Britain is a world leader in exporting creeps

The British recruits who have joined Isis are not exceptions. They flourish in a culture in which it is so commonplace to offer support to authoritarian regimes and movements that few bother to condemn it. Free speech ought to mean the freedom to challenge and criticise in all except the most tightly defined circumstances. Instead in Britain tolerance has become indifference; a lazy desire to live in our comfortable bubbles. The dominant culture views vigorous criticism as rude or insensitive – or, to use that popular and completely meaningless school-prefect putdown, “inappropriate.” More often that not, criticism is taken down and used as evidence of the critic’s failings, his or her obsessions and phobias.

We cannot be bothered to challenge fanatics. We say we don’t want to ‘force our views on others’ – as if argument were physical coercion. And if those others leave England to enslave Kurdish women, or applaud kleptomaniac dictators, we are not responsible.