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The Home Office Secretly Funded A Boyband To Sing Songs About 7/7 In Muslim Areas 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. Financial records disclosed the charity received £400,000 in funding from Prevent shortly before the tour, which accounts labelled ‘Panther [programme]’. In the song ‘Think About It’, the pop trio sings about seeing the reaction to recent terror attacks. The trio sing: See these hashtags all night, Turn the TV on and something else ain’t right More people gone don’t know how we sleep at night, What I’m hoping is we can lead a precious life, 9/11 changes how we view these things People want to terrorise, And 7/7 left behind more broken lives right before our eyes. The group said they wrote the song the day after the Paris terror attack of 2015, when 130 people were killed by Islamic State terrorists. In promotional material, the group claims to have brought the song to Foundation for Peace chief executive Nick Taylor, who organised the school tour around the North West. However, LinkedIn posts by former contractors indicate the tour and campaign were organised by the Home Office. Comms for the tour were handled by BreakThrough Media, a communications company which worked closely with the Home Office’s covert campaigns department, the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU). Leaked RICU documents from 2015 also detailed how BreakThrough had worked with the Foundation for Peace. RICU has been labelled a ‘propaganda unit’ by its critics. A government source has previously said it exists to service the fact that "the [British] government doesn’t want spontaneity: it wants controlled spontaneity.” It has reportedly organised the ‘bussing in’ of imams to local areas to repeat Home Office talking points following terror attacks, as well as organising influencer campaigns online. BreakThrough Media was previously found to be operating a social media channel targeting young Muslim women called ‘This is Woke’ on behalf of the Home Office. The campaign was one of several different covert tactics targeting young Muslims organised by RICU. Due to the secretive nature of RICU’s work, the department’s current projects are unclear. Documents released to the Cranston Inquiry, investigating the deaths of 27 people crossing the channel, highlighted that RICU were working on a comms campaign deterring operators and travellers of small boats. One former Home Office source told PoliticsHome that a number of covert campaigns to deter migrants had been established in recent years. The department has also had an increased focus on the far right, with one research document from the organisation causing headlines as it identified work of Chronicles of Narnia author CS Lewis as a potential sign of far-right extremism. The members of Mr Meanor were contacted for comment. There is no suggestion that any of them knew they were secretly being funded. The Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Foundation was also contacted for comment. A Home Office spokesperson said: “This campaign was delivered under the previous government and has now been discontinued."