Home Office 'secretly funded boyband to sing anti-radicalisation songs in Muslim areas'
Schools in Burnley, South Manchester, Leeds and Blackburn were visited as part of the tour.
The Home Office secretly funded a little-known boy band to travel around areas of the UK to sing songs about anti-radicalisation, it has emerged. The band, known as Mr Meanor, were made up of singers from Essex and Los Angeles, who went to schools in the north of England in 2016 to deter young people from becoming Islamic extremists. Schools in Burnley, South Manchester, Leeds and Blackburn were visited as part of the tour, and one of the schools had a student who travelled and joined ISIS a couple of years before.
The band publicly released a song in aid of Foundation for Peace, a Warrington-based charity that was founded by the families of victims of an IRA bombing in the 1990s. The charity received £400,000 in funding from Prevent shortly before the tour, as revealed by financial records.
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The group said they brought the song to Foundation for Peace chief executive Nick Taylor, who then organised the tour of schools. However, LinkedIn posts by former contractors indicated that the tour was actually organised by the Home Office, according to reports by Politics Home.
A Home Office spokesperson told the Express: "This campaign was delivered under the previous government and has now been discontinued."
The Home Office also said: "A range of activity was designed and implemented in partnership with stakeholders, aimed at reaching audiences who may be vulnerable to radicalisation."
The boyband said it wrote the song Think About It after the Paris terror attacks in 2015, which saw 130 people killed by Islamic State terrorists. Leaked documents from the Home Office’s covert campaigns department, the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), reveal that BreakThrough Media, which handled the comms for the tour, worked closely with the RICU.
BreakThrough Media was previously found to be operating a social media channel targeting young Muslim women called ‘This is Woke’ on behalf of the Home Office.
A former Home Office worker told Politics Home that other RICU campaigns focused on things such as the far-right and channel crossings.
There is no suggestion that the members of Mr Meanor were aware of the funding behind the tour.
