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A “shadowy” British Government Unit set up by a former MI6 agent is using various tactics to try and keep a lid on the UK’s simmering racial tensions in the wake of the Belfast attack, it has been claimed.
While protests spilled across Belfast last week, a group of “spies, spinners and soldiers were deploying the ‘dark arts to try to defuse tensions,” claims the Daily Mail.
The unit, which has been likened to a form of “thought police” has been identified as the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU). It operates out of the Home office’s Headquarters in Westminster.
The “secretive government propaganda unit” is trying to “manipulate events” while posing as an innocuous back-office operation, claims the Mail.
The outfit is allegedly trying to “manage the ‘challenges’ of multiculturalism, with its techniques ranging 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 Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) was established in 2007 by former MI6 officer Charles Farr under the Prevent strand of HMG’s CONTEST strategy, to understand and counter terrorist and extremist ideologies to reduce the risk to the UK, its citizens, and its interests overseas.
The 22-strong unit is believed to have been modelled on the Information Research Department (IRD), a propaganda unit set up by the Attlee government in 1948 to blacken the name of communists and other political opponents.
“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,” says the paper, adding:
“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’.
A source told the Mail: “They are working with the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s C3 intelligence unit to identify those posting the online ‘calls to protest’ in Belfast and other areas, as well as giving strategic messages to the police to ensure that the protesters were portrayed as unsympathetic thugs, rather than activists, and effecting behavioural change.’
‘STATEMENTS RELEASED BY FAMILIES OF VICTIMS HAVE SIMILAR TONE’
According to the same source, the unit had also been advising the police in Southampton following the December 2025 murder of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwa – who falsely claimed he had been racially abused and had acted in self-defence – saying: “RICU made sure that the liaison team dealing with the family were well briefed.”
Additionally, it has been claimed that the unit intervenes to write statements on behalf of the families of victims of potentially racially linked incidents to stop them from inflaming tensions further with their remarks.
“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,” said the source.
Last week, the family of Stephen Oglivie, the victim of the horror “attempted beheading,” issued a statement through the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) saying they had witnessed “a lot of false information” and telling people “do not [divide] in the name of our loved one.”
In it, they said they were “completely devastated by the horrific attack,” adding:
“We have witnessed a lot of false information circulating on social media which is now forcing us to clarify that our loved one is in fact in a stable condition, and we are solely focused on his recovery at this time.
“We are also appealing to the media and the public to please give us some space. We need privacy to focus on our family right now, without cameras or people speculating about what happened via social media.
“We have been left feeling disgusted by the scenes that unfolded yesterday across Northern Ireland in the wake of what happened. We want to make it absolutely clear that to do this in response is not supported by our family, and peaceful protest is only ever the way forward. We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including from within our healthcare system and hospitality sector, and we depend on them to make our country work. We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility – do not do this in the name of our loved one as we do not share the same values.”
In 2023, Conservative peer Lord Dobbs, in a parliamentary question, asked the Government to publish a full analysis prepared by Prevent’s Research Information and Communication Unit (RICU) that reportedly identified books, poetry, TV shows, and films, including ‘Yes, Minister’, ‘Great British Railway Journeys’, ‘House of Cards’, ‘1984’, and ‘Beowulf’, as being ‘far-right’ and ‘white supremacist’.
The unit has further cited articles by The Spectator journalists Rod Liddle and Douglas Murray as contributing to “negative views out Islam and Muslims via the pages of mainstream publications.”
Further, a book on the Rotherham rape gangs and work by Peter Hitchens for the Mail on Sunday was cited, with a 2019 RICY document describing former Cabinet Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg as being among a number of figures “associated with far-Right sympathetic audiences and Brexit.”
A Home Office source said: “RICU provides analysis on extremist use of propaganda and exploitation of the internet to inform the UK’s counter terrorism system. We cannot comment on its operations.”
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