Douglas Murray

Some politicians and pundits are brewing a perfect storm across Europe. Migrants are heading into our continent illegally in record numbers, and at the same time many politicians and pundits are spending their time trying to deride and shut down anybody who might be concerned about this. Last week I mentioned Angela Merkel’s skewed priorities in spending even a nanosecond worrying about what Europeans are writing on Facebook about this mass migration rather than trying to get a grip on the influx itself. The combination of a historic change in our continent and a simultaneous push from the top to police what the rest of society is meant to say or think about this would strike me as the best way possible to convert a decent response now into an indecent response down the road.

This has been a terrible year for free speech. In January, after the atrocities in Paris, the whole world was ‘Charlie’, for about an hour.  Then the violence and intimidation did the job they usually do (though we like to pretend otherwise) and by July even Charlie wasn’t Charlie anymore. So I was delighted earlier this year when the Free Press Society of Denmark asked me if I would be willing to come to Copenhagen this September to take part in a conference to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the original ‘cartoon crisis’.  I have spoken for this excellent group of doughty Danes before, and they have certainly shown more courage than the rest of the European media class combined.  Not that they don’t pay a price for their bravery.

Regarding the pig’s ear of a story currently circulating thanks to Lord Ashcroft’s vendetta against David Cameron, perhaps I could add a codicil. As many readers will know, the allegation is that at a Piers Gaveston event attended by David Cameron while a student at Oxford, our present Prime Minister went through an initiation ritual which involved him putting his private member into a pig’s mouth. I doubt that anybody – not even Labour spin doctors or Lord Ashcroft – seriously believes the story. It stinks of the university-years version of a Chinese whisper, whereby any exaggerated urban legend is attributed to the person who becomes most well known after the event. Lord Ashcroft and his co-author should be ashamed of putting their names to such dung.

The news that Jeremy Corbyn thought the death of Osama bin Laden 'a tragedy' because he was never put on trial is not very surprising. Nor is it as far-out-there as most of his comments.I did a BBC Question Time immediately after bin Laden's death where I got the impression I was the only person in Britain not to feel sad about the terrorist's death. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Paddy Ashdown and most of the audience seemed horrified by the terrorist's early demise and were most exercised of all over whether or not he had been given an appropriately 'Islamic' burial.Fortunately there was a woman in the audience (in Hammersmith, London) who had been on the Tube on 7 July and had seen people ripped from their lives far more brutally and with far less reason than Osama bin Laden was.

I had a piece in the Sunday Times yesterday about Jeremy Corbyn and the dodgy excuse he and his spokespeople use whenever he is caught with another IRA terrorist, Holocaust-denier, Islamist or random anti-Semite. In general the claim is that he was only involved in the meeting as part of a 'peace process.' Occasionally he/they claim he was only there because of something he is even less qualified to speak about and that he only met the bigot in question because it was a meeting on 'inter-faith issues'. In reality Jeremy and his people are clearly just trying to cover his tracks for decades of supporting terrible people with a propensity for extreme sectarian violence. But I would genuinely like to open out as a competition one question I keep asking.

On Monday, Jeremy Corbyn was questioned by Channel 4 News about yet another Holocaust denier and anti-Semite of his acquaintance.  And now the BBC's World at One has asked Corbyn about another. There are plenty more, and this will be able to go on for quite some time.  But Corbyn’s defence was interesting in that it went to the heart of the political inequality of our time: that is the assumption that the motivations of the left are good even when they do bad things, while the motivations of their opponents on the right are solely bad even when they do good things.

The Labour party includes many sensible and intelligent people who want what is best for our country.  But all of them are currently gnawing their hands and weeping into their sleeves as they watch their party prepare to take this great leap backwards.  I know of Labour politicians who hoped that putting Jeremy Corbyn up for the leadership would shine a light on him and his ilk and thus chase out for ever the IRA/Hezbollah wing of their party.  Alas for them the infection turned out to be what the body most welcomed, and so here the sensible members of the party sit, sadly mulling their electoral mortality. In such times I feel that it is incumbent upon those of us who wish the Labour party well to provide some comfortable words.