(Politics Home) A secretive Home Office department funded a little-known boyband to travel around Muslim areas of the UK and sing songs with anti-radicalisation themes during the height of ISIS terror attacks, PoliticsHome can reveal.
Mr Meanor, a pop trio featuring singers from Essex and LA, visited around a dozen schools in the north of England in 2016 as part of a covert Home Office initiative to deter potential Islamist extremists.
As part of the tour, schools in Burnley, south Manchester, Leeds and Blackburn were visited. One school, Parrs Wood High School in Manchester, had a student travel and join ISIS a couple of years previously.
Publicly, the singers released a song in aid of the Warrington-based charity Foundation for Peace, which was founded by the families of victims of an IRA bombing in the 1990s.
