FOLLOWING months of deeply distasteful pro-Palestinian protests in London and other UK cities, a hideous outgrowth has metastasised: the harassment of several MPs. This has culminated in the standing down at the next election of Conservative member Mike Freer and now the disgraceful alteration of Parliamentary procedure by Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle in response to Islamist threats.
Such disgusting intimidatory behaviour of course deserves our total condemnation. No decent individual would suggest that MPs are deserving of such treatment, and yet when you look at the big picture, it is also very difficult to have much sympathy with you collectively for the predicament you find yourselves in.
Ever since the Salman Rushdie affair almost 40 years ago, the rise of domestic Islamofascism has continued unchecked, accelerating in recent years as demographic change became ever more rapid. The outrages are now so many and so numerous we have become desensitised to them: Lee Rigby, the London Bridge attacks, the Manchester Arena bombing and probably the most egregious of them all, the mass rape of thousands of under-age girls by predominantly Pakistani Muslim men.
With a few honourable exceptions such as Sarah Champion and Ann Cryer, politicians of all stripes have stayed completely silent as the picture progressively darkened. For instance, at a scheduled Parliamentary debate on the grooming gangs in February 2021, scandalously only nine MPs attended.
Nine.
No, as an MP you did not have any more pressing engagements that called upon your precious time: nothing could be more important than debating the cause of this atrocity, arguably the most shameful peacetime abnegation of responsibility by the authorities towards its citizenry since the Irish famine. This is especially true since failure to address this issue could only mean that similar horrors would continue to happen in future. Yet ignore it you did.
No, you are not the exception to the rule – you ignored it and let it fester because you are, quite frankly, a gutless coward. You. Not just your colleagues. You. And you have both the blood of innocents and now the degeneration of our democracy on your hands.
Of course, physical fear plays a large part of your cowardice, but it is more than that: if you are a Labour MP, there is perhaps fear for your seat or losing a plum parliamentary job, as Sarah Champion did, because of reliance on Muslim block votes. Of course there is the fear of being labelled a racist. Perhaps if you are an ageing boomer radical, you lack the courage to admit that the great liberal dreams of your youth have failed.
If you are Tory MP, your reasons are simpler but no less contemptible and even more pathetic – loss of social status and exclusion from polite society for holding non-bien pensant views.
If you are woman MP, you have especial reason to feel deeply ashamed. Weren’t more women in Parliament supposed to mean that women’s issues would be more widely represented? Instead, middle-class female MPs spent their time obsessing over more congenial matters like gender pay gaps or microaggressions. I guess class allegiance trumps gender solidarity, eh, sisters?
Finally, if you are a gay MP, where does one even begin? I suppose we all missed the concerns you raised after three gay men were murdered in Reading by a crazed Islamist. Perhaps they should count their lucky stars that at least they weren’t Irish, after two gay men were found ‘severely mutilated’ (trans: beheaded) in County Sligo in 2022.
Yes, I am sure you will bleat in your defence that it is easy for a keyboard warrior away from the sharp end to condemn you, but defence of this country’s way of life, its citizens and our democracy is your job and one that you didn’t even begin to do: at base, you refused to acknowledge what large numbers of an increasingly concerned general public have known for years – namely that by allowing the viciously sectarian, often bestial, cultures associated with radical Islam to grow you have been turning every one of our cities and towns into Belfast.
And that segues nicely into the next observation, namely that in the past our politicians really were made of sterner stuff. During the troubles in Northern Ireland, every MP and Minister was viewed by the paramilitaries as a legitimate target, but they by and large stood tall. A good many ministers from both Labour and Conservative governments took the fight to the Provos, often with considerable gusto. Roy Mason as Labour Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, in the words of the late and unlamented Republican Martin McGuinness, ‘kicked the sh** out of us [the IRA]’. But Mason was an ex-coal miner and used to physical risk rather than a soft-handed Islington lawyer. Thatcher refused to cave into Republican hunger strikers, while Norman Tebbit even advocated the targeted killing of the Sinn Fein/Provisional IRA leadership. English MPs such Ian Gow and Andrew Hunter consistently condemned IRA terror. And all that pales into insignificance compared to the risks run by constitutional MPs in Ulster on both sides of the divide.
Many paid with their lives. MPs Airey Neave and Ian Gow were both killed by car bombs, the Ulster Unionist politician Edgar Graham was shot dead, George Berry MP was killed in the 1984 Brighton bombing that severely injured Normal Tebbit. Despite being very nearly killed herself, Thatcher refused to call off the final day of the Conservative Party Conference being held in Brighton at the time. In time the IRA were duly militarily defeated and essentially sued for peace in the mid 1990s.
In contrast, what can be said of your generation? Even the murder of your colleague Sir David Amess failed to stir you into inquiry, let alone action. Ignorance of the true nature of Islamism and its relationship to mainstream Islam amongst the political and media classes can only described as wilful. The Daily Telegraph columnist and ex-MP Tom Harris recently asked the rhetorical question ‘Are Muslims not individuals like every other citizen?’ Only an ageing liberal could be so naïve. Meanwhile, his colleague Fraser Nelson recently risibly opined that Muslim integration in the UK had been a great success except that Muslims were let down by their community leaders, which is bit like saying that everything would just be great if Islam wasn’t Islam.
The truth is that because the concept of human free will is absent from even mainstream Islamic belief, the politics of Islam strongly tend towards fascism. At nation-state level this means rule by absolute monarchs, dictators or the mullahs of Iran; at community level in Western countries, it means control by self-appointed loud-mouths, thugs and bullies. Of course, most Muslims do not support Jihad or sectarian aggression (though polls often show substantial minorities do) and we all know many Muslims who are thoroughly decent people. However, there is no widespread tradition of dissent within Islam in the way that there is in the far more individualistic Jewish and Christian (especially Protestant Christian) traditions. Nor, due to the hard-wired sectarianism of the Islamic faith, will most Muslims take action that sides with the Kuffar (non-believer) against their fellow Muslims.
Ever since 9/11, a great many members of the public have sought to educate themselves about Islam and the problems of compatibility with Western society, but you politicians have either singularly failed to do so or at least failed to debate it. How on Earth do you expect even to begin to combat a problem in such circumstances? The answer, of course, is that you were too scared to do so: scared physically, scared morally, scared intellectually. Instead, you stuck your fingers in your ears and shouted ‘diversity is our strength’ in the full knowledge that it wasn’t.
As a profession, your record is one of near total disgrace. Yes, there were and are honourable exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions. It must be repeated that no one should wish for MPs to be harassed and intimidated, but the grim reality is that due to your collective sins of omission politics is becoming once again an extremely serious, even deadly, matter rather than just the middle-class elite game you supposed it to be. A silver lining is that your generation of chancers, grifters and cowards will probably now decide to leave the stage. Goodbye and good riddance. Rest assured that the judgement of history will be very hard indeed on you. You reap what you sow.