Politicians remain in total denial over extremism

We were arguing in the Question Time green room before we even went live. Baroness Warsi, who is a Conservative in the way I am still 25, requested that I define an Islamist. “Admit it, you can’t, can you?” 

“Leave it for the cameras,” I bellowed back: “I know perfectly well what it is, so do you. I need some air.”

I walked dramatically out the room, turned a corner and phoned a friend. “What’s an Islamist?” I asked. “I have a feeling it’s going to come up and I don’t know what to say.”

I do know what it is, of course, I was just looking for a definition that wouldn’t get me arrested or my head cut off. Welcome to Britain’s multiculturalism debate. We conduct it behind nervous smiles. 

First question to the panel: can one speak one’s mind about other religions? Well, yes, haha - but… The Baroness said Lee Anderson’s infamous remarks about Sadiq Khan were obviously “racist”; David Lammy accused the Tories of “tearing us apart”; and Caroline Lucas suggested they have “lurched to the hard-Right”. That left me to hedge my way through saying “maybe we’ve got a problem”, bearing in mind my mother’s plea not to say anything about Islam (which rather suggests that we do).

This is a common experience: I find my view, which is about as wet as a conservative gets, is nevertheless so unusual and distasteful to the intelligentsia that when I voice it, I not only feel lonely, or wrong, but possibly insane. Did I dream the 7-7 bombings? That teacher driven into hiding because he showed a cartoon? The threats that shut down a Commons debate? It didn’t help that the news of George Galloway’s victory in Rochdale came through in the sleepy hours of Friday morning, made possible - or perhaps I imagined this, too - by Labour axing a candidate who spread conspiracy theories about Jews.

I woke up to find the Baroness standing over my SuperTed duvet. “Just a nightmare,” she said softly. “Go back to sleep.”

See, the official consensus is that multiculturalism works great, it’s just undermined by individuals who try to set us against each other. Thus the liberal state imagines itself challenged less by religious traditions or political philosophies than by a general spirit of “extremism”, the classically British concern that some chaps are taking things a bit too far. 

Cancel them, arrest them or exile them; isolate the trouble-makers and the problem will go away. By this fantasyland logic, anyone who points out that Islamism is a problem can be as much an extremist as the Islamist themselves, because they’re all stirring the pot.

This was the essence of Rishi Sunak’s strange, vacuous statement on Friday - delivered outside No10 as if we were going to war with Galloway’s hat - in which he pledged to defend British freedom by clamping down on our civil liberties. The UK is “a patriotic, liberal, democratic society” to which “immigrants… have integrated and contributed”, a Garden of Eden now threatened by slithery “Islamists and the far Right”. To prove this axis exists, he noted that Nick Griffin, “the racist former leader of the British National Party”, had endorsed Galloway. 

Elevating Griffin like this was dumb; he’s a nobody who might claim to love Gaza today but told Question Time in 2009 that the BNP was “the only political party” that backed Israel “foursquare” over Hamas. And to tar Galloway with an unsolicited endorsement was also deeply unfair. Perhaps he is a populist Pied Piper travelling the country in search of a constituency to exploit, but why did the PM avoid comment on the 40 per cent of Rochdale residents who voted for him? That’s a more significant endorsement than Mr Griffin’s. 

Sunak was correct to call Britain a successful multicultural democracy, for we’ve long been four nations in one (it always blows my mind that SuperTed was created as a Welsh language cartoon). But if culture is more than artifice – and I’m afraid many shallow liberals do see it as exotic cooking and colourful weddings – then it is a phenomenon that shapes belief, charts boundaries around traditions, and creates the potential for tension with outsiders. 

Thus the long-consequences of mass migration are intense arguments we might otherwise not have had about foreign policy, religion, sexual freedom and what is even up for debate, because the Islamic concept of the sacred takes certain issues off the table. Before going on Question Time, I weighed-up how to phrase this, and concluded with a carefully worded provocation: were I to call Jesus a fraud, I said to the audience, I’d get a few angry letters. If I said something analogous about Islam, I’d get threats of violence.

There are those who will insist, have insisted, that I’m talking nonsense – either that the fear is unreasonable or, as MPs have reassured me on a whole host of issues: “I get death threats from fanatics all the time”. Water off a duck’s back. Fine, I’ve said, but I don’t want to get one – even if the sender is some loser sounding off in his mother’s basement – and isn’t it a sign that something’s gone wrong with democracy if there is a perceived danger about exercising your right to free speech?

I prefer that very British quality: the quiet life. The most I’m willing to bring to the debate about Islamism is the courage to admit I’m too cowardly to talk about it.