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. This is what happens, people told themselves, in ghastly modern London.

The conservative abdication on the matter has been very dangerous because it is a prelude to defeatism. It contains the germ of the mentality which prevailed among non-Nazi supporters of Vichy France — they believed that the country they loved was finished, so they abandoned their patriotism.

I am glad to say, however, that this defeatism is not characteristic of the current leadership of the Conservative party, which is starting to engage more actively with these issues. And the wind of public opinion has changed. Everyone now talks of ‘British values’, even though few seem to have much idea what they might be.

So now is a good time to sketch out a possible conservative approach to the question of Islam in Britain.

It is not for any political party to say what Islam, as a religion, is, even if what that party says about it is complimentary.