I Intend To Escape ......................And Come Back

The Greatness of Cyrille Regis

To get an indication of how great a footballer Cyrille Regis was, and what players of his era overcame, watch these six minutes of highlights from West Brom's 5-3 win at Old Trafford in 1979.

Make sure you watch to the end for the description manager Ron Atkinson gives of Regis 'one of the coloured front people'. He went on to be much more than that.

The Perils of Media Fact Checking

One journalistic tool that is now used frequently is to 'fact-check' particular claims or statements by politicians and campaign groups. What could possibly be wrong with that?

Well, quite a bit actually. This is Mollie Ziegler's take:

"The 'fact-checking trend' meant that journalists would gain more power. They wouldn't just get to determine which stories saw the light of day and which were killed or downplayed; they would pick the angle and framing for the stories and determine who was quoted and how. And through fact-checking, they would tell people what to think about claims made in these stories."

Mollie Ziegler, "Trump vs the Media" (Encounter Broadside No:51, Encounter Books: New York) p. 40 - 41.

Fear For Our Democracy In 2018? It Has Never Looked Healthier

On the Left Foot Forward website, the Green MEP Molly Scott Cato, has written an article saying that, after, the events of recent years, she fears for our democracy. It seems a few people shooting boo at High Court judges or Tory Remainers represents an existential crisis.

Below is my reply. I have no idea if Left Foot Forward welcomes, or censures, critical comment, so I have posted it here just in case.

It seems strange to be lectured on democracy, by an MEP who cannot accept the largest mass vote in our people's history. Every vote counts for Molly, except when those votes reject membership of the European Union.

Brexit was a revolt of the little man against the European project. It was also a firm rejection of the EU's pseudo-democratic model - consider technocrats had already taken charge in Italy and Greece when those countries dared to step outside the rules of the troika.

Brexit knocked David Cameron and George Osborne off their perch, and may yet lead to the abolition of the House of Lords if Lord Adonis and his chums use their ermine to thwart the will of the people.

Leaving the European Union offers us the chance to revitalise our democracy from the local level upwards, moving away from the top down process beloved in Brussels. It ends at a stroke the excuses of our own politicians, who can no longer blame their own failings to deliver x or y, on the EU.

How the Green Party, who once believed in localism, came to be the most rabidly pro-Brussels of our political parties, desperate to stay in the single market, is perhaps an issue for those writing histories of political 'capture'.

But let 2019 be the year we remind ourselves that democracy, if it means anything, means delivering for the people. And that means a full, clean Brexit where the soverignty of the British people is restored.

Brexit Resisted? The Remain Activists Trying to Link Brexit to Neo-Nazis

On 9th November, ITV showed a documentary, Undercover: Inside Britain's New Far-Right. It no longer seems to be on ITV's website, but is available at various points online, for example here.

Documentaries of this type were the staple of an earlier era - remember World In Action in the 1990s? The attempts to convince a sceptical public that a far-right terrorist machine was being established in Britain, via the group Combat 18? The security services, under pressure from cuts in an era that was post Soviet but pre 9/11, were needed to save us from this terrible menace. Similar programmes appeared on animal rights activists, and even the far-left. They did not age well.

Politically, this documentary was much more ambitious. It was about resisting Brexit and seeking to garner support for further controls on social media. My colleague Larry O'Hara explains this fully in his article here (17,000 words long so not suitable for people who can only deal with Tweets/sound-bites/You-tube videos)

Larry summarises his case thus:

The coverage of groups like Britain First, the National Front and Generation Identity (GI) was hardly convincing. For example, there was a lot of focus on GI “military style camps” which are a joke. What wasn’t mentioned were actual military-style camps that have taken place in the UK recently: the Siggurd camps (later rebranded as Legion camps).

1) the rather sad and isolated figure of failed UKIP leadership contender Anne Marie Waters is shown as having poor political judgement by consorting with fascists and, er, saying in private about Islam what she says in public

2) long term Searchlight/Hope Not Hate infiltrator Peter Rushton (whose card I marked back in 1994) is shown twice saying Brexit was about ‘Rights for Whites’. Not only do I disagree, I take strong exception to viewers being manipulated by a prepared script in this way. So strong was my exception I have taken the unprecedented step of quoting from one of many intelligence reports in our possession concerning various assets: in this instance one written about Rushton by his handlers in 2002 when he was under fire for being an infiltrator, though supported by the rather naive John Tyndall.

