The Spectator’s Notes | 30 May 2013

The website of the Security Service (MI5) says that since the end of the Cold War, the threat of subversion is ‘now considered to be negligible’. Isn’t this a mistake? It seems likely that many Muslim organisations — university Islamic societies, for example — are subverted by jihadists. The infiltrators whip up hatred against the West and create networks, rudimentary but often powerful, of the like-minded. When they have done their work well, they do not need to give direct orders to people like the Woolwich murderers to kill: they have primed their human device, and left it to explode. Such subversion may not be backed by foreign state power, but it still resembles communism in its ability to infiltrate minds and organisations at the same time.

It is pointed out that opposition to same-sex marriage is strong among those over 60 and weak among those under 25. No doubt this is true, but does it prove that the oldies are wrong? The generation over 60 is the last to have had a virtually universal experience of marriage.