Inside the Nudge Unit

Speaking directly to victims revealed the friendly face of an insidious organisation

RICU, the Home Office’s Research Information and Communications Unit, is often the subject of much attention online, particularly around its role in the consistently bland calls for ‘unity’ after horrific acts of violence. Many people online suggest that either the Unit itself, or the ‘specially trained officers’ (Victim Liaison Officers or Family Liaison Officers) must threaten victims and their families to ensure their compliance with approved messaging. This always struck me as unlikely — widespread coercion would surely have leaked by now. There was also good reason to be sceptical of the efficacy of behavioural science applications to government. And yet public statements by those victims and their families are remarkably consistent.

So I was delighted when, a couple of months ago, Pimlico Journal asked me to investigate RICU and victim liaison properly. In order to do so, I studied historic statements, publications and coverage of RICU and spoke with victims’ families, some of whom are named in this piece and former police officers, none of whom are named, with knowledge of the Victim and Family Liaison units. What I discovered is fascinating and far more insidious than the imagined coercion. This article provides an overview of RICU’s history, goals and methodology, followed by details from those interviews. I hope it sheds some light on this murky area of the state’s ‘communications management’.

RICU was established in 2007 ‘under the Prevent strand of [the UK government’s] CONTEST strategy’ with its stated goal being to ‘understand and counter terrorist and extremist ideologies to reduce the risk to the UK, its citizens and its interests overseas’. Giving evidence to MPs in 2009, Charles Farr, a former SIS officer, and head of the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism, who set RICU up in 2007, said the unit is ‘responsible for advising the rest of government [and] officialdom, from a brigade commander in Helmand province through to a chief constable in Yorkshire, about how they wish to characterise the threat we face and describe the response that we are making and, secondly, rather different, they are responsible for challenging the propaganda which comes to us from al-Qaeda and associated groups—generally not from people in this country; usually from the incessant 4,500 websites that are in one way or another associated with radical Islamist terrorist organisations around the world’.

The unit embraced convenient lies from the start. Part of their strategy was to send advice to ‘local authorities, people working on community cohesion projects, local police, neighbourhood policing teams’ and ‘the Chief Constable’ that they should not ‘talk about Islamic terrorism, not because in certain circumstances that is an inaccurate description but because the language admits of a number of interpretations which are not always helpful to us’.

RICU was also always concerned with the whole of British society — while Farr said the unit decided to ‘start’ with Muslim communities, he told MPs that he did ‘not want to give the impression that RICU’s sole purpose is to communicate with Muslim communities in this country. It is not.’ So by 2009 a unit existed which had ‘about 35 people’ working for it, ‘and a bit of the private sector in there to advise us on aspects of communications’, which was telling every arm of the state, along with much of civil society, that they should lie about the nature of the threats the country faced, to serve the state’s perceived interests. It was also already building wide and deep relationships within many parts of the state, including policing.

What has it become, in the 17 years since Charles Farr gave his evidence?

In 2011, when the government reviewed Prevent, it found that RICU’s communications sometimes ‘erred in seeking to make language acceptable to some in Muslim communities, at the expense of candour’. The unit was described as having ‘a central role in developing counter-ideological or counter-narrative work’, although its track record was described as ‘mixed’. It was directed to take ‘more care…to identify credible partners to develop powerful and specific narratives across a range of communications channels, especially on the internet’. Despite these criticisms, the state chose to ‘retain RICU, largely in its current form’, but with the expectation that it would produce ‘much sharper and more professional counter-narrative products’ — there was also a commitment to ‘continue to work with social media enterprises’ in the battle against ‘propagandists and radicalisers’ including those whose ‘propaganda work’ might be illegal under ‘race and religious hatred legislation’. The shift is notable — Farr’s commitment that RICU would work across the whole of British society is clearly underway, with Islamic terrorism and radicalisation no longer the main focus.

More recently, RICU has long been the subject of much discussion on social media, and of occasional interest in the mainstream press. It’s often accused of being behind the anodyne calls for unity and calm issued by public bodies, victims and their families after the latest ‘Yookay’ Event in which a migrant has done something appallingly violent. Not unrelatedly, it is generally the right who are more vocal in their criticism of RICU, and it is regularly suggested that they threaten families into sticking to the regime-approved line.