3) I reveal for the first time the amounts paid to Hope Not Hate personnel by pro-EU group Better for Britain, especially interesting given HNHs charitable status and feigned neutrality during the EU referendum and since. HNH are far from neutral commentators on Brexit - they are players central to preventing its implementation.

The second strand of the show was about whipping up hysteria concerning social media. Which explains why an irrelevant group like Britain First had their strength and support exaggerated, and a group like Generation Identity, who barely exist in the UK, were given such prominence. What a coincidence (Not) that since the article was written it has transpired that both Britain First and Generation Identity have had their Twitter accounts suspended.

All this overlaps with the pro-Remainer conspiracy theories peddled by especially Carole Cadwalladr of the Guardian/Observer regarding Russian influence on the EU Referendum. I merely dip my toes into the seething whirlpool that is this debate, which I will return to elsewhere.

In any event, I trust the above has whetted the appetite of those of you interested in referenced argument on the important matters to alluded to above. I did raise many of these issues with the documentary-makers prior to publication, in emails to David Henshaw of Hardcash Productions, but they declined to reply.

They can dish it out, but can’t take it.

December Will Be Magic Again

From 2008 - 2015 I did a lot of security work in order to finance my PhD. Some of the best times were working as a doorman at Epsom Downs racecourse at the Christmas parties, where an enormous effort went into preparing the Queens and Duchess stands for dinner dances.

There are two great pluses to door work. Attractive women speak to you, and you meet some real characters, good and bad. After one party, a man who must have been well into his late 60s, but still had a military bearing, talked at length about his security work in the Gulf, and showed me the scar he got brawling with the late London gangster John Bindon. Before I could ask my new friend if he felt John Bindon and Princess Margaret really had been an item, he was gone, very politely trying to get the phone number of a lady in her early 60s I had seen sitting at an adjoining table. On a loop, reception in the Queens Stand played a variety of Christmas songs, of which "December Will Be Magic Again" by Kate Bush was easily my favourite. It was playing as Bindon's former adversary and his lady friend swapped numbers.

Hafiz Saeed: A Series of Curious Developments

Yesterday I had a short article published about the developments surrounding Hafiz Saeed, a prominent Pakistani jihadist, currently trying to enter politics in the Islamic Republic.

You can view the piece, on the European Foundation for South Asian studies website, here.

A Brief History of Jihadism: The British South Asian Nexus

A few weeks ago I was asked to write a short piece by SOAS University of London, for the section of the Guardian website they use to promote the university's work and some of its ideas and thinkers.

This is my contribution, A Brief History of Jihadism: The British South Asian Nexus.

Duties and Responsibilities in Counter-Terrorism

Several newspapers and news sites have covered the release, in Pakistan, of a US-Canadian couple, Caitlan Coleman and Joshua Boyle. They had been kidnapped in Afghanistan in October 2012, and had three children whilst being held by the Haqqani Network.

Significant in this is the tone of the US government statement. This certainly seems to refer to other Americans (and other westerners?) in a similar predicament, but also that the US government has pretty clearly expectations of Pakistan to address this.

It may be too early to talk of a 'Trump Doctrine' but at least part of what we see forming is a desire for other countries to take on duties and responsibilities, with no doubt some behind the scenes encouragment from either carrot or stick. There is little doubt here, that Pakistan was held responsible either for the kidnapping itself, or its continuation.

The times they are a changing?

On Douglas Murray: How We Got to Where We Are, Yet Never Wanted to Be

“The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam” – Douglas Murray (Bloomsbury: London, £18.99).

One of the publishing successes of 2017 has been Douglas Murray’s examination of the changes we see occurring all around us. There are two reasons for this – Murray is a considered, thoughtful writer with a much greater degree of empathy than he is given credit for. The second is the terrible events at the Manchester Arena on the 22 May. Murray’s explanation of how we reached the stage where our children are being blown up at pop concerts, was surprisingly commissioned by and shown on the BBC. That eloquence, and dismay at the mistakes the political class has made, characterises this book.

