Squeezing out democracy
Sir: Melanie Phillips did a first-rate job in pinning down the Islamofascist ‘elephant in the room’ (‘The clash of uncivilisations’, 24 October). There was, however, one area not touched on: how the Islamists and the BNP are really two sides of the same coin.
I live six miles from the BNP heartland of Burnley and stood as a Labour council candidate in a nearby borough last year. Trudging through council estates, I made it my business to ignore instructions from the party to knock only on the doors of former Labour voters. So the campaign gave me weeks of face-to-face contact with the so-called ‘white underclass’ who, like Phillips, could not understand why kid gloves are only donned for the violence-threatening Islamists; why we sit back while Islamists treat women like ‘s***’; and why we tolerate our military being abused by Islamist thugs. People were angry and that anger feeds the BNP.
So I explained how, behind the scenes, the BNP and radical Islam work together: from Nick Griffin’s sharing of a platform with the jailed Islamic fascist Abu Hamza, to the anti-Semitism, homophobia and Holocaust denial which both groups share with Iran’s mullahs. I could almost hear the mental cogs turning as it dawned on the voters that both the BNP and Islamic fascists share ideas designed to maximise divisions and smash freedom.
It is a comparison too often ignored by the left, who seem obsessed by the BNP, yet paralysed when it comes to tackling Islamofascism. The similarities of these two extremists should also strike a chord with moderate Muslims. And our main political parties should grasp that we are indeed dealing with two forces acting symbiotically to squeeze the very life out of our fragile democracy.
Maurice Jones
Waterfoot, Lancashire
Sir: I welcomed the article by Melanie Phillips. I had been troubled all week — the previous Saturday I had come across a big demonstration in my local high street. I would call these people Islamofascists. The men were shouting aggressively about the corrupt West and the women, covered and looking like pillboxes, were handing out leaflets. I was too angry to take one. Where were the anti-fascists who apparently always appear whenever the BNP or the English Defence League demonstrate? I was very depressed as I had no idea who I could complain to. I thought my local Tory council would not want to get involved (partly because they now have such a large Muslim electorate). I feel much better now as I realise I am certainly not alone in my thoughts.
Cheryl Hounslow
Hounslow, Middx
God is dead?
Sir: Revd Robinson is surely correct when he points to Christianity’s historical claims to honour rationality, and maybe even truth (Letters, 24 October), but it is anachronistic and disingenuous to take advantage of the fig leaf of a historical truth to elide the inevitability of a 21st-century one; namely that the same rationalism given impetus by Christian thought has long since eaten its own tail.
That God is dead, killed by Christian man’s inexorable rationalism, is hardly a new thought, Nietzsche having proclaimed it well over a century ago. This is not a matter for celebration. But nostalgia for a lost certainty does not excuse the tortured logic or intellectual dishonesty of 21st-century religious apologists who seek to obscure the undeniable irrationality of religion’s metaphysical pretensions when faced with the blinding light of today’s scientific reason. Christianity’s claim to rationality was long ago sacrificed on the altar of its doctrinal absurdities.
That the Greco-Christian tradition nourished the spirit of rationalism cannot overcome the fact that ultimately that same rationalism gives the lie to its progenitor. This is not the first hand that has been bitten by the mouth it feeds, whatever the poignancy of the irony.
Simon Joyce
Bangkok
Employable school-leavers
Sir: Matthew Lynn is right — a generation has been led blindly down the garden path by government, teachers and their parents into believing that to hold a university degree of virtually any sort will be a passport to a more successful and prosperous working life (‘The recession generation’, 17 October). Far from it: for many it represents the burden of debt they carry as they emerge blinking and disorientated into the real world after a lifetime of study.
Hundreds of CVs arrive at our London recruitment agency every day, 90 per cent from graduates. Strip away those from the top six or seven universities with meaningful degrees such as economics, English, maths, law, the sciences, engineering and languages, and you are left with a mountainous pile of mediocrity, where it is hard to discern one from the other. In fact it is the ones that belong to the smaller percentage who chose not to go into further education after school which often stand out from the crowd. If they can spell and communicate well, have decent IT skills and experiences beyond those most readily associated with student life, then they are more likely than not to be seen as the more employable.
Joss Walker
London SW3
In a foreign field
Sir: I smiled a bit when reading the quotation from Ian Jack’s new book with which Alexander Chancellor ended his review (Books, 17 October). Ian Jack seemed to have found a lost British civilisation in West Bengal: Serampur was a Danish ‘colony’ until 1845. It saw the establishing of the third ‘Danish’ university. Nice thought for him to find Britishness precisely there of all places.
Hans Hauge
Aarhus, Denmark
Swapping cronies
Sir: I was utterly depressed to read that the Tories are drawing up a list of Tory friends who could run various quangos (Politics, 17 October). I rather hoped that they might draw up a list of the most competent people, whether friends or not, to run quangos. Or even abolish a few quangos. Are we just swapping Gordon’s cronies for Dave’s? If so, I shan’t bother to vote.
Celia Haddon
By email
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