Wednesday, 15th June 2011

Of Left and Right

10:50am

Those looking for further evidence of my drift to the right might wish to look at my latest post on authoritarian Islam for the new website Conservative Voices. As the great man said: ‘The Left is always looking for traitors and the Right is always looking for converts’.

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Saturday, 11th June 2011

Trustees and trustworthiness

6:44pm

I have been accused this week of conducting a witchhunt against London Citizens/Citizens UK, the “citizens organisers” and darlings of the political class. It seems some people are quite content that this liberal institution has a trustee who supports Hamas. They may also turn a blind eye to concerns raised by End Child Detention Now about the organisation’s peculiar partnership with the UK Border Agency:

The shrill cry of witchhunt comes from Independent Jewish Voices, the organisation set up to provide an alternative liberal outlet for British Jews....

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Thursday, 9th June 2011

The fight against extremism and authoritarianism

10:50am

It is now nearly five years since I wrote When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries for the think tank Policy Exchange.

It was a plea for sanity in the debate on radical Islam, which had become poisoned by the belief in parts of government that Islamists of the Muslim Council of Britain were the genuine representative voice of British Muslims.

At the time, few people had heard of the Muslim Brotherhood and still fewer knew that its South Asian offshoot Jamaat-i-Islami had a stranglehold on the MCB and other...

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Tuesday, 7th June 2011

Tolerating a libel

11:06am

It’s always unpleasant to be libelled and particularly nasty to be defamed by supporters of totalitarian Islam. Journalists really shouldn’t sue, but sometimes it can get very frustrating, especially when the libel is obviously malign and ill informed. Over the past couple of weeks I have been examining the close relationship between London Citizens, the “community organisers” so beloved of the political class and the Islamists of East London Mosque and Islamic Forum Europe. In week one, we looked at London Citizens’ Deputy Chair Junaid Ahmed, who is a supporter of Hamas....

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Sunday, 22nd May 2011

The Orwell Prize, DJ Taylor and the intern debate

10:23am

On Tuesday, I presented the Orwell Prize for journalism to brave Jenni Russell, who used the occasion to go public on her battle against cancer. She had not been well enough to apply for the award herself, but her son had selected her best articles and she was a worthy winner.

Here’s the official tribute to her work: “Jenni Russell was the stand-out journalist in an outstanding field. Her empathy for the world beyond Westminster gives her writing an extra dimension often lacking in political insiders. There is an overriding...

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Monday, 16th May 2011

Apprenticeships versus degrees: a disaster in the making

4:06pm

There was a really interesting piece in the Observer business section this weekend balancing up the value of degrees and apprenticeships. “A perception prevails, particularly among middle-class families, that choosing a path other than university is a mark of failure, a fact that concerns both employers and advocates for vocational education such as City & Guilds,” wrote Tom Bawden.

This government (and indeed the last) was very keen to encourage young people to do an apprenticeship. But I wonder how many MPs went down this route or would encourage their children...

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