It has several overlapping themes. Central is Europe’s contemporary lack of confidence in itself, its history, its beliefs and practice. This has conjoined with an era of large scale immigration, often of people with little or no intention of becoming anything like the citizens of the nations they have moved to. Murray roots his work in a sound statistical basis, and the position that historically governments have tended to both lie to their populations about immigration, usually by underestimating demographic change, and then subsequently to do little to address concerns. Instead curious games are played out. Examples vary from the serious – that so few illegal migrants are ever deported - to the surreal. Consider the Office for National Statistics listing Mohammed and Muhammad separately in their annual lists of children’s names until “this was immaterial because the name in all its variants had indeed become the most popular boy’s name in England and Wales. At which point the official line changed to ‘And so what?” (p.313)

Murray explains how academic sleight of hand has been necessary to provide an evidence base that immigration is inherently an economic good, despite the awkward reality that an insurance based welfare system open to all, is unlikely to prosper if significant numbers of people can take out who are yet to pay in. The chameleon like nature of political leaders emerges repeatedly – in one decade it is racist to expect migrants to speak the language of their host country, in another it becomes essential. Sometimes assimilation is promoted, at other times the retention of migrant cultures, with concessions to practices, like sharia law, which appear incompatible with existing structures and rights. Confused? Everybody is.
That immigration may undermine, not strengthen liberal values was something Britain had warning of first, via the Rushdie affair in 1989, an event Murray considers “a crash course in the rules of Islam” (p.131). If so, the response of successive British governments has become distinctly un-British – to play down freedom of speech and the rights of the individual, and to increasingly assert the group rights of multi-culturalism. Those worst affected by this are often minority communities themselves “ordinary Muslims suddenly had a branch of religious representation inserted between them and their political representatives” (p.132) often via groups like the Muslim Council of Britain, dominated by the British end of Pakistan’s main clerical party, the Jamaat-e-Islami. As Murray concludes “No one had prepared for the possibility that those arriving might only not become integrated but might bring many social and religious views with them” (p.152).

If this book were simply a critique of blunders made, it would risk polemic. Murray avoids this, in part through his considered style, in part through interviews with those coming to places like Lampedusa, a transit island between north Africa and Sicily, and Lesbos, one of the Greek Islands closest to Turkey. Most want to go to Germany, although Sweden and the UK are also popular destinations. In 2015 “around 400,000 migrants moved through Hungary’s territory alone. Fewer than twenty of them stopped to claim asylum in Hungary” (p. 81). Whilst empathetic about the conditions many are fleeing, Murray is never naïve. He reminds us that the father of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, whose dead body washed up on the Turkish coast, dominating newspaper headlines in September 2015, took the regrettable decision to leave behind a paid job in a safe country, Turkey, to try to sail for a new life in Europe. Whilst his death provoked emotional political outpourings in Europe and North America, in Muslim majority countries there was little or no interest. Western guilt, absorbed from the top down in our societies, be it about colonialism, race or the holocaust, ensured entirely different responses.

What to do about all this? Even if we wanted to solve the problems of Eritrea, to take just one source of mass migration, where would we begin? The response of the EU was to give six billion Euros to Turkey to prevent its use as a transit point for migrants, thus ensuring Europe’s taxpayers (you and me) pay for the crisis. A chapter on terrorism, violence and sexual assaults by migrants is entitled ‘Learning to Live With It’, the view of terrorism forever associated with the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. A theme Murray returns to time after time is the deceit, we might at times say self-deceit, of our ruling elites. Mrs Merkel for example, was able to declare multi-culturalism a failure in Germany in 2010, then to decide it could work in 2015. Perhaps we need to hold these leaders to account a little more?

A deeper, philosophical question, is the issue of what replaces Christianity in our post-Christian societies? What provides us with a foundation and the moorings needed in times of stormy weather? Here Murray suggests the countries of eastern Europe may have a better basis from which to survive, than those in the west. They at least, seem set to avoid the wave of jihadist attacks that has so shaken France, Belgium, Germany and Britain. As for here, even our architecture seems to be in decline “In London the great building to commemorate the turn of the millennium wasn’t even a structure built to last, but a vast empty tent” (p.263).

There are omissions. Margaret Thatcher, who believed Islam could be used as a bulwark against Communism and was consequently indulgent of some of its most extreme manifestations, is not mentioned once. Murray’s own flirtation with a secular god that failed, neo-Conservatism, is similarly overlooked. In discussing the greatest living French novelist, Michel Houellebecq and his work Submission, Murray misses perhaps the obvious comparison – just as Solzhenitsyn chronicled the disasters of the Soviet era, so Houellebecq’s fiction chronicles the disasters of an increasingly Islamised France. There are few better than Murray though in placing these events in their political, historical and philosophical contexts. If this is a book that ends pessimistically, it is because we have much to be worried about.

