The Labour party seems to have ignored the advice I gave it in last week’s column, and so we are going to be treated to one of those down-market beauty pageants where candidates for the Labour leadership spend weeks talking competitively about the evils of Thatcherism, the nobility of miners and the perpetual threat of NHS privatisation. We might also look forward to watching the leadership candidates go for a jog, play football in an amusing manner and eat this country’s most disgusting foodstuffs as evidence of their authenticity.
One of the candidates for this pie-eating competition is the now-resigned health secretary Wes Streeting. And on this particular candidate I have some history to narrate.
I first encountered Streeting many years ago, after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had been narrowly prevented from blowing up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day2009. The ‘underwear bomber’, as he became known, almost succeeded in setting off a bomb which, if he had succeeded, would have been one of the largest mass-casualty terrorist attacks to date.
Wes entered the picture because Abdulmutallab had until recently been a student at University College London. At the time, Streeting was the head of the National Union of Students – an organisation well known for its usefulness as a conveyor-belt for safe Labour seats.
I was among those who were not especially surprised at what the underwear bomber had attempted. That is because while acting as the head of the Islamic Society at UCL, Abdulmutallab had invited extremist speaker after extremist speaker to give talks on his campus. Among them was someone who was connected to the al Qaeda chief in Yemen, which was the place from which the Christmas Day airline plot originated. A number of us had long warned of the radicalisation of students in certain Islamic societies at British universities.
A short while earlier, the thinktank I then ran had commissioned a poll from YouGov to look into student opinions on a range of issues. Among its findings were that just under a third of Muslim students polled agreed with the statement that killing in the name of their religion could be justified. That figure doubled among Muslim students who were members of their university’s Islamic society. This was because for years these societies had consistently put forward extremist Islamic speakers, entirely unopposed. They did this as though such speakers represented the entirety of Islamic thought instead of a particularly nasty and sectarian variant.
In order to ascend the slippery ladder of left-wing politics, Streeting needed to keep the Islamist contingent onside
As head of the NUS, Streeting denounced the findings and methodology of the YouGov poll before it had even been published. He had a reason to avoid such uncomfortable truths, which was that in order to ascend the slippery ladder of left-wing politics he needed to keep the Islamist contingent onside. He did this in the face of all evidence. Even the New York Times reported at the time that a ‘War on Terror’ week arranged at UCL by Abdulmutallab was notable for its extremism. On arrival, the attendees were played footage of the planes going into the World Trade Center and images of mujahideen firing rockets in Afghanistan. One attendee later recalled: ‘It was quite tense in the theatre, because I think lots of people were shocked by how extreme it was. It seemed to me like it was brainwashing, like they were trying to indoctrinate people.’
At a subsequent meeting of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, Streeting gave a speech in which he said he was pleased to have been attacked in the media by Melanie Phillips and me. He praised Islamic student societies for all their ‘fantastic work’ in promoting ‘social cohesion’ and boasted of his close relationship with the Muslim Council of Britain – an organisation that the Labour government of the time had cut off contact with due to its extremist links.
Streeting then remained onstage as one of the speakers – Haitham al-Haddad – gave a speech in which, among other things, he compared homosexuality to paedophilia. None of this received any rebuke from the gay Wes Streeting; instead, he reserved his ire for those of us pointing out that there was surely something wrong with inviting speakers to UK campuses who taught that women are second-class citizens, that gays are subhuman and that violence in the name of their religion could be justified.
Finally, in 2010, the two of us had this out in a debate at UCL. Streeting smirked as I listed the radical events on campuses during his time as head of the NUS. He brushed off any suggestion that terrorist speakers coming to campus might encourage students to terrorism – and it was obvious why he needed to do so. Streeting is not a stupid person. He was simply an opportunist who wanted to harness the highly activist Muslim base in order to climb the pole of left-wing politics.
After the UCL debate I asked a left-wing journalist present what he thought would happen to Streeting. ‘Oh he’ll get a safe Labour seat and probably end up in the cabinet. Perhaps even prime minister,’ the journalist said. ‘Then at some stage he’ll start saying some of the things we are both warning about now.’ And where will we be? I asked. ‘Oh in some gutter,’ he suggested breezily.
Happily, the last part of that prediction has not yet come true, though most of the rest of it has. Streeting made his way in politics by using the Islamist ‘green’ part of the red-green alliance. Along the way he hid or disguised any principles that anyone (let alone someone who is gay) might hold.
Of course people can change, and perhaps Wes has. And well done to him for getting so far. But it seems a point of minor historical interest that as he runs for the summit he always wanted to attain, the ‘green’ part of his coalition is finally pulling away from the red. Making me, at any rate, ponder whether it was really all worth it.
Comments