It is now nearly five years since I wrote When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries for the think tank Policy Exchange.
It was a plea for sanity in the debate on radical Islam, which had become poisoned by the belief in parts of government that Islamists of the Muslim Council of Britain were the genuine representative voice of British Muslims.
At the time, few people had heard of the Muslim Brotherhood and still fewer knew that its South Asian offshoot Jamaat-i-Islami had a stranglehold on the MCB and other self-appointed “representative” bodies.
At the time it was depressing how eager the Labour Party had been to rush into the arms of religious reactionaries (a problem that Tony Blair, Gordon Brown both failed to full address and Ed Miliband appears not to have even thought about). I wrote:
“There are signs that the reformist Cameron wing of the Conservative Party is beginning to grasp the urgency of the issue.
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