My favourite opinion polls are those which elicit enormous shock in the population for stating something everybody knew for ages, or could have guessed. Such as those headlined ‘People in Torquay are happier than people in Rotherham’ – goodness me, etc.

Surely we are reaching the time when bland, deceitful shibboleths should be replaced by reality

The polls that always occasion the gravest shock, however – despite the fact they come out every year or so – are those dealing with the views of the British Muslim community. In the lacunae between these reports their findings are completely ignored in favour of the approved set of lies with which the rest of the British population is fed to keep it amenable. Then another report comes out showing that lots of British Muslims support Hamas or something and we throw our hands up in despair, asking how can this be? We never knew! Perhaps this is why the BBC almost never covers such studies and just continues ignoring the issue.

There was an example of this doublethink recently, regarding the Henry Jackson Society’s (HJS) representative poll of 1,000 British Muslims. It showed that more than a third wished to see Sharia law introduced in our country, and suggested that fewer than a quarter of those polled believed Hamas had committed murder and rape in its incursion into Israel on 7 October last year. Quite what the huge majority believed Hamas had been up to instead – playing multi-faith Scrabble with their hosts? Sunbathing? – has not been revealed. The same poll discovered that nearly a third of British Muslims had a ‘positive’ view of Hamas and only 24 per cent a negative one. (They are a bit Marmite, aren’t they?)

And yet when I was on television talking about this poll, the presenter felt it necessary to assure the viewing public that actually ‘ordinary’ Muslims were totally opposed to terrorism and had no love for Hamas. Remarkable. The poll findings were right there in front of her. But they came up against the received official opinion, the correct thing to think, the stuff we must all continue to think even though there is all too much evidence to the directly contrary.

I am not sure how we deal with this, a situation in which journos and indeed ‘ordinary people’ are kind of Stepford Wives, brainwashed into believing rubbish by an establishment that wishes simply to keep everybody quiescent and has no time at all for reality. Incidentally, only that pesky 24 per cent believed Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish homeland and almost half thought that Jews have too much power over UK government policy. Which Jews, once again, they did not specify – maybe they mean the Jews at the BBC, an organisation seen by more than half of British Muslims as biased towards Israel.

The BBC seems not to have covered the HJS report, largely because it is most interested in the polls that support its idiotic agenda – and possibly as well because the Corporation views the Henry Jackson Society as being right of centre and, generally, prefers to report studies from left-wing organisations, such as those bloody Rowntree people perpetually gnashing their teeth about poverty.

If you were to summarise the HJS study, you might conclude that a little less than a quarter of the British Muslim community share similar, perhaps even identical values to the general population and that a little less than a third have views which are antithetical – in some cases violently antithetical – to it. The rest are drifting about somewhere between those two poles.

The report certainly shouldn’t be read as suggesting that all of Britain’s Muslims are about to strap on a bomb, and possess a visceral loathing of the country in which they live. But then nor should it be read to suggest that there’s no problem at all, nothing to see here, move along please. There is a substantial minority who revere Hamas, hate Israel and wish to see our own country governed by Sharia law.

Further, as the HJS report made clear, these views are espoused most strongly by the youngest section of the Muslim community, a sector which – for obvious demographic reasons – is growing more quickly than the rest. The Muslim population of the UK in 2001 was 1.6 million and accounted for a little over 3 per cent of the British people. In the last 23 years that number has much more than doubled, to 3.87 million and thus about 6.5 per cent of the general population.

In other words, this is a potential problem that’s increasing if not exponentially, then at least at a fair old whack. It implies, for example, that there are now a good many people whose dislike for our way of life and fondness for barbaric terrorist organisations must, surely, threaten our relatively pacific society. And has indeed done so on many occasions.

Surely we are reaching the time when the bland, deceitful shibboleths of the liberal establishment should be replaced by a rather more vigorous application of reality? And yet the liberal establishment seems no more minded to give up lying to us than it was in 2001.

Is there anybody in the country who doesn’t laugh or sneer when either our intelligence services or Prevent or some other quango staffed by people who believe in unicorns tell us with a straight face that the greatest threat in this country comes from right-wing extremism? (They do not count Islamism as right-wing extremism, of course, even though that is exactly what it is.) To keep parroting ‘They all think exactly the same as us’ was a lie at the turn of the century and is a far, far bigger lie now.

All I am asking for is a certain recognition of this problem. Because it is a problem, isn’t it?