Breaking Point?

Failure to confront Islamist extremism will make Rochdale the new normal

Towering columns

In The Spectator, Jake Wallis Simons says the Rochdale by-election has revealed the deep divisions within Labour’s political tribe.

This is politics by freakshow. Rochdale has one of the highest destitution rates in England, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Symbolic of its prospects is the moribund Wheatsheaf shopping centre, once a bustling, five-storey mall which shut its doors in the pandemic and never re-opened, becoming a haunted house of dusty mannequins and graffiti. Outside its walls the town is stalked by homelessness, pawn shops and food banks. Yet the biggest campaigning issue is the Jewish fight for survival 3,000 miles away and the election is being contested by clowns.

It is true that Rochdale has never enjoyed the best of fortune when it comes to its political representatives. Cyril Smith, the obese Liberal Democrat paedophile who had a penchant for spanking young boys, represented the constituency for two decades until 1992. It has not had the best of luck in the press, either. The grooming gang scandal continues to cast a long shadow over its reputation, in which many dark things hide.

Nevertheless, the current political ignominy says a great deal about Labour. Sir Keir, who has held his nerve – just – in his support for Israel since 7 October, has done a decent job cleansing the parliamentary party of antisemites and has had some success in extending his authority to the rank-and-file. At Labour conference last year, the Labour Friends of Israel event was buzzing with energy while fringe groups like Jewish Voice for Labour, a relic from the Corbyn years, were remarkably etiolated. He also managed to elbow out Ali without too much prevarication. Deep problems, however, remain. Each of the three main Rochdale candidates, in their different ways, has continued to see themselves as representative of the true heart of Labour after the leadership rejected them. Since 7 October, it has become clear that a disturbing number of party members share this view.

In The Times, Juliet Samuel argues that the intimidation and threat of violence from pro-Palestine marchers is real and must be stopped.

So why is it that the police stand passively watching a pro-Palestinian mob halt traffic and yet will, in other cases, rip down posters of Hamas’s kidnap victims or order the removal of a mobile billboard displaying the victims’ faces for the sake of “community relations”? The answer, quite clearly, is fear. The forces of law and order fear those who break the law on the pro-Palestinian side, but they do not fear anyone on the pro-Israel side…

…None of this means that Lee Anderson was justified in saying that the mayor of London was “controlled” by Islamists, a claim made doubly absurd by Sadiq Khan’s amoral opportunism and stylistic resemblance to David Brent. It is quite right that Anderson was suspended. Neither does it mean that peaceful protest should be suppressed.

But it is absurd to claim, as some still do, that the biggest threat at present is the far right. What ought to excite more scrutiny and agitation is the steady deterioration of British state authority under threat of violent intimidation. Clearly, the government needs to examine the guidance and norms determining how the authorities respond to extremism and intimidation. The police and political leaders need to rediscover their appetite for confrontation with unacceptable elements of the pro-Palestinian movement, even where it involves risk and the use of force. Our education system needs the resources and political backing to tackle Holocaust denial and classroom extremism.

In The Telegraph, former immigration minister Robert Jenrick argues that Labour’s proposed definition of “Islamophobia” would create a de facto blasphemy law and restrict free speech.

It’s now become routine to use the “Islamophobia” label to silence criticism of extremism and sectarian politics. I am far from the first and I won’t be the last to be attacked as “Islamophobic” for holding a position that is in no plausible way anti-Muslim if we accept the terms of the current debate. Such practice is enabled by censorious definitions that have been hastily recognised by political parties and councils. For instance, Labour has adopted the nebulous and incredibly broad definition of Islamophobia as a “type of racism [that] targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. It runs head-first into two immediate problems: British Muslims are not bound by a shared ethnic identity, and within the population, there are huge differences.

Their definition classifies derogatory comments about Mohammed as Islamophobic. But we would never apply the same standard against the Pope or Jesus, despite being a Christian country and these religious figures being sacred to millions of practising Christians. Elsewhere the authors include “claims of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword or subjugating minority groups under their rule”, which is a denial of a well-established history of Islamic imperialism. Again, we would never apply the same standard to Christians and the Crusades…

…In so doing, the definition actually risks enabling sectarianism within British Muslim communities. Just this week a British Muslim had his kebab shop in Bradford attacked by a mob for not boycotting Coca-Cola. But under the Left’s soft bigotry of low expectations, they miss the fact Islamism is an extreme political project that is largely rejected by British Muslims. Desperate to preserve their progressive status in polite society, they turn a blind eye to British Muslims being intimidated and harassed by these same extremists.