However, the organisation wasn’t always ignored by the left. As recently as 2016, the Guardian published a lengthy exposé into what they called ‘the shadowy propaganda unit inspired by the Cold War’. The article itself is a fascinating historical artefact, having been written when Islamic State was near its height, and Prevent, along with much of the UK state was particularly concerned with the radicalisation of British muslims, over 900 of whom travelled to join the nascent Caliphate.¹ It is in this context that the Guardian described Prevent as ‘the controversial counter-radicalisation programme’ and RICU as an organisation modelled on Attlee’s Information Research Department. They reported it had ‘hired linguists, psychologists and anthropologists as well as counter-terrorism strategists, digital media experts, film-makers and marketing consultants’. It has three divisions: a monitoring and coordination team to watch and study digital and traditional media; an insight and analysis team to research audience reactions; and a domestic and international campaigns team to deliver the covert propaganda. This propaganda reportedly took the form of ‘masses of digital material - films, Twitter feeds, Facebook profiles, YouTube clips, online radio content and websites’.²

This is worth pausing to consider. The British state directed energy, time and money into creating content including fake social media profiles in order to propagandise its own citizens, and films which although they aren’t ‘scripted by RICU’, ‘they’ll make it clear that they want a particular form of words to be used at a particular point in a film’. At the time, perhaps it gained less attention than it should have because RICU’s efforts were seemingly primarily targeted at Muslims — one official told the Guardian that the work ‘amounted to propaganda’, but that all they were ‘trying to do is stop people becoming suicide bombers’.

With the defeat of ISIS, the decline of organised Islamist / jihadist terrorism as a threat in the UK, the British state’s increasing weakness, and its growing fear of losing control of the ‘communities’ it governs, the perceived threat has evolved. As Laurie Wastell and I wrote for the Pimlico Journal earlier this year, the government’s new cohesion strategy, Protecting What Matters, specifically states that ‘the extreme right… [who] equate being English with being white or being Christian [and] exploit national identity as an ethnic construct’ are “hostile actors”, who it must implacably oppose’. Similarly, Prevent training materials now define concern about mass migration as a ‘terrorist ideology’, and warn that the belief that ‘Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups’ could be grounds for referral for deradicalisation.

To suggest then that RICU must be using the same tools and methods it deployed against British muslims during the War on Terror and ISIS era is not conspiratorial in the slightest. The state has publicly defined certain right-wing beliefs as ideologies which threaten it. Naturally, RICU will move, or has moved, to target those beliefs just as it did jihadism and Islamism when it was founded. Naturally, it will seek to nudge British society in the direction it desires.

In fact, RICU has actively become biased against entirely mainstream right-wing beliefs. According to the 2023 Shawcross Review into Prevent, while its ‘products related to Islamic terrorism focus on the most serious material relating to violent Islamist ideology…much of the material covering Extreme Right-Wing falls well below the threshold’. Shawcross mentioned that he ‘saw one RICU analysis product from 2020 on Right-Wing terrorist and extremist activity online which referenced books by mainstream British conservative commentators as “key cultural nationalist ideological texts”. The same document listed “key texts” for white nationalists as including historic works of the Western philosophic and literary canon’. Shawcross also describes RICU analysis of a ‘cohort of social media users it termed “Actively Patriotic and Proud”, listed a prominent Conservative politician and former member of the government as being among figures “associated with far-right sympathetic audiences, and Brexit”’ (who I understand to be Jacob Rees-Mogg). This then, is RICU now. An organisation which seeks to ‘counter extremist narratives’ and maintains ‘contingency communication’ materials ‘for rapid deployment after major incidents’. The methods they deploy are ‘never published’.

Or at least, were never published until this year. The Belfast attack may have changed things, in particular a statement from the Ogilvie family which was widely mocked for including lines such as ‘we have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including from within our healthcare system and hospitality sector’ which could not plausibly be the first thoughts of a family whose loved one had been the victim of such an attack. Shortly afterwards, the Mail on Sunday’s Glen Owen published a detailed article on RICU. He described many examples of their interventions. After the 2017 London Bridge attack, the unit’s ‘undercover operatives handed out flowers in the area, with the aim of perpetuating an atmosphere of “grief” instead of anti-Muslim “anger” [while] a team in an unmarked van…toured the area plastering the walls with posters bearing hashtags such as #TurnToLove, #ForLondon and #LoveWillWin’. In 2014, after Islamic State decapitated British aid worker Alan Henning, RICU used a ‘front operation’ to ‘plant an image of a woman in a Union Jack hijab in the media’.

Its role in victim liaison had also not been addressed by the mainstream media until Owen’s article was published. He described how the unit was ‘advising the police in Southampton’ following Henry Nowak’s murder, and that ‘RICU made sure that the liaison team dealing with the family were well briefed’. The source was also reported to say ‘you can see their fingerprints all over the statements released by the families of victims in these volatile situations - they usually have a similar tone’. The following week he published another article in which he spoke with Siobhan Whyte, mother of migrant hotel worker Rhiannon Whyte who was murdered by asylum seeker Deng Chol Majek in October 2024. Siobhan described how victim liaison officers ‘guided’ the Whyte family in ‘toning down’ their public statements. According to Siobhan, police said they didn’t want ‘another Southport’ when she told them Rhiannon’s life support was going to be turned off. She also said, ‘Did they tell us what to say? No. Did they guide us so it didn’t look so aggressive? Maybe. I was aggressive - they toned it down’. Siobhan also emphasised her gratitude to the police.