Terrorism In Britain and Its Relationship to Pakistan

On 19 September I spoke at a side meeting to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, organised by the European Foundation for South Asian Studies.

You can read my paper "Terrorism in Pakistan and the Role of Pakistani Diaspora in the UK" (membership required) on the Academia.edu site here, and this is the video of my talk, which lasta around 17 minutes.

The Left's Jewish Problem: A Review

The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism by Dave Rich (London: Biteback Publishing, 2016, 292 pages, no illustrations, £12.99, ISBN 978 1785 901 201, paperback)

A contentious issue during the Corbyn revolution has been the relationship between the Labour left and the Jewish community. Historically this is an aberration, as the British left was long considered a welcoming place for Jews, whether practising or secular. Of the main parties, Labour was perhaps the most explicitly pro-Israel until at least the 1960s, whilst at one point the Communist Party of Great Britain had an estimated 10% of its membership of Jewish heritage (p.6) How then do we get to a situation where Jewish Chronicle (04/05/16) poll data suggests only 8.5% of British Jews are likely to vote Labour, and where the party has conducted three inquiries into alleged anti-Semitism almost in succession?

Dave Rich is arguably better placed than anyone within the Jewish community to analyse this dislocation. Deputy Director of Communications at the Community Security Trust, the primary organisation established to provide security advice and protection to British Jews and their property, Rich was completing a PhD on left wing anti-Zionism from the 1960s-1980s as Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour party. His historical knowledge ensures that as well as seeking to explain contemporary political controversies, there is plenty here for the political train spotter and fan of socialist esoterica. That the Young Liberals considered themselves part of the new left (p.42), that George Galloway was a member of the British Anti-Zionist Organisation (BAZO) or that Israel produced an anti-Zionist communist party, Matzpen, that significantly influenced British Trotskyists (p.101) is easily forgotten.

Rich situates the formation of Israel in a distinct background – that it was created by Jews within Europe’s left tradition. Zionists had to fight a traditional colonial power - Britain - in an insurgency to establish their state. This is a book which works hard to bring in overlooked and perhaps inconvenient historical facts – in 1944 Labour supported transferring Arabs out of Palestine to make way for Jews (p.5) and the Soviet bloc’s initial support for Israel came via both rhetoric at the United Nations and arms shipments to fight Arab forces (p.2-3).
Public criticism of Israel on the left seems to have begun not in 1948 with what Palestinians designate the nakba, but with Israel’s greatest military triumph – the Six-Day War against Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The noun ‘Palestinian’ did not appear in New Left Review before 1967 (p.24). Rich observes the seismic change that was commencing on the left as identity politics began to meet, match and in time supplant socio-economic concerns. His categorisation of the new left in class terms is particularly valuable:
… the new Left effectively represented a new social class, rooted in intellectual and cultural professions, populated by public sector workers, and whose political agenda would come to be dominated by identity and iconoclasm (p.8).

From the new left is seen to come the view Zionism is racist and Israel a remnant of western imperialism (p.11). Organisations such as the International Marxist Group began to conceive of revolution spreading from the third world inwards, and Tony Cliff’s International Socialists declared Israeli workers could not be revolutionary. Zionism is an issue where definitions really do determine debate, and Rich gets his in early with regards to Israel, arguing that criticisms of the state may become anti-Semitic when they “use language and ideas that draw on older anti-Semitic myths about Jews” (p.xxii). This was a problem for both the new left and orthodox communists, as by 1967-8 the much-admired revolutionaries of the FLN in Algeria were adopting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and the USSR returned to one of its periodic bouts of anti-Semitism (p.20-1). Interaction between Matzpen, the new left and Palestinian exiles in the UK seems to have run aground though on more concrete problems, which Rich perhaps sums up adroitly:
….. is it a conflict between two competing national movements, both with a legitimate claim to the same piece of land; or is it a case of coloniser and colonised, with all the right on one side and all the wrong on the other? (p.104)

In 1975 the UN General Assembly declared Zionism to be a form of racism (a position it rescinded in 1991). Rich gained access to the National Union of Students archives, and there is much here on how the UNGA resolution led to attempts to ‘no platform’ both Zionists and Jewish Societies (JSOCs) on campus. Here the left divided, with the Broad Left and Communists generally opposed, the Trotskyists for (p.129-131). In this controversy, we again see the centrality of identity politics, and its ability to produce division and stalemate. In the 1970s JSOCs had responded to criticism by using the language of democratic rights and free speech. By the 1980s they too had adopted that of identity politics, comparing themselves to “every other minority group” (p.137-8). To deny Jewish students their right to organise on campus would be deeply problematic. But to anti-Zionists, if Jewish students use that political space to exercise a Zionist identity, they are propagating racism. Student unions are yet to square that circle.

