The moral panic over incels

Luke Pollard, Labour MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, has been campaigning for Britain to adopt a ‘national incel strategy’ since August 2021, when a mass shooting claimed six lives in his constituency. Journalists dubbed the perpetrator, 22-year-old Jake Davison, an ‘incel killer’, after a cursory look at his digital footprint. Ignoring the police’s ruling that Davison’s crimes were not terror-related, news outlets ran sensational headlines about the supposedly violent ideology that drove him to kill. As a result, there have been loud demands for government action to tackle the alleged incel threat.

Last week, Pollard answered those calls by convening a committee of ‘online experts’ to discuss potential incel strategies. He told The Times that Prevent, the UK’s counter-extremism programme, was ill-equipped to handle the rising threat of incel violence because it was designed specifically to tackle Islamist extremism. He also noted that incel referrals to Prevent are routinely dropped.