Inside the Nudge Unit - Pimlico Journal

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Inside the Nudge Unit<br>Speaking directly to victims revealed the friendly face of an insidious organisation<br>Pimlico Journal<br>Jul 31, 2026

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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.<br>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’.<br>Pimlico Journal is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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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’.<br>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’.<br>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.<br>What has it become, in the 17 years since Charles Farr gave his evidence?<br>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’...