Chapter five “The New Alliance: Islamists and the Left” critiques the relationship between exiled Islamists, usually but not always from Muslim Brotherhood backgrounds, and both the revolutionary and Labour left. Jeremy Corbyn has been central to these alliances. Whilst they did not stop the Iraq war nor bring freedom to Palestine, they have changed the composition of the left in Britain (p.162) paving the way for Corbyn’s eventual victory. However, for these relationships to prosper, the left has had to turn a blind eye to political attitudes it would usually reject, and actively opposes, when articulated by the far right. In what is the strongest section of the book, Rich cites examples in the fields of human rights, suicide attacks and racism.
The Hamas Charter cites anti-Semitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as fact, whilst believing the United Nations was created by the Zionists (p.176). The British left is inexorably sucked into this nonsense via its affiliations with Islamic actors in the Middle East and here. In 2003 the Cairo anti-war conference, which brought together regional activists with anti-war figures such as Corbyn and John Rees, adopted the position the Iraq war was “part of the Zionist plan” (p.189). Socialists chanting ‘We are Hezbollah’ at Stop the War’s 2006 protests against the Israel-Hezbollah conflict either did not know, or did not care, Hasan Nasrallah has called for all Jews to go to Israel, so they can best be killed in one place (p.178).

Labour’s recent anti-Semitism controversy has involved former Mayors in London, Bradford and Blackburn, plus councillors in Luton, Nottingham, Burnley, Newport and Renfrewshire (p.197-8). Rich’s book goes a long way in explaining how we got there. It ends with the hope that the left and British Jews can again have a positive relationship. The re-admittance of Momentum’s Jackie Walker to Labour demonstrates how tricky this will be. Rich traces her ‘analysis’ that the Jews financed the slave trade, to a 1991 book by the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. Identity politics has brought the left more problems than answers.

Dr Paul Stott, 14 December 2016.

Some Recent Talks, An Article and Video Clips

Last month I spent some time in Geneva, speaking at a side-event to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Organised by the think tank European Foundation for South Asian Studies, 'Terrorism in South Asia' brought together four scholars and a healthy audience to discuss events, primarily in Pakistan and Kashmir, and their impact closer to home.

You can hear a recording of my talk here, via Soundcloud. A copy of my paper "Terrorism in Pakistan and the role of Pakistani diaspora in the UK: Challenges?" is on the Academia.edu site, but I think you will need to be a member of the site to download it (it is free).

Whilst in Geneva I did some work with the Indian media. It is fair to see the antipathy between India and Pakistan somewhat colours their approach, but hopefully the gist of my general points emerges here, and here. Some of the EFSAS recordings of the event are also appearing online now, for example here.

Finally I also did a guest lecture in Septemberto a Leicester University summer school for distance learning Criminology students. You can hear an audio recording of my talk on British Jihadism here.

A Solution to the Rohinga Crisis?

This is a bit too long for a tweet, so I shall leave it here.

Lets get all those who insist Buddhism is a religion of peace. And all those who insist Islam is a religion of peace. Lets lock them all in a room together. And watch as they beat the shit out of each other.

Irene Lancaster v David Irving

The Sunday Times has a feature by Sian Griffiths (p.13) on Manchester University refusing to remove from open display, books by the far-right historian David Irving.

Some universities have already moved Irving's books into closed access areas, or added disclaimers (!) to them. This is reportedly due to a campaign by Dr Irene Lancaster (who I think is a retired academic) and Dr Rowan Williams, who having retired as Archbishop of Canterbury is now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Two comments on this madness. Firstly it is not as new as Sian Griffiths supposes. Way back in January 1993, on my first day as a library assistant at the University of North London's then Kentish Town library site, I was shown the 'under the counter' books. Sadly this was not a collection of red-hot pornography or studies of illicit sexual practices, but a small collection of books by David Irving. Following a campaign by the Anti-Nazi League (the SWP's then anti-fascist front group, now Unite Against Fascism) the university authorities had taken the books off the shelves. I was given a stern lecture by a senior librarian that this was a terrible mistake and undermined both academic freedom and the nature of a university library. That approach stands the test of time - libraries are by definition places where ideas sit, germinate, breathe and, whether you like or or not, fester. If you want them to be places where only nice, cuddly, safe ideas are to be found, go to a children's library.

