Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray and Melle Garschagen, UK and Ireland correspondent for NRC, discuss the Dutch election: The Dutch public go to the polls tomorrow, and the question of Turkey is on the menu. This past weekend the Dutch government forbade a plane containing the Turkish Foreign minister from landing in the country.  The Turkish minister had been due to address a crowd in Rotterdam.  Another Turkish minister – the hijabi Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya, due to attend a similar rally – was prevented from entering the Turkish consulate in Rotterdam.  All of which led the Turkish government to dismiss the Dutch people (and then the Germans as well) as ‘Nazis’. Last night, Turkey then banned the Dutch ambassador from returning to Ankara.

Several months ago, after his election victory, I asked for any proof that Donald Trump is – as some of his most mainstream critics were claiming – a vile homophobe. I thought it a perfectly reasonable question to ask, and the only evidence I was given in reply was one gay man in America who cried after the election.  This did not satisfy my standards of evidence.  But a related question now also needs asking.  Where is the proof that Donald Trump is an anti-Semite? I ask because in the last week there has been considerable, nay ecstatic, reporting of an accusation that the President of the USA is not only fuelling anti-Semitism but has installed anti-Semites at the heart of the American government and is himself a vile anti-Semite.

A couple of weeks ago I named the Labour MP Tulip Siddiq as my pious political hypocrite of the week, mainly for being silent on her bigoted aunty while strikingly vocal about a total stranger. I’m afraid that I was so overwhelmed by applicants for last week’s award that I have only just emerged from the pile of entries. However, I am now in a position to reveal the latest recipients of this increasingly coveted prize. Pipping even Speaker John Bercow to the award are the brave sisters of the Swedish government. Here is a photo from earlier this month of Isabella Lovin (Sweden’s Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for International Development Cooperation and Climate and spokesperson of Sweden’s Green Party).

I have noted before in this place that the people who seem most fascist these days are self-described ‘anti-fascists’. The inaugural weeks of Donald Trump’s Presidency are – whatever else you think of them – doing a fine job in smoking these people out. The principal cause of ‘anti-fascist’ ire today would appear to come from the collective decision that anybody whose opinions do not wholly concur with a narrow set of agreed upon ‘liberal’ views is a ‘fascist’. This is not a wholly new development – Allan Bloom noticed this more than thirty years ago.

I would like to propose Labour MP Tulip Siddiq as the winner of the pious political hypocrite of the week badge for her response to President Trump’s temporary immigration halt. From today’s Guardian we learn that Ms Siddiq is one of a number of Labour MPs who have warned that the UK Prime Minister’s allegedly ‘feeble’ response to President Trump’s recent immigration order risks making UK Muslim communities feel ‘disenfranchised and disillusioned.’ Apparently the consequences of this failure could be ‘played out on our streets’ and ‘turning a blind eye to the reality of this ban we run the risk of losing the trust of an entire generation of young British Muslims.

It looks like the people might do it again. After the British electorate misled themselves so badly and American voters failed to rotate the Clinton and Bush families for another presidential cycle, the latest fear is that democracy might occur in Holland. Polls currently show Geert Wilders’s Freedom party almost at level pegging with the governing VVD party, both milling around the 30-seat mark. Questions about when the Dutch became illiberal miss the point that this is a revolt in defence of liberalism rather than against it. The misinterpretation does Dutch voters a serious disservice and fails to acknowledge that the Dutch status quo of recent years — like that in the UK and US — has gone badly wrong.

When Martin McGuinness said he was retiring from politics due to serious illness it gave vent, almost immediately, to the sort of ‘How McGuinness became a man of peace’ stories. Personally I have always thought the salient point about the man is not that he became a man of peace but that he was ever a man of violence. Over recent years a narrative has developed around the Troubles, that the people who ‘became men of peace’ are much to be admired.

While observing reactions this week to allegations against America’s President-elect my mind has been ineluctably returning to 2015 and the story so inventively known as ‘pig-gate’. In case anyone has forgotten, this was a story which was pumped into the British press and then into the world’s media about the then Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron. A former Conservative party donor – Lord Ashcroft – had fallen out with David Cameron years before because Cameron would not give Ashcroft a position in the British cabinet. Being a man of means and owning a publishing house, among other things, Ashcroft had his revenge in an inventive and thoroughly modern manner.

A New Year is upon us and a new wave of racism, bigotry and xenophobia is meant to be stalking our land. That’s according to a Sky poll released on Monday which proclaimed that ‘Britain is more racist and less happy since Brexit vote’. If this made you check your pulse and wonder what racism has started coursing through your veins since June 23rd, fear not. The headline does not reflect reality but simply some peoples’ perception of reality. It is the result of a question in the poll which asked people not whether they felt more or less racist since last June, but to answer the question ‘Would you say Britain is more or less racist than a year ago?

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 4, in which the future foreign secretary Boris Johnson was named as the winner of Douglas Murray's 'President Erdogan Offensive Poetry' competition I’m pleased to announce that we have a winner of The Spectator’s President Erdogan Offensive Poetry competition, and here it is: There was a young fellow from Ankara Who was a terrific wankerer Till he sowed his wild oats With the help of a goat But he didn’t even stop to thankera. The author of this winning entry is former Mayor of London and chief Brexiteer, Boris Johnson MP.