For City A.M., Adam Hawksbee warns that Britain will experience further cost-of-living crises if action is not taken to build up economic resilience.

We have to ask why Britain was hit so hard by this inflationary shock in the first place, especially compared to our G7 peers. Since the end of 2021, the UK’s consumer price index has risen by 15 per cent compared to 10 per cent in the US and France. While higher interest rates have begun to restore balance, the impact has been felt by the poorest regions and most vulnerable families. And managing the fallout has not come cheap: the government’s cost of living support has totalled almost £100bn over the last two years.

The benign inflationary and low interest rate environment of recent decades has allowed our susceptibility to price shocks to be overlooked. In these good years, our economic system has prioritised efficiency at the expense of resilience. We need to act, because more inflationary shocks are coming – spurred by rising disruption from climate change, heightened global conflict and the diminishing deflationary effect of manufacturing shifts to Asia.

In short, Britain needs to be better insulated against volatile prices. Companies are making adjustments of their own, shoring up supply chains or building reserves to increase their resilience following the pandemic and Ukraine war. But the government also has a role to play in digging out the root causes of our vulnerability and developing supply-side solutions to reduce long term exposure to inflation.

In the Financial Times, Camilla Cavendish calls on Westminster to help farmers more with producing cheap food while maintaining environmental standards.

It’s legitimate to ask big landowners who have benefited disproportionately from subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy to reduce pollution. But food production cannot be taken for granted. Policymakers must accept that extreme weather exposes farmers to more uncertainty, and manage the demands on land strategically. Last year’s EU Nature Restoration Law — which pledges to set aside 20 per cent of the bloc’s land and coast for natural restoration — was seen by some farmers as a dismissal of their stewardship of the countryside.

The anger at the loss of subsidies should not drown out what seems to be a deeper fear that a whole way of life is under threat. Smallholdings across Europe are going bankrupt. The countryside is ageing, with younger generations wondering if they can handle the psychological strain of an industry where financial worries can crush mental health. In France, suicide rates are 20 per cent higher among farmers than the national average…

…When livelihoods are at stake, green issues get pushed aside. But there shouldn’t have to be such a stark trade-off. The war in Ukraine has exposed the risks of being overly dependent on imports. Perhaps nutritious food should be regarded as part of our critical infrastructure. In her valedictory speech as president of the NFU, Minette Batters pointed out that UK landowners who installed solar farms received index-linked payments for 20 years; but those who produced crops had no such luxury.

In the New York Post, Niall Ferguson reviews the growing threat to the West from a new Axis of Evil formed by Russia, China, and Iran.

A consequence of the Biden administration’s weak deterrence is that a real Axis of Evil, or at least an Axis of Ill Will, has formed. No two world leaders have met more frequently in the last decade than Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. And I assure you they’re not discussing the respective merits of Russian and Chinese cuisine. They met immediately prior to the offensive against Ukraine, and at that meeting they declared that they had a “no-limits” partnership. The fact that Iran is a major source of drones for the Russian air assault on Ukraine is further evidence. 

So is the fact that the attacks on Israel were preceded by meetings in Tehran between Iranian government officials and the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, not to mention Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but also by Chinese diplomatic intervention to bring about some kind of truce between the Saudis and the Iranians. All of this I think is part of the jigsaw that you can put together without knowing the classified information. On the basis of the open-source intelligence, it’s very clear that there is coordination, even although there is no ideological homogeneity between these regimes. 

China is still nominally a Marxist-Leninist communist regime, Russia is some kind of imperial-nostalgia tribute to Peter the Great, and Iran is an Islamist Shia theocracy, but they all want American predominance to end. The Pax Americana, which has many defects, hasn’t been such bad international order that one would wish it to be replaced by a Chinese-Russian Greater Eurasian Co-prosperity Zone. Yet the Pax Americana, which was about American economic might plus alliances, is more vulnerable today than at any time since the end of World War II. One thing that’s interesting about Cold War II is that it seems to be going faster than Cold War I.