Why this issue has flared up again now, having first run over twenty years ago, is unclear. My second comment is motivated by the quote from Irene Lancaster which appears in the Sunday Times. "Leaving this literature on the shelving with inadequate labelling poses a physical threat to the Jewish student and staff body and constitutes a deep insult to the lives of all those who were exterminated in the Nazi holocaust". These presumably include members of the Lancaster family, who we are told died at Treblinka.

Several issues emerge here. Firstly books do not attack people. The ideas in them may or may not inspire people to action, and may or may not inspire people to violence. To function, a democracy has to have a marketplace of ideas. Given the historical fact of the holocaust, it is hard to see how Mr Irving comes out top in that marketplace. Why can he not be defeated in argument? Also, how does putting a sticker on one of his books makes any difference at all?

There is another, less comfortable issue which emerges from Dr Lancaster's fear of violence. The neo-Nazi far-right in Britain is weaker today than it has ever been, be it in electoral terms or in street activism. Who then is providing a threat to Jewish students and staff? If Jews are leaving Europe today because of violence, it is not because of people like David Irving, but because of violence from Islamists. And yet (correctly) we do not seek to purge university library's of material from Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden or a succession of Islamist actors who would happily do to Irene Lancaster what the Nazis did to her Grandmother.

Ideas matter. And they matter too much to give in to selective outrage, in the very place where those ideas need to be digested and discussed.

JD Vance on Trump

There is a good interview by Josh Glancy in today's Sunday Times magazine, of the American author J D Vance.

Of particular interest are some of his quotes about Donald Trump.

"My fears thus far have been confirmed..... He understands the problems, but there's no evidence he's actually articulating a way out."

Glancy then paraphrases Vance "He points out that the president gained a lot of trust by telling people things no other politician would say".

There was also this on Trump's support base "They will give him a long leash, and judge him by whether their lives have got better in two to three years".

That seems the right way to judge a politician, certainly from a viewpoint in rust belt America - are you better off, or is the framework there for you to make yourself better off, than at the last election? In pressuring US companies to stay in America rather than decamping to Mexico, and reopening coalmines, Trump, as Vance says, does get it. If Steve Bannon stays in the White House (by no means a certainty) there is the prospect of focus on those issues remaining. If there is another plus point here, it is that whether Trump still articulates things other politicians do not, he will grasp the nettle of issues where western elites have failed. On FGM, his administration is already light years ahead of the UK, as shown here and here.

Vance does not really touch on Trump's approach to security issues. This is much harder to fathom. I have never seen how Shia Iran (the minority trend within Islam) can be viewed as an existential threat to the west. Yet Trump is working with a country which is an existential threat to the west, Saudi Arabia, to isolate Iran and Qatar. There may or may not be method in his madness. We shall see. In the long term the travel ban, should it be fully implemented, probably does make the US more secure, although as it does not include countries Trump is in bed with - Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to name three - it is a string vest.

I am not sure a President in a string vest can be re-elected. But as Vance points out, if people are better off when he stands for re-election than they were previously, he will be judged on that criteria.

Journalistic Solidarity From Shepherd's Bush to Qatar

Yesterday's Evening Standard saw the BBC's World Affairs Editor, John Simpson, complaining about the pressure Qatar is under to close down Al-Jazeera. He wants to see the West supporting the station.

One of Simpson's lines particularly caught my attention:

"It may have been accused of being slanted in favour of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt and elsewhere but it employs talented ex-colleagues of mine from the BBC, and I've always felt its heart is in the right place".

It is a sign of just how lightweight Simpson is, that whilst showing solidarity to his old BBC muckers, he does not actually get the main problem with Al-Jazeera. That is its ability to take in western liberals by saying one thing in its English language programming, and something entirely different in its Arabic material. Consider these findings from one US think tank:

"Aljazeera Arabic, in contrast, has much less freedom to report on regional developments -- including in Qatar -- than the English site. Very little criticism of Doha can be found in Arabic"

or the wave of resignations among its staff because of this subservience to the Qatari royals. More recently Al-Jazeera's racism re-surfaced, for once in English, when it blamed climate change on the Jews.

