The Deep Roots of Extremism

Tackling illiberal Islamism will be necessary to restore social cohesion

In The Telegraph, Lord Frost says governments must go further than they previously have in defining extremism for the purposes of who the state will engage with, praising Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove’s new measures.

We can’t rely on the old informal ways to keep extremists out of government. Yet governments are perfectly entitled to choose who they want to work with. If a Conservative government doesn’t want to be advised by extremists, if it doesn’t want state policy to be undermined by advisers telling public authorities the opposite, and if it doesn’t want to spend the public’s money on any of these people, then that is entirely reasonable. This is what Gove, it seems to me, is trying to achieve. The existing definition of extremism is too broad and is often implemented by people who don’t really agree with it – so it is rightly being tightened so there is less room for doubt. We need to have a system for defining organisations as extremist and therefore not to be invited into government or otherwise interacted with by state authorities – so Gove is creating one. 

None of this has legal force: it’s guidance for government. Nor is it about freedom of speech. It doesn’t ban any organisation.It doesn’t stop anyone saying anything. It just means that, on the basis of what an organisation says or does, the government can decide not to interact with it, appoint its representatives to quangos, or give it taxpayers’ money. I can’t see what is wrong with that. Indeed, I approve of it. 

Now nothing is without risk and it is right to be concerned about two aspects. The first is that officials in practice take all the decisions about which organisations go on the blocked list. It’s crucial that ministers supervise properly and have the final say – all the more so since the new definition catches ideologies based on “intolerance”, which to my mind is rather too broad, particularly in progressive hands. The other is the risk that we are creating a weapon which a Labour government will use in a different way, to block our allies and friends, and to squeeze out, for example, gender-critical or anti-abortion groups from public life. That is a risk – except that Labour is going to do this anyway. It’s very clear that it intends to double down on the Equality Act, bring in a new Race Equality Act, adopt a broad definition of Islamophobia, and much more. 

In The Times, Ed Husain warns against the influence of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in spreading extremism in Britain.

The nation of Churchill cannot stand idly by while those influenced by the fascism of the last century, namely the Muslim Brotherhood and its ideological activists and allies, use London as a political capital. Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood seeks to rule with hardline sharia as law, and views ordinary Muslims that do not share this vision as its opponents. The rise in antisemitism in Britain since October 7 has many sources, including the far left and the far right, but the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies are ideologically committed to the destruction of the state of Israel. This matters to all of us, because what starts with the Jews never ends with them. Citing Benjamin Disraeli, Churchill used to say that the “Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews”.

The time has come to tackle the Brotherhood and shut down its financial, media, charitable and political arms in Britain. The government recently banned Hizb ut-Tahrir for advancing the same ideology as the Brotherhood after October 7. Follow this lead and relations will be strengthened with Arab nations in the Gulf. The Brotherhood is banned in Mecca, but thrives in London, including under names such as the Muslim Association of Britain.

Hamas is the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. They unashamedly killed Jews and have vowed to act again. The Brotherhood in Britain, operating under different “community representative” organisations, has been radicalising young Muslims against Jews. Islamist mosques and publishing houses have been disseminating calls for the destruction of Israel. After October 7, this is not an abstract issue. Sayyid Qutb, the Lenin of the Brotherhood, wrote Our Battle against the Jews in the 1950s, and Ayatollah Khamenei, now supreme leader of Iran, translated that text into Farsi. Their agenda against Jews and Israel couldn’t be more clear.

Also in The Times, Francois-Joseph Schichan traces the difference between British and French approaches to extremism, arguing that Britain is now facing a reckoning France did ten years ago.

At the root of these differences lie the diverging approaches that the two countries have taken in managing multiculturalism. Historically, France has always sought to limit the expression of cultural and religious identities in the public domain, for example by banning the veil in schools or in the civil service. Conversely, the UK has been practising a form of laissez-faire that allowed all minorities to express their identities openly, at the risk of clashing with each other and with the British values the prime minister referred to in his remarks last week.

These differences explain why, for the majority of the French public, the tolerance of the British police to some behaviours in the recent demonstrations in support of Gaza on the streets of Whitehall and near parliament is a source of bewilderment. By contrast to the response of political leaders in France, the UK’s political class seems stuck in denial, as demonstrated by the reluctance to even use the words Islamist extremists.

