Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.
According to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) Britain must bring millions more immigrants into the UK to sustain our ageing population. As the Telegraph reports it, the OBR study has found: ‘…. that allowing more than 140,000 immigrants into Britain a year, equivalent to 6million people, would help increase the overall number of people
Belated thanks to readers who wrote in about the BBC’s Question Time last week (still viewable here). It was a slightly odd edition, I thought. The panel – Margaret Hodge, Danny Alexander, Sarah Woollaston, Tony Robinson and me – found ourselves in agreement on more things than is usual on the show. On party-funding we agreed
The weekend brought the sad news of the death of Kenneth Minogue. Intellectually and physically active to the last, he died on Friday at the age of 82, while returning from a conference on the Galapagos Islands. Spectator readers will remember his essays and reviews for the magazine stretching over many decades. Some may have
As an addendum to yesterday’s post I thought I might remind readers of something about Keith Vaz. The chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee has of course just applauded the banning of two American authors from Britain because of their criticism of Islam. So I turn to Joseph Anton – the illuminating fatwa-memoir released
According to the Home Office if you are a non-Muslim and you make the following statement your presence will be deemed ‘not conducive to the public good’ and you will be barred from entering the United Kingdom: ‘It [Islam] is a religion and a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for
A terrific debate last night at the Spectator: ‘Assad is a war criminal – the West must intervene in Syria.’ I don’t think there was any disagreement on the first part of the motion. But there certainly was on the second. I spoke in opposition to the motion and much of the argument I made
Sadiq Khan MP had a piece in the Telegraph last week attacking an excellent piece by Charles Moore in the same paper the Saturday before. In his piece Sadiq makes a number of claims which are worth rebutting. First is his question, ‘Would we accept the Jewish community being talked about the way the Muslim community
I don’t think, so far as I can remember, that I have ever previously found any sympathy with the sayings of top Islamist cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. But I do appreciate his recent sentiment that Hezbollah is in fact not the ‘Army of God’ but rather the ‘Army of Satan.’ And I can find only
Is there not something odd about a Prime Minister talking of getting involved in the Syrian civil war on the very day that another 4,500 British service personnel had their redundancy notices handed to them? It has always been my belief that you should never even tinker in a conflict unless you are prepared to
There is a terrific piece in today’s Telegraph by Charles Moore which I very much recommend. It is titled ‘Woolwich outrage: we are too weak to face up to the extremism in our midst’. In the piece Moore rightly criticises our societal inability to deal with Islamism. In particular he criticises the switch of attention
There is a superb piece in the magazine this week by the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, titled ‘Atheism has failed: only religion can defeat the barbarians.’ Whether you agree with his diagnosis or his preferred remedy, it is a characteristically thought-provoking and vital piece. It is the third piece in the magazine this year to
The other week I had the honour of spending some time with a great hero. Chen Guangcheng is the blind Chinese human rights activist who made world news last year when he escaped from house arrest and made his way to Beijing where he claimed asylum in the US embassy. Now living in the US
How did a blind Chinese dissident scale the walls of his house while under house arrest, evade government surveillance, travel hundreds of miles to Beijing, seek asylum in the American embassy and in the process shine attention on a horror the world has grown used to? The questions for Chen Guangcheng are legion. Last week
Readers might like to know that I have a new book out today. It is called ‘Islamophilia: a very metropolitan malady’ and is available on kindle, e-readers and all that sort of thing. It is available from the publishers, emBooks here and from Amazon here. I will have more to say in the coming days,
I thought readers might be interested in this piece from me in the new issue of Standpoint which is just out. It is titled ‘Forget “Islamophobia”. Let’s tackle Islamism’. In the wake of recent attacks there has been an upsurge in claims of ‘Islamophobia’. As I explain in the piece, even if such a thing
Readers may like to know that I have a cover piece in this week’s magazine titled ‘The Enemy Within’. It is available here for subscribers. (Non-subscribers can subscribe here.) It looks at what – if anything – will change after the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich. It is also an account of just
The decapitation of a British soldier on a street in London is the latest disgusting new low in this country’s experience of Islamist terror. But everything else in the aftermath of the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby is hideously familiar. What the country has gone through since last Wednesday is the same endless turning over
Might I urge people to watch the following video? In recent days the press has inevitably focussed most attention on the perpetrators of the Woolwich attack. Here is a video from earlier today of the wife and step-father of Drummer Lee Rigby speaking about him and their love for him.
Immediately after the 7/7 bombings the then police-chief Brian Paddick told a press conference: ‘Islam and terrorism do not go together.’ Now, after Woolwich, the Prime Minister has said, ‘There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act.’ Even after all these years our leaders continue to make this terrible mistake. Politicians or
Similar attacks in recent years include the beheading of a Dutch film-maker, Theo van Gogh, on a street in Amsterdam in 2004 and the killing of French soldiers by Mohammed Merah in Toulouse. Over recent years, those who have warned that such attacks would come here have been attacked as ‘racists’, ‘fascists’ and — most
