The miners’ strike and the fight against Islamism

The huge defeat of the Conservative party in the election of 1997 drove the party back into its rural and suburban redoubts and so cut it off from many things which were happening in Britain. It did not want to think about the rise of political Islam.

This opting out was part of a wider demoralisation in conservative culture in recent years. In the time of the Millennium, the death of Diana and all that, many conservative-minded people started to say things like, ‘I don’t recognise my own country.’ They felt so alienated, particularly from their own cities, that they wanted to avoid thinking about problems of multiculturalism, and of terrorism. So when bombs actually went off in 2005 and actually killed people, the fact that they exploded in our capital city should, if anything, have made them even more alarming for the whole country. For sections of Tory Britain, however, they seemed remote, almost easy to dismiss.