However, it appears that Hamas’s attack on Israel might have been a turning point. The various political developments that followed the attacks in the UK, from the demonstrations in the streets of London to the debates in parliament, exposed the growing influence of Islamist extremists in British politics and society. It is leading to the realisation that it is time to face the challenge of Islamist extremism head on — the same realisation that started to happen in France a decade ago.

For The Critic, Patrick Porter says British influence in the world must be underpinned by a hard defence capability, questioning the importance of “soft power”.

These are the hard capabilities [former permanent secretary to the Foreign Office, Simon] McDonald claims Britain is no longer capable of wielding. That seaborne trade has resumed through the Black Sea is only possible because Ukraine militarily holds Russia’s fleet at risk. Yet asked about Britain’s support to Ukraine, McDonald plays the definition game: “These all to me feel in the soft power side of life: to draw other people’s attention to something, to galvanise activity.” If “soft power” can be reformulated to include arming and training Ukrainians to kill Russian soldiers, the term is meaningless.

History does not support the notion that cultural attraction generates behavioural deference. If anything, there is a disconnect. In our time, Saddam Hussein defied the United States for 13 years even while consuming Frank Sinatra and Jack Daniels. Islamists from Egypt or Saudi Arabia crave the pleasures and technological wonders of the Western societies that they want to burn.

And recall wishful visions two decades ago, that Western offers of prosperity could make a rising China into an equity stakeholder, deferring to American primacy. In more distant times, even invading predators liked the civilisations they looted. Recall the invaders that sacked Rome yet minted coins in the likeness of emperors, or the crusaders who diverted their expedition to plunder Constantinople.

Without hard foundations, appeals to authority carry little weight. In 1945, Stalin notoriously dismissed papal disapproval: “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?” This may not capture the full complexity of diplomacy. But it is a better “first cut” guide to the world than the Soft Power Index, or mandarins who mistake popularity for strength.

In The Telegraph, Madeleine Grant says universities have increasingly become a scam.

For a profession supposedly geared towards discovering the truth, academia practises industrial-level self-deception. Masters’ degrees are fast becoming academia’s dirty little secret. Privately, academics know full well that there’ll be students studying, say, a masters in law who would never be admitted for a bachelor’s degree. It is an embarrassing wheeze to pretend these students are up to scratch.

Meanwhile, the post-study work visa for graduates – reintroduced under Boris Johnson – does not seem to be benefiting only the best and brightest. The Migration Advisory Committee, not usually famed for its plain speaking, has called for “a rigorous evaluation of the route”. Separate analysis has shown that more than 50 per cent of international students who switch to a “skilled worker” visa are becoming care workers, putting them on a speedy path to permanent settlement.

And what of the deal for students? Data journalist John Burn-Murdoch has analysed the dramatic decline of the graduate wage premium over the past 25 years. More than a third of graduates now work in jobs that do not require a degree. Arguably this premium was already inflated by the credentialism arms race accompanying expansion, since many jobs that never used to require a degree now do. The Institute for Fiscal Studies claims that one in five students would have been better off financially had they not gone to university at all (accumulating £50,000 worth of debt on the way).

In The Times, Alex Massie says Scotland remains an outlier in prescribing puberty blockers, while the rest of Europe is realising they were a mistake.

Across Europe, healthcare authorities have been revising guidelines for the treatment of gender-questioning children. In 2020 Finland prioritised psychological assessment over medicalised interventions. The following year Sweden restricted the used of puberty blockers in all but the most exceptional circumstances following a determination that the risks of these drugs — and the cross-sex hormones for which puberty blockers act as a gateway — are considerably greater than their putative benefits. France has also severely restricted the use of these drugs. Even the Netherlands, which pioneered these treatments, is reconsidering their usefulness.

So England is not the outlier; Scotland is the exception to this gathering trend of re-evaluating and reforming treatment for gender-questioning children. Three years have passed since David Bell, a governor-turned-whistleblower at the Tavistock gender clinic, declared that “children have been very badly damaged” by “gender-affirming” medicine of the sort practised at the Tavistock gender clinic. Yet the official line in Scotland continues to be that concerns in England mysteriously evaporate as soon as they cross the border.

