Credit: Dangerous Minds / Publicity

On the one hand, using a boyband to combat radicalisation looks patently fucking ridiculous to the point of being genuinely laughable, at least until you remember the stakes.

In the shadow of some truly horrific events that had already happened and were to come later, David Cameron’s Conservative government tried to reach out to vulnerable kids who might be affected by extremist propaganda and ended up with this. A patronising, out-of-touch, flailing attempt at connecting with “the youth” via a boyband performance in a school assembly.

At the time, anyone involved in the project swore blind that it was spearheaded by the band themselves, but, as revealed by Politics Home, the truth is murkier than that.

The story begins in 2016. Little-known boyband Mr Meanor releases a song called ‘Think About It’ in aid of the Warrington-based charity Foundation For Peace. The charity was set up in the mid-1990s in the wake of an IRA attack that claimed the lives of two children aged 12 and three, and to this day, it works to teach non-violent conflict resolution skills to kids in working-class communities.

In the singles press release, the charity says that the band wrote the song themselves (already we’re stretching plausibility) and got in contact with the charity to help with its release.

Thus, the story goes that Foundation For Peace then booked the boyband on a tour of secondary schools in northern towns. Namely Burnley, south Manchester, Leeds and Blackburn. These locations were not picked by accident. In fact, the south Manchester date was at Parrs Wood High School, which had a student leave and join ISIS a few years previously. The tour passed without a hitch at the time, and if all had been the way it seemed on the surface, it would be nothing more than a sincere, if slightly awkward, attempt at reaching vulnerable youth.

Nearly a decade later, we can see what was really going on.

How did this boyband get caught up with the government?

As with most things, the truth behind the whole story has come out along with the publication of its finances.

The charity’s financial records show them receiving an astonishing £400,000 from a donor called “Panther [programme]”. A little more digging shows that “Panther” is actually “Prevent”, the home office’s anti-radicalisation programme. This is supported by documents recently leaked that showed just how much control the Home Office had over the tour.

All communications for the tour were handled by BreakThrough Media, a communications company that has worked closely with the Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications department, or RICU, for short. This is where things get genuinely unsettling because RICU are little more than a government propaganda wing. An organisation that parrots government talking points in a way that makes you think members of your community are doing it. Whether that’s bussing in Imams to areas that have suffered terrorist attacks or setting up social media channels targeting young Muslim women.

The one entity seemingly innocent in all this is Mr Meanor themselves. There’s no sign that the boyband was aware of precisely where the money was coming from, or that the music they were playing had been OK’d by the Home Office themselves. Seemingly, they were contacted by the Foundation for Peace and had no goal other than to spread a good message where it really needed to be spread. One could argue that Foundation For Peace did the same, but then, why the smoke and mirrors?

Sure, we can all point and laugh at how cringe the content is; however, the real problem is how covert this all is. If the Home Office had just put its name on this project from the start, chances are this story wouldn’t be anywhere near as embarrassing to them as it is today. They didn’t feel they could, though, so all it does is add to the paranoia and mistrust that people feel not only towards the government, but also to genuine community efforts to tackle radicalisation.

Nice one, lads, you really knocked it out of the park here.