Extremely Confused: The Government’s New Counter-Extremism Review Revealed
By Andrew Gilligan and Dr Paul Stott (Policy Exchange, 2025)

Britain is already a sinister police state, and under the Starmer Government, it is set to become still more a police state. Extremely Confused, a Policy Exchange report, exposes the Government’s latest scheme to expand the definition of “extremism” to include not just genuine threats to national security, but also much of ordinary political opinion. The most chilling revelation? The proposal to classify claims of two-tier policing—the entirely factual observation that the British state treats similar crimes differently based on the identities of the perpetrators and victims—as a “right-wing extremist narrative.” In other words, noticing reality will soon be labelled extremism.

It is rare to see a government so openly committed to its own people’s subjugation, but here we are. The Starmer Government has decided that suppressing dissent is more important than dealing with real security threats. Instead of focusing on Islamism—the clear and overwhelming source of terrorist violence in Britain—the Government is trying to equate “extremism” with “conspiracy theories,” “misogyny,” and “online subcultures” like the “manosphere.” Meanwhile, the ruling class continues its policy of replacing the British people in their own country, and now it wants to criminalise any opposition to this.

The Home Office’s “Rapid Analytical Sprint”

The Home Office’s counter-extremism review, leaked in this report, reveals a plan to go after vague “behaviours.” These include:

• “Spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories”
• “Violence against women and girls”
• “Extreme misogyny”
• “Fixation on gore and violence”
• “Involvement in an online subculture called the manosphere”

None of these, with the possible exception of actual incitement to violence, belongs in a counter-extremism policy. Even the authors of the government’s own report admit that many people who engage in these behaviours “are not extremists.” But the expansion of the definition serves a purpose: it allows the Government to criminalise almost anything it dislikes. If you question official narratives on crime, migration, or public health, you are a conspiracy theorist. If you criticise feminism, you are a misogynist extremist. If you suggest the police enforce the law unevenly, you are a right-wing radical.

The Reality of Two-Tier Policing

The claim that complaints about two-tier policing are extremist is particularly revealing. It is fair comment that the British State treats similar crimes differently based on who commits them. The grooming gang scandals—which the government spent decades ignoring—were a clear case of the police refusing to act because the perpetrators were overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim men and the victims were white working-class girls. More recently, the government and media response to the Southport murders was characterised by deliberate obfuscation, while dissenters were arrested and social media posts were censored. Meanwhile, when a white man commits a violent crime, the government and press are eager to highlight his race and political views, even if they are irrelevant.

At every level, the British state enforces a system of selective prosecution. Disorder by favoured groups—mass pro-Palestinian demonstrations, climate protests, migrant riots—is tolerated, even encouraged. But working-class Britons expressing their frustration? That must be crushed with arrests, censorship, imprisonment, and new hate crime laws.

Labour and the Expansion of State Censorship

This new policy would only be an advance from what was already happening. The previous Conservative Government made it an easy step by failing to repeal any of the Blair and Brown-era censorship laws and pushing through the Online Safety Act—legislation that gives the Government shocking and previously unthinkable powers to police speech online. But Labour is taking things further. The review proposes:

• Reintroducing “non-crime hate incidents,” allowing the police to maintain blacklists of people who have committed no crime but have expressed the wrong opinions.
• Creating a new crime of “harmful communications,” which would criminalise speech that allegedly causes psychological harm, even if it is factually correct.
• Establishing a “national centre of excellence for the monitoring and disruption of protest,” an explicitly Orwellian proposal to crush dissent before it even begins.

All of this is to ensure that the British public cannot challenge what is being done to them. They must not be allowed to notice the replacement of their own population. They must not be allowed to complain when criminals from imported communities are given leniency while they themselves face the full weight of the law for trivial offences, or for what should not even be offences. They must not be allowed to object when their cities are handed over to hostile foreign cultures.

Britain and China: Two Different Systems of Control

As a Chinese person, I am often asked how I view political repression in Britain compared to China. The answer is simple: they are entirely different. The Chinese Government suppresses dissent against itself. It is viciously paranoid in its monitoring and suppression of comment on what happened in China between 1949 and about 1980. But that is all. It does not try to remake the Chinese people into something else. It does not seek to replace them with mass migration. It does not allow criminals from imported groups to terrorise the native population. It does not criminalise belief in Chinese national identity.

The British State, on the other hand, is engaged in something much wider. Its censorship is not about protecting the Government’s legitimacy and past record. It is about preventing the British people from resisting their own destruction. In China, people know what they cannot say, and they avoid saying it in public. Everything else is a matter of indifference to the authorities. In Britain, people have no idea what they can say. The result is that, much as in Eastern Europe before 1989, they speak of nothing else in public but sport and television celebrities. Open a political discussion in a company of British strangers, and watch their faces close like so many steel shutters on a shop.

Conclusion: The Road to Totalitarianism

The findings in Extremely Confused are clear. Britain is no longer a free country. It is an authoritarian police state run by people who openly despise the nation they rule. Under Labour, this will get worse. The government has made it clear that its primary enemies are not criminals, terrorists, or foreign threats—they are ordinary Britons who refuse to accept their dispossession.

The question is whether the British people will realise this before it is too late. If they do not, the future is clear: an ever-expanding web of censorship, mass arrests for “hate speech,” social media surveillance, and an endless erosion of their ability to protest or even speak.

Freedom in Britain is dying, not because of a foreign invasion, but because of the deliberate actions of its own ruling class. And unless the British people find a different ruling class, they will soon wake up to find they have none left at all.