The insouciance with which the authorities — political and medical alike — have treated this issue is something worse than merely reckless. It is grotesque. Children, some of whom were still at primary school, risked being left infertile by treatments of unproven usefulness and dubious morality. This is the opposite of “being kind”. On the contrary, dogma trumped science; ideology vanquished safe practice.

Wonky thinking

Writing in The Times, David Goodhart reflects on his influential essay, “Too Diverse?”, twenty years on, concluding that Britain is experiencing fundamental cultural tensions due to uncritically promoting diversity above cohesion.

Some things have changed for the better since 2004. We have a minority prime minister, and people are more upset by his bank balance than his ethnicity. Minorities are more visible at the top of politics and the professions and there is a greater awareness of minority differentiation. Integration at professional class level happens mainly effortlessly, less so further down the social hierarchy. Neighbourhood segregation, although still high in some, mainly poorer, places, is in gradual decline overall as minorities climb up and move out to the suburbs. The story in schools is less good, with nearly half of minority pupils attending schools that are less than 25 per cent white British.

On the debit side we have seen the emergence of identity politics and an intolerant progressivism — maybe the shrill reaction to Too Diverse? was a premonition. I flagged this up too in 2004: “In the decades ahead European politics may start to shift on a new axis, with left and right being eclipsed by value-based culture wars and movements for and against diversity.” One thing I got wrong was to place too much emphasis on increased diversity eroding support for the social safety net. The welfare state in the UK, and across Europe, has proved robust. Once it exists it creates its own vested interests and it is hard to exclude people who are thought to be undeserving.

Nevertheless, I was not completely off the mark. According to the British Social Attitudes survey in 1989, 61 per cent of people thought spending on the poor should be higher, even if it meant higher taxes; today it’s just 37 per cent. And there is simmering resentment around immigration-related pressure on public services and housing — almost half of social housing in London is occupied by people born outside the country.

I was also right to predict that, thanks to Denmark’s restrictive migration policy and integrationist approach to newcomers, its welfare state would, 20 years on, be in better health than the (then) pro-immigration, anti-integrationist Sweden. Sweden’s real trauma has been migrant gang violence and welfare dependence, and the gradual realisation that people from traditional societies are not automatically transformed into modern liberals on arrival.

So, the tensions I highlighted were and are real. Nevertheless, given the scale of change in the past 20 years, one could also argue that we have not done badly. There are occasional flare-ups, usually involving Muslim sensibilities. And the colour-blind melting pot is largely confined to the higher professions, the affluent suburbs, and the most successful minorities — Chinese, Indian and some Africans. But we adapt.

Yet the realities of ethnic difference, sometimes separation, are now feeding into broader trends of diversity and identity politics that favour differentiation and individualisation and which are helping to shape a new kind of society. One feature is a general retreat from national attachment. Many older people look at the national media, or at London (now barely 30 per cent white British), and feel they have lost their country. Many younger people never had it, and according to recent polls would not fight for it.

Perhaps this is the inevitable product of wealth and technology allowing us to curate our own lives in ways that were not possible until recently. And maybe I am just nostalgic for an idea of a single country with a recognisable way of life — albeit with many, varied smaller streams feeding into the mainstream — that is no longer achievable or desirable.

Then I look at what is coming our way and I think we need the galvanising and unifying power of the post-ethnic nation state more than ever. We need it to lean against fragmentation as we head towards a 40 per cent minority population by 2050. We need it to grant legitimacy to politicians to take big decisions about burden sharing over climate change and the high costs of an ageing society, and maybe to manage conflict over a shrinking economic cake. We may even need it to defend ourselves militarily in a more dangerous world.

An increasingly diverse and individualistic future in which most of us don’t know our neighbours and society becomes a collection of networks of kin and friends — a cacophony of competing WhatsApp groups? — is not an appealing one. It is America without the patriotism; a new version of “there is no such thing as society”.

