Allister Heath

I stand by what I wrote

Matthew Parris is wrong about the threat of Islamic terrorism

Even the most perceptive and brilliant commentators have their blind spots. In the case of Matthew Parris, a giant of modern British journalism if ever there was one, it is an inability to appreciate the true extent of the threat posed by Islamic terrorism. This was demonstrated again by his column in these pages last week, where he attacked a recent Spectator/YouGov poll and my accompanying analysis of its findings. The poll revealed the British public to be remarkably hawkish; Matthew believes this to be a distortion.

Matthew recently criticised in the harshest terms the thesis expounded by Tory MP Michael Gove in his book Celsius 7/7. For Matthew, to argue that ‘the West is blithely unaware of a huge and pressing danger in the form of worldwide Islamist plotting, and that an urgent imperative to foil this should be at the centre of Western foreign policy’ is to be ‘stark, staring bonkers’. Last week he added that anybody expressing himself in terms of The Spectator’s cover lines summarising the poll’s findings — ‘This is war; we are losing; we need tougher policies; we will be attacked’ — would be deemed ‘an obvious nutter’.

I too wish the terrorist threat had been exaggerated, but I fear instead that tragedies such as 7/7 represent only the first, early stages of a larger onslaught; unless we act, it will only be a matter of time before we are faced with fanatical groups armed with suitcase nuclear or chemical weapons that could wreak unimaginable devastation. If Matthew thinks I am crazy for believing this, then so be it; but he is misreading public opinion if he thinks that most people do not support tougher action.

Had our poll been mere neoconservative snake oil, we would not have asked whether people wished to pursue a foreign policy closer to that of the US or whether they would prefer closer links with Europe — nor would I have spent a third of my analysis highlighting the result, which found 45 per cent to 14 in favour of Europe.

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