Is it possible to report the government to Prevent? I ask because I swear they’re trying to radicalise me. In the past few days we’ve learned that in 2015 Theresa May’s Home Office granted asylum and citizenship to a bodyguard of the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and – this is going to shock you – the terror chief’s hired muscle is now accused of plotting an attack on German Jews on the second anniversary of 7 October.
That’s what you call soft power: Britain has established such a reputation for Islamism that Europe is sourcing its alleged jihadis from us. And to think they said Brexit would leave us isolated. We are belatedly hearing about the allegations thanks to reporting in the Sunday Times. Westminster magistrates’ court initially granted the accused a 100-year anonymity order to prevent his case being prejudiced. Not his case in Germany but his case in the UK, because there’s a criminal case in the UK too.
I would prefer it if ministers stopped trying to drive me to the right, thank you very much
Then came the news that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is reopening the UK resettlement scheme to provide Palestinians and Afghan females with ‘safe and legal routes’ to Britain. Safe for whom, we might ask. Polled three months after 7 October 2023, by which time their compatriots’ murder of 1,200 Israelis, rape of women and slaying of children had been widely reported, 65 per cent of Palestinians expressed support for the attack on Israel. Maya Angelou: ‘When people show you who they are, believe them.’ Shabana Mahmood: ‘When people show you who they are, import them.’
If the policy was simply bringing over randomly selected Palestinians, we might stand a chance, but instead it will be those sponsored by NGOs, which all but guarantees that alongside the worthy cases we’ll get new Britons who will make us sorely regret ever bringing them here. Add to this the difficulty in capping these numbers to preclude ever-expanding chain migration, and there is almost no discernible benefit but potentially unlimited costs and risks involved. It’s a policy so injurious to Britain’s interests it could almost have come from a Conservative government.
Now, word reaches us that someone calling herself Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, purporting to be the minister for nature and rural affairs, fears ‘a nostalgic vision of Britain’ and a ‘far right nostalgic vision’ at that, featuring ‘warm ale’ and ‘a black Labrador at your feet in a pub’, is a version of the country ‘that never really existed’. This troubles me because I’m quite keen on dogs. Are they all far right, or only Labradors? Dachshunds, I can see; little four-legged fascists. But Labs? A bit mischievous with loo rolls but harmless otherwise.
It’s not coincidental, I suspect, that Riddell-Carpenter chose to direct her scorn at collective memories of dogs and pubs. You would struggle to come up with two symbols more intimate to the British sense of self and common to our cultural identity. It would be like sneering at bald eagles and apple pies in the United States, brie and laïcité in France, or Jew-hatred and self-pity in Ireland. On the bright side, now that romanticising room-temperature beer is considered reactionary, the post-Brexit love-in between John Major and the centre-left might finally be over.
I don’t expect home secretaries Conservative or Labour to prioritise Britain’s national security and I’ve given up on the idea that British governments should have at least one minister who actually likes Britain, but even so they could tone it down a bit. Opening the BBC News app these days is like playing Russian roulette with a copy of Viz. Every headline now reads like: ‘Ministers float new offence of aggravated looking-back-in-anger’, ‘Is your bin committing genocide? Rayner pledges review’ and ‘Taliban advises against travel to “fundamentalist” England’.
This is all very awkward for me. Here I am, a Hiroo Onoda of the dead consensus, D:Ream at the top of my Spotify favourites, still buying the Guardian and pretending it’s only for Peter Bradshaw’s film reviews. I’m just a Blairite, standing in front of an electorate, asking for it to be 1997 again. Instead, I find myself clinging to liberalism amid borders so open as to be non-existent, national institutions suffused with the maddest of ideologies and the Gazafication of everything from upmarket bakeries to Ed Sheeran concerts. And, yes, I know most of the comments underneath this will be about Tony Blair being a globalist EUSSR traitor but he’s looking pretty good compared to what’s come since.
I would prefer it if ministers stopped trying to drive me to the right, thank you very much. Centrism might have had its day but it doesn’t follow that a Labour government must pander to every destructive derangement of its activist base or jeopardise national security to woo back sectarian sociopaths who reckon Keir Starmer was a Mossad asset. Just be more normal, patriotic, unifying. Be more 1997.