Wonky thinking

For Engelsberg Ideas, James Vitali examines the paradox of liberal individualism that has resulted in more choice than ever before as well as greater constraints from the state. The decline of community has broken down the ‘mediating institutions’ between individuals and the state, resulting in our current situation.

The debate on the political right today is ensnared in a misleading binary between those who believe that we are too burdened, and those who think we are too liberated. Between those who argue that competition, free exchange and prosperity are being quashed by the state, and those who feel that in our pursuit of absolute individual freedom we have eroded our social solidarity.

This is a misleading dichotomy. Rather like the economic phenomenon of stagflation, efforts to solve one part of this dilemma will exacerbate the other: the more we unmoor individuals from community membership, the more the state will aggrandise to compensate. The more the state aggrandises, the less space is left for genuine free agency.

The task of any genuinely conservative government in the present context then must be to support an increasing role for community and associational life at the expense of the state. In other words, we need to repatriate power directly from the state to communities, for it is through the restoration of community that we will create fertile social contexts for the genuinely independent, self-sufficient individuals – championed by conservatives and liberals – alike to emerge.

In seeking to reduce the size of the state, we will need to reduce the demand for its services. To ask the state to do less is implicitly to ask communities to do more: in the provision of education, childcare and support for the elderly; in the allocation of land use; in the decision-making of local areas. We need to restore the functional significance of communities in our society, and that will require us to think hard about the tasks the state could and should do, and those things that the state should not be responsible for.

The Adam Smith Institute has launched its new Next Generation Centre, headed by Sam Bidwell, with the report My Generation. Intergenerational inequality is eroding the confidence of young people in democratic institutions and market economics, turning them away from the centre-right, the report argues.

Rising house prices and soaring rental costs are the direct result of a lack of housing undersupply - in turn, this is the result of a planning system that tries to control for any and all risks, while giving enormous influence in the planning process to established economic stakeholders (e.g. homeowners). By the same token, our flawed higher education funding system is partly shaped by a desire to ensure adequate funding for established stakeholders - in this case, UK universities which might not otherwise be financially viable. Any proposals to reform this system are met with arguments about the risk that reform would pose to our higher education sector, even as existing higher education provision fails to deliver acceptable outcomes for many graduates.

Even stagnant wages and diminishing career prospects can be partly attributed to this culture of risk-aversion. At least to some extent, the UK’s lack of per-capita economic growth in recent years is a feature of burdensome regulation. In 2019, the National Audit Office (NAO) found that there were roughly 90 regulatory bodies in the UK, with combined expenditure of around £5 billion, imposing monitoring and compliance costs estimated to total over £100 billion annually. The activities of these regulators has, in too many cases, been tilted entirely towards minimising the potential harms for consumers, at the expense of other objectives. However, removing risk is not cost-neutral. These additional obligations on businesses, and the associated costs, stifle economic growth; the resultant lack of growth manifests itself in the form of fewer career opportunities for individual economic actors. Over-regulation risks creating, in the words of Economic Secretary to the Treasury Bim Afolami, “[safe] graveyards”.

There is a direct link between the expansion of the regulatory state, and the challenging economic conditions that now face younger people. A more dynamic approach to our economy, which tries to balance risk against reward in all areas of economic life, would drive economic growth while unlocking the potential of a generation of young people who are currently being stifled. Against this backdrop of stagnating incomes and declining homeownership, is it any wonder that younger people are rejecting the established political order? In the words of Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities: “if people think that markets are rigged and a democracy isn’t listening to them, then you get - and this is the worrying thing for me - an increasing number of young people saying, ‘I don’t believe in democracy, I don’t believe in markets.’”

Book of the week

This week we recommend The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism by historian Andrew Gamble. The author provides a comprehensive account of the ideological underpinnings of the Thatcherite project and its transformative impact on post-war Britain.

