Shadow minister for militant Islam

Meet the shadow minister for militant Islam

James Forsyth

29 August 2007

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Paul Goodman MP has a tricky brief

Even among those who are normally sympathetic to the Cameron project, Warsi’s appointment was viewed as a stunt too far. After all, she has observed that the government’s anti-terror proposals were ‘enough to tip any normal young man into the realms of a radicalised fanatic’ and said that if ‘terrorism is the use of violence against civilians, then where does that leave us in Iraq?’ These concerns were assuaged, to an extent, by the naming of Paul Goodman as the Commons spokesman for her brief. Goodman, a former comment editor of the Daily Telegraph, has developed robust views on the need for the political class to wake up to the threat posed by extremist Islamist ideology. He denies that he’s been given the job as a balance to Warsi, claiming that the idea is a ‘stereotype’ and that ‘much of the commentary has been simply wrong’ about her views. But it is hard not to see his appointment as a signal that Cameron hasn’t gone wobbly on the Islamist threat.

Goodman represents more than 9,000 Muslims in Parliament, more than any other Tory MP, and his Wycombe constituency is home to several of those arrested over the 2006 Heathrow terror plot. When I meet Goodman in a near-deserted Palace of Westminster, it is immediately apparent how eager he is to get to grips with the brief. He has been firing off letters over the West Midland police’s bizarre decision to refer a Channel 4 programme on Muslim extremism to Ofcom, the so-called Olympic Mosque and the government’s decision to re-engage with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) in a manner that suggests he should be the MP for Tunbridge Wells (Disgusted) rather than Wycombe. He talks animatedly about the issues involved, only becoming hesitant and defensive when the subject of whether it would be a good thing if more Muslims married non-Muslims is raised and when I ask him about some of Warsi’s more peculiar utterances.

Ideology is what is missing from our discussion of what radicalises young Muslims in Goodman’s view. He is happy to acknow-ledge that it ‘is undoubtedly true that the Iraq war ...has worsened the situation’. But, he says, ‘it’s not sustainable to argue that Iraq and Afghanistan foreign policy are the sole cause, or even necessarily the main cause of our current difficulties’. Goodman thinks that there’s a growing recognition of this among the Muslim community, saying there’s ‘much more willingness to co-operate with the authorities than is sometimes said to be the case. It has becoming increasingly clear to everyone that you can’t shrug off this extremist, separatist political ideology as the fault of foreign policy or the world Jewish conspiracy or a malign plot by the West.’