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The best we can hope for is tolerance

John Gray

Wednesday, 14th February 2007

John Gray, Britain’s foremost political philosopher, says that Ruth Kelly’s new campaign against Islamic extremism is doomed because it exaggerates the scope for cohesion in our fragmented modern world

The only thing that can be known with reasonable certainty about Ruth Kelly’s new programme of engagement with Muslim communities, which the Prime Minister told the House of Commons at last week’s meeting of the liaison committee will tackle Islamist extremism ‘head-on’, is that it will be muddled and ineffective. Nothing the government has done suggests it is ready to examine why extremism is gaining ground. Tony Blair persists in claiming that Britain’s role in the Iraq war has played no part in the process — an assertion that has been repeatedly questioned by intelligence analysts, and which suggests an inability to engage not only with Muslims but also with reality. It is not only the Blair government that is at fault. The political class as a whole has no clear idea of what it wants from Muslim communities. Is it their more active co-operation in combating terrorism? Or are they being told that they must integrate into the British mainstream and embrace some version of liberal values? Though they are commonly seen as being so closely linked as to be practically equivalent, there is danger in conflating these goals. Pressing Muslims to integrate may actually make the struggle against terrorism more difficult. Britain is not a notably cohesive society and there is no prospect of it becoming one. Rather than trying to secure a consensus on values — even liberal values — we would be better off framing terms that allow us to co-exist in peace.

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Don’t expect the cyclone in Burma to have benign political side-effects

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle says that there is a natural hope that the interventions of the UN and charities in the disaster-stricken country will open it up. But history does not support such optimism

The hard choices that face the Father of the Mayor

Stanley Johnson

Stanley Johnson is adjusting to his new constitutional position in the life of London: not least deciding which clubs to avoid at lunchtime in order to dodge Boris’s journalist foes

Our transport system is not even ‘Third World’

Andrew Neil

Andrew Neil offers a despairing snapshot of cancelled trains, ludicrously expensive rail tickets, hell at Terminal 5, non-existent customer service. Does anyone want to fix this?

‘It’s harder for straights to feel Christian charity than gays’

Theo Hobson

Theo Hobson meets Gene Robinson, the only openly gay Anglican bishop, who says that homosexuals are more open to the Christian ‘message of radical change’

London Notebook

Barry Humphries

Barry Humphries on life in the capital

Happy 60th birthday, Israel: well done for surviving

Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips says that the prosperity and growing cultural confidence of Israel is a fitting riposte to the Western intelligentsia, American meddling and the daily propaganda assault that ignores the Islamisation of the Palestinians

I know why the government wants to send homosexuals back to Iran to be hanged

Rod Liddle

Gays are law-abiding, better-educated than the norm, economically productive and tend to be less of a drain on the state, says Rod Liddle. They don’t stand a chance in this country

We live in a state of emergency: and we are getting angrier

David Selbourne

Britain has lost its identity and its sense of nation, says David Selbourne. The citizen is treated as a mere ‘consumer’, liberty reduced to the ‘freedom to choose’, politicians held in contempt and hostile forces such as Islamism appeased. The stakes could scarcely be higher.

Milburn: What’s it all about, Gordon?

Fraser Nelson

Alan Milburn gives his first interview since Brown became PM, and tells Fraser Nelson that Gordon has converted to Blairism too late. Something new is needed now

The miners’ strike and the fight against Islamism

Charles Moore

Extremism dies when its lack of legitimacy is revealed, Charles Moore says. Muslim fundamentalism is as brittle as union militancy was in the Eighties