Andrew Gilligan

Last year I obtained a leaked copy of the new government’s ‘counter-extremism sprint’. It caused a huge political backlash – and was disowned by ministers within hours – for saying the UK’s approach to extremism should no longer be based on ‘ideologies of concern’, such as Islamism, but on a very wide range of ‘behaviours’, including misogyny, violence against women and spreading conspiracy theories. Fourteen months later, we risk sliding back into the same folly. In a report this week, the Commons’ home affairs select committee says Britain’s ‘failure to move on from a counter-terror mindset’ has made Prevent, the main counter-extremism programme, ‘outdated’, and ‘left the country ill-prepared to deal with new forms of extremism’.

Even by its own recent standards, the latest investigation from the anti-extremism group Hope not Hate was fabulously, joyously, Rizla Micron-thin. People with “a broad opposition to liberal orthodoxies,” Hope not Hate “can reveal,” meet in rooms in Westminster. It’s not quite clear what Hope not Hate sees as the actual problem here That’s it. It’s not quite clear what Hope not Hate sees as the actual problem here. Should people with a broad opposition to liberal orthodoxies only be allowed to meet in, say, caves? Or is it the Westminster bit that’s the difficulty? Would it be all right for them to meet in rooms, so long as the rooms were in, for instance, Perivale?

Not worried enough yet by the government’s new definition of 'anti-Muslim hostility'? Here’s another red flag: the mild, nuanced, or downright supportive responses it’s received from some of the worst people in Britain. In the week or so since the definition was published, I’ve been tracking reactions across British Islam’s vast cosmos of professional offence-takers and grievance-mongers – sorry, diverse’n’vibrant civil society groups. Take Muslim Engagement and Development (Mend), the organisation which has, in the past, suggested that Britain 'treats all Muslims as criminal.

The government’s new official definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ is 144 words long. But in a sign that even ministers now realise what a mess they have made, it is followed by a further tortuously pleading 1,400 words which ‘must be read together’ with it. You will be relieved to hear, according to this ‘accompanying text,’ that the definition is no threat at all to ‘the fundamental right of every person in the UK to exercise freedom of speech,’ or to ‘academic and political discussion,’ or to ‘criticisms of religion or belief,’ or to ‘debates in the public interest.’ If this were not a threat to free speech, the government would not need to say so To which I reply: qui s’excuse, s’accuse (he who excuses himself, accuses himself).

Some things in the government’s leaked social cohesion strategy will be deeply neuralgic to many. There is the creation of a “special representative on anti-Muslim hostility,” which will almost certainly hand an official bully pulpit to an activist such as Baroness Gohir, who has attacked media coverage of the grooming scandal as “disproportionate” and being “used…to fuel racism and Islamophobia,” or to a figure such as Dominic Grieve. The leaked strategy is clear that Islamism is the country’s greatest extremist threat There’s a claim that last summer’s widespread flying of English, Scottish and Union flags were “tools of hate” and the “misuse [of] national symbols to exclude or intimidate.

Better not tell Ed Miliband, but in spring 2022 his then shadow cabinet colleague, David Lammy, appears to have struck oil. For the first time, The Spectator can tell the story of how, while serving as Britain’s shadow foreign secretary, Lammy was announced as the director of another country’s sovereign wealth fund – set up to (theoretically) channel newfound oil riches to its people, with a bit left over for the board. This was announced on 20 April 2022 in an official press release from the President of Guyana’s office about the Natural Resource Fund (NRF). The statement is still on the government website.

The real scandal of Alaa Abd el-Fattah is that it is nothing new, and that not enough has changed. For decades, in dozens and dozens of cases, the British state has legitimised, worked with, empowered or funded extremists and bigots; people with values deeply opposed to Western democracy; people who sometimes literally seek our destruction. Periodically, some new bad guy – in this case Abd el-Fattah – is exposed by the media or thinktanks. There’s a row. The person or body concerned is sometimes jettisoned, sometimes not. But the basic operational failure keeps happening. As a No.

For those who think there could never be a worse disaster than HS2, or hope that governments can learn from their mistakes, I have disappointing news. Later this month, ministers will unveil a future platinum medallist in the Fiasco Olympics: a project which even their own infrastructure watchdog calls ‘unachievable’. A new, high-speed line between Liverpool and Manchester which will actually take longer than the existing rail service. Called Northern Powerhouse Rail, this section alone will cost a claimed £17 billion (in reality, perhaps £30 billion). It will be a high-speed railway on which trains can never reach high speeds, because the stations are too close together.

Readers of progressive newspapers have occasionally been invited to admire a man called Miqdaad Versi. He was the subject of a respectful 2018 profile in the Guardian for his 'personal mission to confront…the Islamophobia of the British press' one complaint at a time. Versi's 'spreadsheet of shame' showed 'how flagrantly British papers get their news about Muslims wrong'. Alas, a large number of this piece’s claims about the corrections supposedly forced on shameful British newspapers by Versi were themselves wrong and had to be corrected at the bottom of the online version. That is, as it happens, a truer reflection than the Guardian intended of the organisation which Versi set up, and where he remains 'lead strategist'.

In Robert Jenrick’s fare-dodging video, it felt a little unfair for the Tories’ checked-shirt crusader to include that shot of the Tube station assistant with his feet up. The guy was probably just on his break, and you don’t blame the infantry for the failings of the generals. But on a wider level, the mayor, Sadiq Khan, and TfL management have had their own feet up for nine years now, with results that people are starting to notice.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10RzzluJFEQ Today’s London is not, of course, New York in the 1970s. But parts of the London Underground are looking rather like it. Each time I’ve travelled on the Bakerloo Line recently, the train has been covered in graffiti, inside and out. It doesn’t seem to be the same on any other line – yet.

According to people at City Hall, Sadiq Khan writes some of his own press releases. I can believe it: they’ve certainly become a lot more excitable since he took over. I like to imagine the Mayor of London, late at night, combing the thesaurus for fresh superlatives to bugle his ‘unprecedented programme of far-reaching improvements’ for the taxi trade (allowing black cabs in more bus lanes) or his ‘bold package of measures’ to revive street markets (creating a London Markets Board and an interactive map). One release even panted that Khan had ‘personally scrutinised’ the New Year’s Eve fireworks display ‘to make the acclaimed event the most exciting yet’.

Let’s try a thought experiment, shall we? If a senior adviser to my old boss, Boris Johnson, had celebrated John Smith’s heart attack, mocked Gordon Brown for talking about his dead son and referred to senior members of the Labour party as ‘scum’, how long do you think that person would have kept their job? Thankfully, however, this particular mini-Trump, the former reality TV star Amy Lamé, was appointed (as London’s ‘night czar’) by a Labour mayor, and her -targets were all Tories, so it’s fine. As, apparently, are Lamé’s years of virtue-signalling on social media for higher spending and taxes while arranging to receive her own City Hall salary through a personal company so she can pay as little tax as possible.