This is intriguing. No hint of coercion, but the police, and the wider state, appear to have obtained the words they wanted from a victim’s family, at least until Majek had been sentenced. It was only at this point that Siobhan began her campaigning — pointing out that Majek had arrived in the UK on a small boat, and that the constant flow of men like this into the country makes such crimes inevitable. This is also intriguing — why did Siobhan’s language change so much after the trial was complete?

When I spoke to her, something which really struck me was quite how positive she was about the ‘specially trained officers’ who had supported her and her family. Siobhan described them as ‘brilliant’, and emphasised that she was never told she had to ‘be silent’, or that ‘you can’t do this or can’t do that’, and ascribed the family’s relative quiet before and during the trial to not wanting to ‘jeopardise her case’, along with a concern that she ‘didn’t want it to look like we were going in with a racial hatred things’.

This level of trust appears to have been effectively built by the officers through sustained contact from very soon after Rhiannon was attacked, and ensuring the family could, and did, rely on them throughout the entire process. Siobhan told me that the liaison officers ‘helped…in every way…through the court, outside of the court, prior to the CCTV [being shown in court]...they’ve been at the end of the phone for us’. Those liaison officers stayed at the Whytes’ side ‘every step of the way’, ‘kept the media away’ from them, going as far as to ‘put it out there not to approach’ the family. The officers were available whenever and wherever the family needed them, ensuring that they became a trusted, reliable source of information about the criminal process, a guardian against others, outsiders who might cause disruption, and a reassuringly stable presence during an awful, utterly destabilising time. As a result of this trust and reliance-building, when the family came to draft their public statements, they trusted the liaison officers - ‘they guided us…we were full of anger, we were full of hate, we were full of sadness, and what they did is they kind of say, well, if you say this, it doesn’t look [right], you know, but they never took the word out of our mouth. They just guided us [on] what to say’.

The impression I formed from my conversation with Siobhan Whyte is that the liaison officers who worked with her were very skilful at building a close, trusting relationship in which she and her family came to rely upon them. It is quite natural in these conditions that the Whytes found themselves to feel a need for such support — Rhiannon had been murdered in an appalling manner and their whole world had been shattered. It is the most natural thing in the world to cling to anything and anyone which offers stability and reassurance. So the constant presence of the liaison officers meant that they very quickly became trusted and relied upon by the Whyte family, such that their suggestions and guidance were acted upon without any sense of instruction or coercion.

It is notable that there was one time their management of the Whytes slipped — the night when Rhiannon’s life support machine was turned off. Siobhan told me that the officers informing her ‘we don’t want another Southport’, was ‘the only thing’ which ‘irritated’ her during her entire relationship with those liaison officers. She remains unsure if they ‘meant we don’t want a riot or meant don’t speak out’. What I think happened then is that the relationship between the liaison officers and the Whytes was still relatively new — the police had not yet had the time to build an absolute sense of reliance and trust, and they were clearly afraid. The Southport riots were still very fresh in their minds (having taken place just two months before), and it seems this affected their normally more subtle persuasion and management. As a result they slipped, and Siobhan, I suspect sensed their intent — keep quiet, don’t say an asylum seeker killed her, or this is going to be really bad. It is also, I think, relevant that the moment of ‘irritation’ was when the victim’s family were entirely focused on the fact that Rhiannon was about to have her life support machine turned off — the police intruded on people who were thinking of nothing else, to pursue their own goal.

These early hours and days of the liaison relationship are clearly very important. I spoke with Katie Amess, daughter of murdered MP Sir David Amess. She told me that she felt betrayed from the start because the killing was reported in the press before the police contacted her, and indeed had blurted out the fact that Sir David had been killed in front of her brother. Police seem to have further damaged the relationship by not responding in what the family felt was an urgent or serious fashion to a man behaving in a threatening manner near the family home. In this case, liaison officers entirely failed to secure trusting reliance from the victim’s family, with the result that the Amesses have been highly critical of the police throughout the process, and more importantly have continually made it clear that Sir David was murdered by an Islamist.

