There is today one overwhelmingly important issue of issues, the meta-issue without the resolution of which it is pointless to address any other issue. It is the issue of whether the United Kingdom is to continue as a sovereign nation able to govern itself in accordance with its own laws, culture and traditions or not. The Lisbon constitutional treaty which, with the Czech Republic’s agonised capitulation, has now been ratified by every member of the EU does away with the sovereignty of member nations that it has been steadily eroding for so many years in pursuit of the goal of creating a European super-state.

This anti-democratic entity, this chimaera, the bureaucratic regime of Euroland, has now come into being. The big question for the conservative leader David Cameron is what he is going to do to restore Britain’s power to govern itself. Yesterday we had the tragic answer. He will do nothing that will have the slightest]]> Melanie Phillips 2009-11-05T09:03:45+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5504821/the-deep-green-sophistry-of-religious-equivalence.thtml

It’s official -- putting plastic bottles into the recycling bin or going on a Greenpeace demo is akin to having a religious experience.

Rupert Dickinson, who was made redundant by a London property company, claimed that it had discriminated against him on account of his subscription to the theory of man-made global warming and other environmental issues which he said constituted a ‘philosophical’ belief.

In any rational universe, he would be sent away with a flea in his ear for trying it on. But this is not such a world. At an Employment Appeal Tribunal Mr Justice Burton ruled that because of his belief in climate change Dickinson was entitled to the same protection against discrimination as someone with religious convictions.

How hilarious is this?! When sceptics like me observe that man-made global warming resembles religious zealotry because it is a dogmatic belief which has nothing to do with actual as opposed to pseudo-science, we are dismissed as anti-science flat-earthers. Yet now Mr Justice Burton has laid down that it is a philosophical ‘belief’ which has the same status as belief in a religion.

Two steps led to this remarkable]]> 2009-11-04T17:38:25+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5501326/britains-timid-jews.thtml
Isi Leibler has written a fierce denunciation in the Jerusalem Post of Britain’s Jewish community leadership for their supine and craven response to the way Britain’s political and intellectual class is throwing Israel ever more brazenly under the bus. I agree with all that he says. However, I fear that his hope that British Jews get rid of these leaders and replace them by individuals who are prepared to mount a proper defence of Israel in the face of this verbal pogrom is tragically unrealisable.

This is because Britain’s Jewish community leadership is, first, congenitally supine and, second, historically ambivalent towards Israel. Having always been terrified of the dread accusation of ‘dual loyalty’ – the bigoted taunt that has always been flung at Jews wherever in the diaspora they have lived, long predating Israel’s rebirth in 1948 – they have always sought to minimise any identification of the Jews as a people or nation. Which indeed they are. In addition, they believe that anti-Jewish hatred is a constant and is merely exacerbated if Jews protest about it. So their instinct has always been to keep their heads well below]]> 2009-11-03T17:57:05+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5498441/twominute-hate-at-the-guardian.thtml
Students of the psychopathology of Britain’s intelligentsia might find it educational to peruse this post by the admirable CiF Watch, the website devoted to monitoring the Guardian’s Comment is free website as a public service of rare devotion, on the readers’ comments that followed Ed Husain’s attack on me in Cif last Saturday (to which I respond below). Don’t miss in particular the contribution by one BellaM, a Guardian moderator of the site, to the verbal pogrom against me -- a contribution so outstanding that CiF Watch dedicated to her in addition a whole post of her own.

zealotry and ignorance

and being filled with

anger, venom and hatred

not to mention also being

demented.

Such fame! It could turn a girl’s head.

The first question is why Ed Husain was so exercised by what I wrote. After all, this was not his fight; I had made no mention of him or his ‘anti-Islamist’ Quilliam organisation. Much more astonishing was that he was leaping to the defence of none other than Inayat Bunglawala and the MCB. The MCB is an Islamist body which wants to theocratise Britain according to the precepts of Islam.

Last March, the government suspended links with it after its deputy]]> 2009-11-01T01:29:17+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5487921/a-less-than-united-front.thtml
This weekend there is to be a demonstration in London organised by the Islamists of the re-formed al Muhajiroun calling for sharia law to be enforced in Britain.