Either Simpson does not know these things, in which case he is a fool. Or he does know it, and decided it did not matter.

Brexit Pessimism

I have rarely felt as pessimistic about Brexit happening as I do this morning.

David Davis talking about staying in the single market. Liberal elites, from Canterbury to Kensington, discovering their electoral as well as their cultural power. The future members of that elite, our students, voting with it as a bloc. A dead duck in No.10 whose only attribute was as an administrator. No UKIP to speak of. Whilst Corbyn now knows he can win, the smallest part of his grand alliance, and the one with least social capital, are the returning Brexit voters. Emily Thornberry or Sir Keir Starmer would happily throw those Labour voters, in Thurrock or Crewe, under their white vans in an instant.

The potential fiddle is this. Contrary to popular opinion, the split between Vote Leave and Leave.EU was not over personalities, what weight to give immigration as a campaign issue, or what role to give Nigel Farage. The split was over the failure of the Vote Leave campaign’s leadership to give clear assurances they would not accept a second referendum on membership of the single market. UKIP MEPs pressed Vote Leave Campaign Director Dominic Cummings on this, and he would not give any guarantees. They left feeling his primary concern on this issue was the unity of the Conservative Party.

The Tories have not maintained that unity – Theresa May is likely to be torn apart like a fox set upon by a pack of hounds. But the potential ‘fix’ is there for all to see – staying in the single market would satisfy our cultural elites (the Thornberrys and Starmers of this world) and the Conservative centre. It would mean the European Union still determines what we can do, and cannot do, in huge swathes of our political and economic lives.

That is not what we voted for on 23 June 2016. The question is how do we stop the will of the people being subverted in this way?

Why Andy Burnham Is Saying Some of The Things He is

Last December I spoke to a conference of the religious literacy organisation Lapido Media, on the influence Islamists have developed on the British left. A chunk of my speech was on the direct influence groups like MEND have on the Labour Party, and Andy Burnham in particular.

You can read the speech here (pdf) and below.

For two background papers on the Islamisation of the left in Britain, please go here.

The text of the speech is below, with Burnham covered at the start, and to the end:

The demise of critical thinking: how Islamist organizations corrupt the academy

by Dr Paul Stott

Perhaps the easiest place for Islamists to gain and then project influence is with and via the political left, and in those sections of society where the left’s ideals predominate. Those who have read my two articles last month on the Lapido website, and in the past maybe saw Nick Cohen’s What’s Left, or Dave Rich’s excellent recent work on anti-Semitism in the Labour party, will be aware of these relationships.

It needs to be stressed though that this is not simply about the far left or even the left of the Labour party. MP and former Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham’s recent opposition to the Government’s Prevent strategy was not rooted, as it could have been, in a consideration of whether it is wise for the Government to be challenging its citizens’ legally held and legally practised political beliefs. Burnham did not seem to be stressing the importance of developing critical thinking in young people, the need to teach people how to think rather than what to think. Instead,at a Labour conference fringe event organized by the Islamist group Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND),he ran with a series of Islamist tropes: that Prevent demonises Muslims; that it stigmatizes the Muslim community; that Prevent has no community support; and that only through working with the community can any problems be addressed.

Those views are now virtually hegemonic in academia, and in trades unions such as the National Union of Teachers (NUT), or the University and College Union (UCU).

A civil liberties critique of Prevent is barely made. The ‘Islamophobia’ argument predominates, even though Home Office figures at 31 December 2015 recorded that of 143 people in jail for terrorist offences in Great Britain, 139 affirmed themselves to be Muslim. Some figure, when Muslims are usually considered to be between five and ten per cent of our population.

There are Islamic organizations trying to shape how we think about terrorism in this country, how we respond to people fighting in Syria, or those who support jihadist groups. And they have been doing this for some time. The Muslim Council of Britain for example were lobbying the Metropolitan Police on this in the late 1990s.

They thrive on error and a lack of knowledge in the population at large. I want to take people back to the 7/7 attacks. They were followed, you may remember, by the publication of a suicide video of Mohammed Siddique Khan, the acknowledged leader of the plot. On 1 September 2005, the BBC placed a transcript of Khan’s video on their website, where it remains. The BBC transcript is headed ‘London bomber: text in full.’ Unfortunately this is not actually the case: Khan’s religious salutations as the video commences are not translated from the original
Arabic – an unsatisfactory omission.

