That the United Kingdom’s central institutions are rotten, crumbling, captured and perhaps beyond recovery is not news, but the Gaza intifada has crystallised the scale of institutional debasement. The brutalisation and murder of 1,400 Jews by Palestinian terrorists, and the open celebration of those actions by Jew-haters in this country, ought to have been met swiftly and resolutely. We do not do that sort of thing here. Instead, this demonic behaviour has granted us the most intimate and bracing glimpse at the decay inside the British state since the aftermath of 9/11.
At a time when statesmanship is called for, we are forced to choose between Rishi Sunak, a waste of an expensive suit, and Sir Keir Starmer, a waste of a slightly more affordable suit. Both men have been praised for having a ‘good war’, this on the strength of them having said that massacring Jews is jolly well not on and that Israel has a right to defend itself from barbarians sworn to its extermination. These are touted as examples of leadership, rather than the bare minimum required to be a morally functioning human being.
Why are our institutions in such a muddle?
Starmer has been meeting with Labour MPs, universally described as ‘Muslim Labour MPs’, over his stance on the conflict, in what appears to be a concession to communalist politics. Sunak says he wants ‘pauses’ in Israel’s defensive actions against the terrorist organisation that invaded its sovereign territory, massacred its civilians and kidnapped its children. This should not surprise us. Sunak’s government refuses even to recognise Israel’s capital city because it might upset the people who don’t think Israel should have any cities.
Sunak is still — still — resisting proscription of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Iranian state terror group that backs Hamas. After all, in the words of the Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, proscribing the IRGC would ‘mean that we could have no direct diplomatic relations with Iran’. Goodness. If we severed diplomatic ties, then how would Iran be able to arrest our ambassador, seize and interrogate Royal Navy personnel, or abduct our citizens for ransom?
At least we have our bold, no-nonsense Home Secretary. She’s not like the rest of the political class. When Hamas supporters take to the streets of London to celebrate a pogrom, Suella Braverman doesn’t sit on her hands, she fires off a sternly-worded press release. How British Islamists must cower at the thought of opening the Daily Express and seeing a disobliging quote from the Home Secretary. The jihad’s off, lads.
Which brings us to the Metropolitan Police, which has had some things to say about mobs calling for jihad in public. When the anti-extremism blog Harry’s Place tweeted a clip of a rally in the capital at which the crowd chanted for jihad to ‘liberate people from the concentration camp called Palestine’, the Met’s Twitter account popped up in the replies, unbidden, to inform everyone that ‘the word jihad has a number of meanings’. The crowd, you see, might have been calling for an inner spiritual meditation against the Zionist entity. In the Met’s defence, this is new territory. They’re not used to issuing statements about dangerous characters on the streets of London without suspending them from duty first.
How are our other institutions holding up? The BBC still refuses to call terrorists terrorists, or more accurately it refuses to call terrorists who kill Israelis terrorists. On the day of the 2011 Oslo bombing and Utoya mass shooting, the BBC speculated whether it was ‘a terror attack’. The day after the 2020 Nice church stabbings, the Corporation’s Paris correspondent called it ‘the third terrorist attack France has suffered in just over a month’, alongside a double stabbing outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo and the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty.
Just last week, the Corporation’s initial headline on the shooting attack in Belgium referred to it as a ‘terror attack’, though this was changed after the double standard was spotted. The BBC has been stressing its scrupulous commitment to due impartiality in its coverage of the conflict, a commitment illustrated by correspondent Jon Donnison when he opined on air that it was ‘hard to see’ what could have caused an explosion at al Ahli hospital in Gaza ‘other than an Israeli air strike’. It certainly would be hard to see if you took at face value the lightning-fast and unverified death toll of 500, but no BBC correspondent would do that. That initial death toll came from Hamas and the BBC would have treated it with the same scepticism it treats every statement from the Israeli government. Because, as we all know, the BBC is impartial.
Universities, those incubators of extremism, have performed as expected, too. Academics at Oxford proposed a motion to members of the University and College Union proclaiming ‘intifada until victory’. Students at Cambridge are debating the merits of a ‘mass uprising’ against Israel. The Jewish Chronicle has documented British academics branding the Hamas attacks a ‘legitimate struggle’, a ‘counteroffensive’ and ‘decolonisation’. It’s almost as if sending half of all 18-year-olds to be indoctrinated for three years by communists, grievance merchants, and sundry dismal postmodernists was a really bad idea. The damage cannot be undone but the rot can be stopped by removing taxpayer-funded research grants from those disciplines where extremism, division and group victimhood are habitually promoted. If that means other, valuable research is lost, then so be it. Academics in the arts, humanities and social sciences have had every opportunity to police their own. The standards they ought to have imposed on their fields can be achieved more crudely by defunding.
Why are our institutions in such a muddle? Because those in authority, not all of them but enough of them, are weak, feckless, clueless, cowardly and just passing time till they can collect their public sector pension, Britain’s highest honour for a lifetime of service to mediocrity. These are among the more benign of our leadership class. Then there is the resentment payroll, those paid handsomely by institutions public and private to visit their grievances on the rest of us, for if oppression doesn’t come with a consultancy fee, is it really oppression? The most malignant are those gripped by fashionable doctrines of self-loathing and self-abasement, primed to bend the knee to every fresh outrage decked out in the guise of righteous victimhood. These tend to be the ones with the most power, the ones who make the decisions, and they can be recognised from their near total contempt for whatever institution they happen to lead.
Things don’t have to be this way. We could be a country run by stalwarts, patriots and proud defenders of liberal democracy. We could have institutions that don’t vacillate between craven appeasement of homicidal antisemites and open apologetics for their ideology and methods. We could have a prime minister who recognises that there is no humanitarian alternative to Israeli victory: Israeli victory is the humanitarian outcome. We could have a leader of the opposition who tells his party that he will be standing with the embattled democracy under attack from fascists, and suggests they find another political party if they have a problem with that. We could have a Foreign Secretary who pushes for the IRGC to be proscribed and a Home Secretary who introduces a Bill to make calls for jihad against Israel or for the destruction of the Jewish state a criminal offence.
Instead, we have the leaders and institutions we have, crumbling under their own moral desiccation, each as unfit for purpose as the other.
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