This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
“We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector and we depend on them to make our country work. We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility.”
If a member of your family had been left comatose after a Sudanese migrant attempted to behead them, is this how you’d respond? Can you imagine your own tone being so conciliatory — or your own words tacking so closely to the establishment view on migration?
Apparently, this is how the family of Stephen Ogilvie expressed themselves, after watching his attempted beheading on the streets of Belfast. The Ogilvie family’s statement is eerily similar to those issued by the family members of other victims, in cases which might be termed politically sensitive.
After Vickrum Digwa was convicted for the murder of Henry Nowak in Southampton, the statement issued by Henry’s father included a subtler appeal to ignore the racial aspects of the police’s treatment of his son: “We do not want [Henry’s] death to be used to create further division, hatred, or tension.”
The grandfather of one of the girls murdered by Axel Rudakabana in 2024 told the Guardian that the response to Rudakabana’s crimes had been “despicable”. He went on to argue that “The ethnicity of any perpetrator, or indeed their immigration status, is completely irrelevant.”
In the wake of any high-profile crime linked to race, religion or immigration, the media is invariably able to find or be pointed towards a bereaved family member willing to offer a spirited defence of multiculturalism. Government ministers will then parrot this sentiment as a panacea against anybody who dares suggest that a specific tragedy might be the result of broader political decisions. What matters is that we pay respect to the bereaved — which means that we must repeat platitudes, or else say nothing at all.
Rarely do the affected use their statements to talk about the downsides of mass migration, or the evils of differential treatment in policing. This is no coincidence. The British state’s response to politically sensitive events, especially those linked implicitly to immigration, is remarkably well coordinated.
Police forces employ Family Liaison Officers, who provide guidance to the bereaved. The guidance provided by these officers will include advice on what to include in public statements. A grieving family is unlikely to covet press attention, so it is much easier to let the police draft responses on their behalf.
These frontline officers are guided, in turn, by a number of secretive organisations in Whitehall.
One such group is the Behavioural Insights Team, sometimes called the “Nudge Unit”. The BIT was set up by the government in 2010; it has since become a limited company. Despite this nominal independence, BIT still works closely with government departments, including the Home Office.
The Nudge Unit helps government departments to win subconscious public buy-in for their policies, through the clever use of language and prompting. In 2018, BIT was commissioned to review 33 “deradicalisation” schemes, most of which were administered as part of the government’s “Prevent” counter-terrorism strategy. The language used by the government around extremism and migration, including the language inserted into statements issued by the families of victims, may owe its origins to the BIT.
Then there’s the National Security Online Information Team, previously the Counter Disinformation Unit. Set up in 2019, it monitors social media for “disinformation”. During the Covid pandemic, it worked with Facebook, Google and the BBC to “counter disinformation” about lockdown and vaccine passports, including by having critical posts removed or suppressed.
The most important organisation of all is RICU — the Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit. RICU was set up in 2007, the brainchild of former MI6 officer Sir Charles Farr, in support of “Prevent”.
Authoritative details about its work are difficult to find; the government is happy for details about the unit to remain classified. Ostensibly, it provides “strategic communications” support to the Home Office; given what we know about its work, “propaganda” might be a more accurate description.
RICU was, in theory, set up to “monitor and challenge” the spread of Islamist views. Speaking to a parliamentary committee in 2009, Farr said that RICU would “convey … proposals” about how to counter extremism to “for example, local authorities [or] the chief constable”.
RICU’s reach isn’t limited to direct employees of the state. We now know that the unit also works with charities and private companies to promote its agenda; it’s also known to regularly use social media to infiltrate conversations amongst “target communities”.
Whilst its original mission may have been focused on Islamism, RICU has since taken on a far broader “anti-extremism” mandate.
In his 2023 review of the Prevent programme, Sir William Shawcross noted that “the bar for what RICU includes on Islamism looks to be relatively high, whereas the bar for what is included on the extreme right wing is comparably low”.
It’s RICU that is responsible for the spontaneous outpourings of pro-migration sentiment in the wake of politically sensitive tragedy. According to a source quoted in the Daily Mail, RICU has been working closely with Northern Ireland’s C3 intelligence unit in the wake of the Ogilvie attack, including by providing “strategic messages” to the police.
The same source reported that RICU had been active in Southampton following Henry Nowak’s murder, to “[make] sure that the liaison team dealing with the [Nowak] family were very well briefed”.
In 2014, after British aid worker Alan Henning was beheaded by ISIS militants, the front page of the Sun newspaper was plastered with an image of a Muslim woman wearing a Union Jack hijab, with the headline “UNITED AGAINST I.S.” The company responsible for that front page was Breakthrough Media, a firm contracted by RICU to produce digital content and viral campaigns.
In June 2017, when white nationalist Darren Osborne carried out his attack on the Finsbury Park Mosque, the media reported that bystanders attacked Osborne at the scene of the crime, until a heroic imam appealed for them to stop.
These reports came from journalists who were briefed at the police cordon by a woman called “Gabbie”, who identified herself as an employee of “Horizon PR”. “Gabbie” offered to introduce those journalists to a third party, who “stressed to the journalists the role that the mosque’s imam had played”. Once again, it was Breakthrough Media who were behind that story.
Earlier that month, when an Islamist drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge, groups linked to RICU were responsible for plastering the area with posters bearing slogans like “#TurnToLove” and “#LoveWillWin”.
The RICU playbook is consistent. In their view, “extreme right-wing” sentiment, such as scepticism about mass migration, is best defeated by emotional manipulation and social pressure.
The bereaved are emphasised; apparently spontaneous acts of unity are deliberately engineered; heroic migrants, sometimes fictional, are lionised. Instead of raising questions about migration policy, we must come together against the vaguely defined “forces of hate”.
As for what RICU is doing now, it’s hard to say. Freedom of Information requests into its activities are routinely denied. We know that, in 2024, it produced a report which accused the “far right” of exploiting Pakistani grooming gangs in order to further a “grievance narrative”. We also know it opposed the push to scrap the recording by police of Non-Crime Hate Incidents, presumably because this record allowed them to keep a close eye on “potential extremists”.
All we can say for sure is that the British state is secretly working to shape how you think about, and respond to, politically sensitive events. Mass migration isn’t going away and multiculturalism will be upheld, regardless of what voters may think or instinctively want.
As such, these state agencies take a keen interest in what people say online, about subjects like race, immigration and Islam. They view certain positions on those issues as inherently dangerous and extremist — and if William Shawcross is to be believed, its definition of which views constitute “extremism” is very expansive.