As a political project Thatcherism had three overriding objectives - to restore the political fortunes of the Conservative Party, to revive market liberalism as the dominant public philosophy and to create the conditions for a free economy by limiting the scope of the state while restoring its authority and competence to act. It is because Thatcherism deliberately set out an alternative to the policy regime that had been established since the 1940s that it has attracted such attention. Many explanations have been offered for Thatcher's dominance of British politics in the 1980s - the electoral system, the disarray of the opposition and the political skill and opportunism of the Conservatives are all important factors. But the ideological ascendancy given by Thatcherism to the right wing was important as well.

After 1975 the New Right increasingly set the terms of the political and ideological debate. Its central doctrines could be applied to theoretical issues, policy issues and issues of ordinary life, and its arguments appeared plausible and coherent. It was able to do this both because of the failures and disarray of the Labour government and because of the greater readiness of the Conservatives to respond positively to new issues and new opportunities created by rapidly changing patterns of work and leisure and an increasingly open and interdependent world economy. The initial spur behind the development of Thatcherism was the strong reaction in the Conservative Party against the record and policies of the Heath years. But its momentum was maintained by the flow of ideas and policy discussion that came from the New Right and by fast-moving world events.

The impulse behind Thatcherism was the need to restore the state's authority and reverse the decline of the economy. Although the New Right is made up of many groups, which have tended to become more rather than less diverse, they were united in the early years of Thatcherism by the need to free the economy from the controls and burdens of collectivism, while at the same time strengthening the authority of government by limiting its size and scope. The Thatcherite project was driven by the belief that the postwar accommodation between the interests of labour and capital could no longer be sustained, and that this was leading to accelerating inflation, rising unemployment and a growing burden of public expenditure. The market economy was being buried under an avalanche of controls and regulations, and the state was being paralysed by strong pressure groups. The New Right favoured a return to the principles of classical liberalism - free markets and limited government.

Limited government, however, does not mean weak government. The state has to be strong to police the market order and provide those goods - such as security, competition, law enforcement and stable prices - that the market cannot provide for itself. If the state takes on responsibilities beyond these it risks losing its authority and effectiveness. It has to be above the fray of competing interests in civil society, which means that the state should not become involved in administering major spending programmes, such as education and health, or economic enterprises, such as coal, electricity and telecommunications. Its role is to encourage families and individuals to be self-reliant and independent of the state, relying on the market rather than on public services for the satisfaction of their needs. This image of the good society, based on a free economy, a strong state and stable families was central to Thatcherism. It was the inspiration for many of the policies and strategies of the Thatcher government. From it sprang a number of separate if related discourses - commonsense homilies about the economy as well as sophisticated disquisitions on macroeconomic management and public choice.

Quick links

Anti-Israel activist George Galloway won the Rochdale by-election with 44% of the vote after a campaign focused on Gaza, with the former Labour candidate coming fourth.

Problems with airport e-gates mean Britain’s border is “neither effective nor secure” according to damning reports by a Home Office watchdog.

A record 1.4 million visas were issued in 2023 with only 44% for skilled work.

The Government’s Bill to strengthen leaseholders’ rights, reduce ground rents and prevent new builds’ sale as leaseholds passed its third reading.

The Chancellor is considering scrapping “non-dom” tax exemptions.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts that surging immigration will mean spending on public services being £150 per person lower by 2028.

Former PM Sir John Major joined those calling for increased defence spending over tax cuts at the Spring Budget.

The report on the rape and murder of Sarah Everard case revealed that former police officer Wayne Couzens had a long history of sexual offences going back to 1995.

Young people now have the worst rates of mental health of any age group and are more likely to be out of work due to illness.

Private equity firms are buying up the UK rental market, putting pressure on tenants and first-time buyers.

Germany accepted 334,000 asylum seekers last year, excluding Ukrainians, which is larger than the population of Bonn.

Focus groups run by Lord Ashcroft found large disparities between the concerns of voters and politicians with one person saying “I couldn’t find Gaza on a map”.

The UK pension industry is 41% underweight its own domestic equity market while the average for the rest of the developed world is 2089% overweight.

Share price returns have flatlined for 50% of the most domestically-orientated companies on the FTSE since 2016.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific advisor to the Government, joined the Tony Blair Institute as a strategic counsellor.

The Foreign Office reopened the Chevening scholarship scheme for places at top universities to future Russian leaders.

Conservative Texas has avoided a housing crisis by approving new builds while planning regulations fuel homelessness and high house prices in liberal California.