“While the streets of Belfast were ablaze with anti-immigration protests last week, behind the scenes a group of spies, spinners and soldiers were deploying the ‘dark arts’ to try to defuse tensions.
The name of the secretive Government propaganda unit trying to manipulate events makes it sound like an innocuous back-office operation – the Research, Information and Communications Unit, or RICU.
But the dull moniker is part of the deliberate camouflage of an outfit which uses deception and skulduggery to try to manage the ‘challenges’ of multiculturalism.
Its techniques range from planting stories in the media, using undercover operatives to lay flowers at the scene of terrorist attacks and even, in one case, sending a pop group to sing anti-extremist songs in Muslim schools.
The 22-strong unit was established in 2007 by the late Charles Farr, a former MI6 officer, as part of the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy.
Modelled on the Information Research Department (IRD), a propaganda unit established by the Attlee government in 1948 to blacken the names of communists and other political opponents, RICU operates out of the Home Office’s Westminster headquarters.
While its original purpose was to monitor and challenge the spread of Al Qaeda propaganda and to vet the language used by public officials when describing terrorism, its tentacles now stretch far across Whitehall – to the extent that critics say it risks strangling free speech.
When the mobs took to the streets of Northern Ireland last week following the stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie, allegedly by Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese asylum-seeker, RICU swung into action to advise the police in the province on how to ‘control the narrative’.”