Andrew Gilligan

Last year I obtained a leaked copy of the new government’s ‘counter-extremism sprint’. It caused a huge political backlash – and was disowned by ministers within hours – for saying the UK’s approach to extremism should no longer be based on ‘ideologies of concern’, such as Islamism, but on a very wide range of ‘behaviours’,

Even by its own recent standards, the latest investigation from the anti-extremism group Hope not Hate was fabulously, joyously, Rizla Micron-thin. People with “a broad opposition to liberal orthodoxies,” Hope not Hate “can reveal,” meet in rooms in Westminster. It’s not quite clear what Hope not Hate sees as the actual problem here That’s it.

Not worried enough yet by the government’s new definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’? Here’s another red flag: the mild, nuanced, or downright supportive responses it’s received from some of the worst people in Britain. In the week or so since the definition was published, I’ve been tracking reactions across British Islam’s vast cosmos of professional offence-takers

The government’s new official definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ is 144 words long. But in a sign that even ministers now realise what a mess they have made, it is followed by a further tortuously pleading 1,400 words which ‘must be read together’ with it. You will be relieved to hear, according to this ‘accompanying text,’

Some things in the government’s leaked social cohesion strategy will be deeply neuralgic to many. There is the creation of a “special representative on anti-Muslim hostility,” which will almost certainly hand an official bully pulpit to an activist such as Baroness Gohir, who has attacked media coverage of the grooming scandal as “disproportionate” and being

Better not tell Ed Miliband, but in spring 2022 his then shadow cabinet colleague, David Lammy, appears to have struck oil. For the first time, The Spectator can tell the story of how, while serving as Britain’s shadow foreign secretary, Lammy was announced as the director of another country’s sovereign wealth fund – set up

The real scandal of Alaa Abd el-Fattah is that it is nothing new, and that not enough has changed. For decades, in dozens and dozens of cases, the British state has legitimised, worked with, empowered or funded extremists and bigots; people with values deeply opposed to Western democracy; people who sometimes literally seek our destruction.

For those who think there could never be a worse disaster than HS2, or hope that governments can learn from their mistakes, I have disappointing news. Later this month, ministers will unveil a future platinum medallist in the Fiasco Olympics: a project which even their own infrastructure watchdog calls ‘unachievable’. A new, high-speed line between

Readers of progressive newspapers have occasionally been invited to admire a man called Miqdaad Versi. He was the subject of a respectful 2018 profile in the Guardian for his ‘personal mission to confront…the Islamophobia of the British press’ one complaint at a time. Versi’s ‘spreadsheet of shame’ showed ‘how flagrantly British papers get their news

In Robert Jenrick’s fare-dodging video, it felt a little unfair for the Tories’ checked-shirt crusader to include that shot of the Tube station assistant with his feet up. The guy was probably just on his break, and you don’t blame the infantry for the failings of the generals. But on a wider level, the mayor,

According to people at City Hall, Sadiq Khan writes some of his own press releases. I can believe it: they’ve certainly become a lot more excitable since he took over. I like to imagine the Mayor of London, late at night, combing the thesaurus for fresh superlatives to bugle his ‘unprecedented programme of far-reaching improvements’

Let’s try a thought experiment, shall we? If a senior adviser to my old boss, Boris Johnson, had celebrated John Smith’s heart attack, mocked Gordon Brown for talking about his dead son and referred to senior members of the Labour party as ‘scum’, how long do you think that person would have kept their job?