Rishi Sunak has joined the long line of prime ministers who have declared that enough is enough, and the country must act to root out Islamist extremism. His speech from the steps of 10 Downing Street on Friday was hailed in some Conservative quarters as ‘striking intervention’. Nevertheless, the sceptic might wonder why it’s taken the Prime Minister until now to face up to the fact that many Jews do not feel safe in the British capital.
Those same sceptics are entitled to think that despite Sunak’s vow to ‘implement a new robust framework’ to tackle extremism, nothing will change. Britain has been here many times before.
Sunak has at least admitted that Britain is menaced by Islamist extremism
A week after a homegrown Islamist terror cell murdered 52 people in London in July 2005, Tony Blair delivered an eloquent and honest speech about Islamist extremism: ‘It plays on our tolerance and good nature,’ said the prime minister. ‘It exploits the tendency to guilt of the developed world, as if it is our behaviour that should change.’ The greatest danger, Blair added, ‘is that we fail to face up to the nature of the threat we are dealing with.’
A month later, Blair outlined a raft of new anti-terror measures, decided upon after consultations with Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. The first measure focused on ‘deportation and exclusion’, and a bullish Blair declared: ‘Let no one be in any doubt. The rules of the game are changing.’
Blair said that he expected resistance from human rights lawyers and organisations but his government was up for the fight. ‘Should legal obstacles arise, we will legislate further, including, if necessary, amending the Human Rights Act, in respect of the interpretation of the European convention on human rights.’
But apathy and inaction continued to characterise Britain’s approach to Islamist extremism, even when the Conservatives were elected to power in 2010. Two years later the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Britain could not deport the radical Islamist cleric Abu Qatada to Jordan for fear he would not get a fair trial (he was eventually deported in 2013). In response to the ECHR ruling, prime minister David Cameron bemoaned the fact that ‘we do have a real problem when it comes to foreign nationals who threaten our security’.
Cameron, like Blair, focused on foreign nationals as a convenient way of distracting attention from the real danger: homegrown extremists. Three of the four Islamists who carried out the 2005 bombings were born and bred in Yorkshire, and the fourth had arrived in the UK from Jamaica aged five.
The two men who murdered off-duty soldier Lee Rigby in London in 2013 were also British-born. After that atrocity, Cameron read a statement in front of 10 Downing Street in which he promised that: ‘We will defeat violent extremism by standing together, by backing our police and security services and above all by challenging the poisonous narrative of extremism on which this violence feeds.’
Four years to the day after Rigby was murdered, 22 young people were blown up by a suicide bomber at the Manchester Arena. The attacker had been born and brought up in Manchester. From outside Ten Downing Street, Prime Minister Theresa May delivered a statement, vowing to ‘thwart such attacks in future, to take on and defeat the ideology that often fuels this violence’.
May’s statement contained 1,150 words but not one of them was ‘Islam’. Unlike her predecessors, May didn’t even have the courage to specifically name the ideology that had inspired the Manchester bomber.
Nor did her successor, Boris Johnson, when he paid tribute to his colleague, David Amess, murdered by an Islamist extremist in his surgery in October 2021. In what must rank as one of the most despicable sessions in the history of the House, neither Johnson, Keir Starmer or any other parliamentarian could bring themselves to properly condemn the ideology responsible for the savage death of one of their own.
For two hours politicians on all sides of the House honoured the memory of Amess, but the only time ‘Islam’ was mentioned was when the Tory MP, Peter Bottomley, said: ‘We stand with Muslims against Islamophobia’. Sunak did at least mention ‘Islamic extremists’ in his speech last Friday but there was little else in his statement to offer much hope that anything will fundamentally change.
It is reported that the PM wants to block foreign ‘hate’ preachers from entering Britain, a largely pointless measure when there are already plenty of homegrown preachers spewing anti-Semitism and other prejudices each week. As far back as 2005 BBC’s Panorama reported on the bigotry found in some British mosques. That was the year Tony Blair promised that the rules of the game were changing.
The Islamists’ assault on British democracy is being extensively reported in France. There’s concern but not much surprise at what is happening. France has always been way ahead of Britain in understanding the threat posed by Islamist extremism, as well as its toxic alliance with the far-left. The French call it ‘Islamo–gauchisme’, a phrase coined by the philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff more than twenty years ago.
The naivety and complacency of the British has been a source of bewilderment to the French for decades. In the late 1990s their intelligence services dubbed the British capital ‘Londonistan’ because of its readiness to accommodate dangerous Islamist extremists from around the world.
The French newspaper Le Figaro recently published a painfully honest column by a former French diplomat who had spent much of his career in London. François-Joseph Schichan described the recent chaos on the streets and in parliament, and mentioned the ‘curious tolerance’ of the police towards the people threatening Britain’s democracy.
Schichan concluded that Britain’s model of multiculturalism had irrevocably broken down. ‘The UK has long practised a form of “laissez-faire”, allowing the expression of cultural and religious identities in society,’ he wrote. ‘This approach allowed fundamental changes in British society to go unnoticed, perpetuating the myth of happy diversity.’
While he acknowledged that France was also engaged in a bitter struggle against Islamist extremism, Schichan pinpointed one crucial difference between the two countries: France is fighting back. Whether it’s expelling imams for preaching hate, closing extremist mosques and religious schools or dismantling Islamist networks within amateur sports clubs (one of the extremists’ most effective methods of proselyting). In contrast, Britain’s political class remains in ‘denial’.
Sunak has at least admitted that Britain is menaced by Islamist extremism, but blocking a few foreign preachers and asking police to be less tolerant of anti-Semitism are superficial measures. The cowardice of the British establishment has allowed Islamism to become embedded in all forms of society this century; to root it out will be, as David Cameron said in a speech in 2015, ‘the struggle of our generation’. Nine years after that speech, Britain is losing this struggle and must act decisively before it is too late.
The first step is to remove the intellectual straitjacket of ‘Islamophobia’ – what the French did years ago – which is preventing constructive criticism of a religion that has been immune from censure for too long. If Britain doesn’t accept the challenge, if the country remains in denial, then at some point in the not-too-distant future that French nickname for London may be a reality and not just mockery.
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