When they heard about this, various moderate, anti-Islamist Muslims started suggesting on Facebook and elsewhere that a counter demonstration be held. Within a short space of time, the moderate anti-Islamist British Muslims for a Secular Democracy decided to hold a counter-protest of their own. It was great news that reformist British Muslims were now getting it together to oppose the Islamists like this. But then things got a little bit complicated.

Alarmed by the threat that such moderate Muslims pose to the Islamist stranglehold  over public discourse, the Muslim Brotherhood moved swiftly to try to neutralise them. Thus a surprising article appeared on the Guardian’s Comment is free blog by Inayat Bunglawala of the Brotherhood’s British arm, the Muslim Council of Britain – which, having been briefly given the cold shoulder by the former Communities Secretary Hazel Blears who is one of the very few British politicians to understand the threat that it poses, has now disgracefully been welcomed back]]> 2009-10-29T23:46:20+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5487731/the-struggle-for-islams-soul.thtml
The tireless Islam scholar and anti-Islamist Dr Patrick Sookhdeo of the Barnabas Fund has written a must-read article in the Fund’s current newsletter which, if his analysis is correct, provides a real chink of light in these dark times. He suggests that the Islamist orthodoxy which has had the Muslim world by the throat is beginning to crack under pressure from reformist Muslims around the world, particularly within Britain. He writes:

Recent months have seen a number of unexpected and extremely encouraging statements coming out of the Muslim world.  Respected, mainstream Muslim leaders in a variety of countries have voiced opinions which are at odds with traditional, conservative Islam.  They have challenged aspects of shari‘a and are calling for a liberal, modernist, enlightened Islam compatible with Western norms.  Perhaps the most significant of all is a comment by a group of British Muslims calling for an end to the apostasy law and for full freedom in all religious matters.

A small minority of marginalised Muslim progressives has been bravely defying traditional and Islamist pressures by reinterpreting Islam in a way compatible with modern concepts of secularity, individual human

Yet as the Mail on Sunday reported last weekend, Britain is complicit in the torture of Palestinians – by other Palestinians. So much so that – surreally – Britain is now sending British police and intelligence officers to the West Bank to try to stop a wave of torture by Palestinian security forces (pictured above in a batle with Hamas activists in Qalqilya last June) funded by UK taxpayers. The paper reported:

The neo-Nazi British National Party now has two MEPs, one million votes and a claim to a place in the legitimate political life of Britain principally because a very significant proportion of the electorate believe that Britain’s culture and identity are being steadily transformed by mass immigration.

Last Friday a former speechwriter for government ministers, Andrew Neather, who wrote a seminal speech in 2000 for then Immigration Minister Barbara Roche which signalled the loosening of immigration controls, blurted out that the ‘driving political purpose’ of this ‘major’ shift in policy was to bring about mass immigration and a ‘truly multicultural’ society. This purpose was deliberately kept secret from the British people because ministers knew they would react very badly against it.

There could scarcely be a more profound abuse of the democratic process than to set out to destroy a nation’s demographic and cultural identity through a conscious deception of the people of that nation. There could hardly be a more worthy issue for the Conservative party to leap upon. Yet the Tories’ reaction so far has been muted. In the Commons]]> 2009-10-27T16:57:14+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5476426/blame-the-cows.thtml
Really, this is beyond parody. Nicholas Stern, whose absurd and ignorant report on the economic consequences of man-made global warming has embarrassed even the warmists because of the scorn and ridicule it provoked from other economists let alone scientists, has now decided what we must all do to avoid the imminent climate Armageddon: stop eating meat. The Telegraph reports:

Lord Stern, author of the 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, predicts that eating meat could in the future become as socially unacceptable as drink driving. Livestock farming has come under fire in recent years from environmental campaigners because methane from cattle and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Lord Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, believes that the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December should call for an increase in the price of meat and other foods that contribute to climate change. In an interview with The Times, he said: ‘Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.’