I also spoke with Emma Webber, mother of Barnaby Webber, who was killed in Nottingham by Valdo Calocane. She was able to provide more specific detail about the process — their ‘first contact was with family liaison officers from Nottinghamshire Police, and then a week or two later we got assigned a support worker from Homicide Victim Support, which is funded by the Ministry of Justice’. She was less positive about the liaison officers, noting that when people hear that ‘specially trained officers are supporting the family’ they probably imagine ‘a therapeutic kind of support, whereas what it actually is, is a more softly, softly approach from the police and the criminal justice system…they are part of the investigation team and their duty is to investigate the crime…they were very much the conduit to get information out of us and to relay information to us’. This assessment was echoed by former police officers I spoke with who described the liaison role as absolutely being in the service of the investigation, and the police’s other ‘operational goals’.

Despite this, Emma described the ‘two ladies assigned’ to the family as ‘very nice’, ‘clearly caring’, and they wanted to ‘support’ — again it seems that being pleasant and supportive is a particularly important attribute for these liaison officers in their efforts to win victims and their families over. Perhaps as a result, during the initial period of the Calocane investigation, the relationship remained harmonious until the different loyalties were made clear when the CPS decided to accept a plea of diminished responsibility. When the Webbers pushed back they sensed that the relationship was souring.

A very interesting detail Emma shared is that the liaison officers wanted to keep the families of the three victims (Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates) apart from one another. During the discussions around Calocane’s plea being accepted, Emma asked ‘why the Coates family weren’t in a meeting’, and was told ‘it’s because they didn’t want to be’, but when she spoke to the Coates family, ‘they said they were never invited’. This wasn’t an isolated incident either — ‘throughout the whole summer, every time we tried to reach out to the Coates family’, the liaison officers would say ‘they wish you well’, but they ‘won’t’ talk, but, according to Emma, ‘if you speak to the Coates family, they will say exactly the same’. The only reason the police were not able to do the same with the O’Malley-Kumars is that they and the Webbers had a pre-existing relationship.

So, according to Emma, officers did everything they could, even to the extent of lying, to prevent contact between the families of Valdo Calocane’s three victims. Considering the pattern that is forming — that liaison officers work to create strong, dependent relationships with victims’ families in order to be best able to influence them — it makes perfect sense that they would seek to isolate those families from others in the same situation. Shared trauma is a powerful driver of bonding, and it would be very natural for family members whose loved ones had been killed by the same person to bond rapidly, compromising the primacy of the liaison officers’ relationship with them.

As the relationship soured the police’s tools became cruder — they ‘were told we couldn’t say anything’ until ‘sentencing had been done’ because of the risk of contempt of court. Emma described this as ‘the managing down bit from the police — you know you cannot, you must not say this’. Officers even tried to ‘manage’ the families’ ‘victim impact statements’ — even demanding to ‘see them all in advance’, telling them that ‘you’re not allowed to say anything…too contentious about the verdict’. Emma told me they ‘were made to feel’ that if they didn’t comply with the ‘guide’ which the police provided their victim impact statements might not be allowed at all. Emma also said she was left with the very clear impression that they weren’t allowed to say anything suggesting they ‘didn’t agree with the process’.

Another family member of a victim described something similar to me — they felt that throughout the process they were not allowed to ‘express their actual feelings’ — throughout officers were ‘managing’ their words. The former officers I spoke to did not ever put it in such strong terms. However, they did acknowledge that victim liaison officers are not actually there to support the family — their role is both communications-related and ‘investigative’.

Drawing all this together, I think we can begin to discern the shape of how liaison officers — trained and briefed with RICU-approved and supplied materials — operate. In the immediate aftermath of a deeply traumatic event they make themselves indispensable to the families. Liaison officers will answer every question, explain every process, keep others away, and as a result become an object of security and safety which those families inevitably come to rely on. Other families sharing the same pain and trauma are kept away, so there is no threat to the liaison officer’s primacy. And as a result, the families will generally happily and willingly comply with the suggestions, help and guidance which the officers provide, particularly over their public statements. The veiled threat of a trial collapsing due to reckless statements is also held in reserve, should families become non-compliant. Similarities to both cults and abusive relationships are, I think, obvious.

It is, as I said, far more subtle than threats, far more effective (indeed, most families seem to pass through the experience feeling grateful to their liaison officers), and, in truth, far more wicked. To use the tools of manipulation and coercive control like this, in the service of the state’s goals, and to sustain the state’s failing myths, is a particularly modern evil.

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This article was written by David Shipley, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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1. Half returned, and only ‘around 40’ were convicted of any crimes, meaning the UK is seemingly happy to have 400 or so people who joined ISIS wandering around the country.

2. By which I presume they mean ‘accounts’ — it is an interesting exercise to wonder how many of e.g. the ‘football bloke’ Twitter/X accounts which consistently push regime messaging would fit RICU’s goals