The best we can hope for is tolerance

John Gray, Britain’s foremost political philosopher, says that  Ruth Kelly’s new campaign against Islamic extremism is doomed because it exaggerates the scope for cohesion in our fragmented modern world

The only thing that can be known with reasonable certainty about Ruth Kelly’s new programme of engagement with Muslim communities, which the Prime Minister told the House of Commons at last week’s meeting of the liaison committee will tackle Islamist extremism ‘head-on’, is that it will be muddled and ineffective. Nothing the government has done suggests it is ready to examine why extremism is gaining ground. Tony Blair persists in claiming that Britain’s role in the Iraq war has played no part in the process — an assertion that has been repeatedly questioned by intelligence analysts, and which suggests an inability to engage not only with Muslims but also with reality. It is not only the Blair government that is at fault. The political class as a whole has no clear idea of what it wants from Muslim communities. Is it their more active co-operation in combating terrorism? Or are they being told that they must integrate into the British mainstream and embrace some version of liberal values? Though they are commonly seen as being so closely linked as to be practically equivalent, there is danger in conflating these goals. Pressing Muslims to integrate may actually make the struggle against terrorism more difficult. Britain is not a notably cohesive society and there is no prospect of it becoming one. Rather than trying to secure a consensus on values — even liberal values — we would be better off framing terms that allow us to co-exist in peace.

Public debate about the place of Islam is taking place at a time when the political consensus on multiculturalism has visibly crumbled. There is a steady stream of media reportage whose subtext is that choosing an Islamic form of dress somehow connects with atrocities of the kind that occurred on 7/7.