The words the BBC leaves out of its translation are ‘Praise be to Allah, blessings and prayers upon his Prophet’. As you can see, the BBC certainly had some way to go in that period in terms of religious literacy.
Lines 20-34, are perhaps the best known. Here Khan is at his most political: ‘Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world.’ Although they are not mentioned by name, it is clear this is a reference to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

And there for many people, analysis ends. In discussing 7/7, Khan’s condemnation of British foreign policy was to be central to the response of the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, the anti-war movement, the revolutionary left and a series of activists and institutions in British Muslim life. Muslim Weekly; Salma Yaqoob of the Respect Party and Stop the War Coalition (STWC); Moazzam Begg of CAGE all managed to quote Khan’s words in explanations condemning British foreign policy.

From 2008 the Cordoba Foundation, the Muslim Brotherhood’s think tank in Britain, began to take a lead in influencing opinion in this area. A round-robin letter was organized by the Ikhwaan’s Anas Altikriti, in which signatories agreed that the ‘misguided few’ who turn to terrorism do not do so because they are driven by the writings of Sayyid Qutb– the MB’s foremost thinker – or because they are disenfranchized, but because of their anger at Western foreign policy.

The responses I cite ignore the religious ideals also expressed by Khan. This centres not just on the salutations left out by the BBC, but the words preceding his discussion of foreign policy: ‘Our religion is Islam – obedience to the one true God Allah, and following the footsteps of the final Prophet and messenger Muhammad… This is how our ethical stances are dictated.’ He is structuring his actions in terms of his faith.

When I read those words in my lecture at the 2011 Critical Terrorism Studies conference at Strathclyde
University, I looked up to see one well-known Terrorism Studies academic walk out. I am glad to see you all still here.

Since 2010 a series of Islamist organizations, nearly all related to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) have funded research conducted by academics into counter-terrorism and issues pertaining to the Middle East and British Islam. Usually this involves funding those at Spinwatch – a collective of left-leaning researchers based in England and Scotland – with sums of money, and several months later a report written by academics pops up. Some £52,000 has changed hands this way in the past six years. The most recent donation of £12,000 was from MEND. They sponsored the fringe meeting at which Andy Burnham condemned Prevent.

We have also seen Islam Expo as one of the sponsors of a major 2015 conference on terrorism at Bath University: ‘Understanding Conflict: Research, ideas and responses to security threats’, which was jointly funded by the taxpayer through the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Islam Expo and the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath. Perhaps not unusually in these circles, although billed as a conference studying terrorism, more than a quarter of the papers, and nearly half the advertised sessions, were about Islamophobia.

Why is a Muslim Brotherhood-related group such as Islam Expo sponsoring an academic conference attended by socialist academics and the leaders of the Stop the War Coalition? Lorenzo Vidino writes in The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West, that: ‘The Brothers do not advocate isolation from mainstream society. To the contrary, they urge Muslims to actively participate in it, but only in so far as such engagement is necessary to change it in an Islamic fashion (Vidino 2011 p.11).’

These are not the people Louise Casey is worried about, ostracized from society. They want to be at the centre of events, but from an ideology that seeks to rival liberal democracy. The methodology of the Western Brothers is traced to the Islamist ideologue Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s 1990 statement, Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase, which envisaged the group’s representatives developing positive relationships with leading tiers in Western societies. From this position the Brothers would seek to play a central role in administering Muslim community life in public bodies, achieving hegemony in those communities, whilst at the same time professing the Islamist position on geopolitical issues.

Some of my fellow academics, perhaps distracted by ready funding, seem unable to grasp this. Labour’s Andy Burnham MP, last seen critiquing the Prevent strategy at a MEND event at the Labour conference, does not understand it either. But those in the media, and indeed all walks of life who seek to develop a degree of religious literacy can and I believe should try much harder to understand.

To Celebrate Article 50: What A Wonderful World

Today is something many people worked so hard for, in some cases for decades.

There are lots of ways to celebrate, but it seems appropriate, as Britain re-enters the world in its own right, to listen to Louis Armstrong. It's a wonderful world.

Englishness and Brexit

One of the debates following the EU referendum is the extent to which the leave vote was English led and English driven.

The British Politics Society in Norway asked me to examine this issue in an article for their journal, British Politics Review. In a special issue devoted to Englishness, I line up alongside the former Labour Minister John Denham, Christopher G. A. Bryant,Judith Blake and Andrew Mycock.

You can download the journal as a pdf here.