So, yes, I would now remove the question mark from Too Diverse? I think we are becoming too diverse to achieve some things most of us want. And even if you disagree, you would surely accept that diversity has many trends on its side, so pointing to some costs should not be controversial. Diversity usually erodes implicit understandings of trust in established groups that then requires elaborate and costly regulation by law or committee to take its place. Constraint on free expression is another. Diversity seems to require evasions and silences to reduce potential frictions when people with very different beliefs live cheek by jowl. One example is the unwillingness to acknowledge that it is much easier to absorb people from some cultures than others.

Book of the week

We recommend Why Can’t You Afford a Home? by Josh Ryan-Collins. The author argues that the financialisation of the housing market for speculative profit is a driver of the housing crisis as much as supply shortages.

A remarkable transformation is occurring in advanced capitalist economies. Home ownership and housing more generally is becoming unaffordable for large swathes of citizens. In nearly all advanced economies since the early 2000s, the ratio of house prices to incomes has increased significantly above its long-term average. The financial crisis of 2008-9 led to a fall in the ratio, but it has rebounded sharply since 2013.

Anglo-Saxon economies - where home ownership is deeply embedded in culture - have been particularly badly affected. In big cities such as London, Manchester, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Vancouver, Toronto, Los Angeles and San Francisco, median house prices have risen to over 7 times median incomes - with 3 times generally seen as “affordable”.

The hardest hit have been younger adults: the “millennials”. In the UK, for example, in 1996 two-thirds of 25-35 year-olds owned a home; by 2016, this had fallen to just a quarter. In the United States in 2004, almost 45% of the same age group were home owners, a figure that dropped to 35% by 2016. In Australia, home ownership among the under forties declined from 26% in 2001 to 25% in 2015.

The foundational promise of liberal capitalist economies that “if you work hard enough you can have a home of your own” no longer holds true. There have been major falls in the levels of home ownership since the turn of the century across all the major English-speaking economies…Rising house prices would be less of a problem if housing rents were more stable. But rents are also eating up an increasing share of household incomes. In the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, renters spent about 10% of their income on housing; by 2016 this had risen to 36%…

…To understand today’s housing crisis, we must go beyond just looking at the supply of housing and examine demand, in particular the demand for housing as a financial asset and land as a form of collateral. And looking at the demand for housing and the land underneath it leads us to consider much bigger questions about the social and economic structure of modern capitalist economies.

In particular, the increasing political preference for home ownership over other forms of tenure, coupled with wider shifts in political economy, have led to two important - and perhaps unintended - developments in the housing and land market. Firstly, the windfall gains that naturally accrue to landowners in a growing economy - generally referred to as “land rents” - have been allowed to grow as taxes on property and the public provision of affordable housing have both withered. Secondly, and most significantly for explaining the rises in house prices in the last two decades, the deregulation of the financial system has created a positive feedback cycle between finance and house building. Finance has become addicted to property just as citizens in many capitalist economies have come to expect to own a home. Underlying and perpetuating both these developments has been a failure of economic theory and policy to conceptualise the role of banks and land in the economy.

In this sense the housing crisis is about much more than just the housing market: it lies at the epicentre of the crisis of modern capitalism. To end it, radical structural reforms will be required to economic and public policy, including how we shape the market for land and regulate the financial system.

Quick links

Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove announced a new definition of “extremism", affecting which groups can have dealings with government.

The Prime Minister said comments by Frank Hester were “wrong” and “racist”, but will not return his £10 million donation to the Conservative Party.

Research by the Government’s counter-extremism chief found that “blasphemy” protests have become more frequent and radicalised in the UK.

Annual wage growth is now 1.8 per cent in real terms.

Research by pollster J.L. Partners found “weak” to be the word voters most associate with both major party leaders.

The top political issue for 2019 Conservative voters is immigration.

SpaceX successfully launched its “Starship” into orbit, but the vessel broke up on re-entry into earth’s atmosphere.

Armed Forces minister James Heappey resigned from the Government.

New data showed that two-thirds of incapacity benefit claims are for mental ill-health.

Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick urged the PM to scrap EU “nutrient neutrality” rules to enable more planning approvals.

Councils have only spent ten per cent of allocated levelling up funds.

Germany is considering developing an independent nuclear deterrent.

Forty per cent of 20-29 year-olds live with their parents.

White males receiving free school meals are the least likely group to proceed to higher education, with less than ten percent going on to university.