 20 years since the 7/7 attack, there are many lessons to be learned from which policies have worked, which have been ineffective, and which have proved counter-productive. Regardless of how the challenge evolves, what is certain is that an effective prevention infrastructure must be ideologically agnostic, adaptable to a shifting threat environment, and grounded in the protection of human rights.
The first article in this series, ‘Twenty years on: Assessing the UK Islamist terrorism landscape since 7/7‘, lays out evolutions to the Islamist terrorist threat.
