Douglas Murray

It is amazing what some people are willing to listen to on a Saturday.  I have just watched Charlotte Church’s speech to the small fringe of ‘anti-austerity’ activists in Westminster at the weekend. And my reaction is very much ‘Coo!’  Of course I knew how humourless this portion of the left can be, with their beliefs that Ukip is a ‘fascist’ party and that the current government is secretly selling off all schools and hospitals.  But even I didn’t think that they would wish to spend their weekends hearing lectures on David Cameron’s ‘neo-liberal vernacular’ from Charlotte Church.  Yes, she actually used that phrase in her speech.

Unencumbered by the regressive Liberal Democrats, the new government has already managed to start taking extremism seriously.  The counter-extremism legislation which the Lib Dems managed to stall will be included in the Queen’s Speech next week. But the government already faces an early test of its policies. Muhammad Salah – a ‘star’ of Huda TV – is due to speak next month at ten venues across the UK, from Edinburgh to Crawley at a ‘Welcome Ramadan’ event. You can see the invitation from ‘Human Appeal’ here. Now Salah is a strange and disconcerting figure to ‘Welcome Ramadan'. And the Home Secretary can hardly deem his views to be conducive to the public good.

I was on the BBC on Sunday morning discussing the government’s new counter-extremism legislation. Unusually for a discussion on this area the debate seemed to me to be constructive and engaging.  Perhaps this is a reflection of the changed political weather. But there was one strange thing – which is why I mention it here – and that is my disagreement with the former Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris who was on this occasion representing the National Secular Society (NSS).  I like Evan, share many of his views and rather like his ever so slightly other-planetary manner (something he shares with that other former Liberal Democrat MP, Julian Huppert).

It is often said that we get the politicians we deserve. But throughout this election I have kept wondering, ‘Are we really as bad as all this?’ The answer must be ‘yes’. This bland and empty 'campaign' has not only been the fault of the main parties competing to govern the UK – it has also been a reflection of what they believe we, the general public, now expect from our politics. Of course the result is aggravating, in part because we keep trying to enjoy contradictory things. For instance at some point in recent years it was decided that any statement outside a vague centre-left orthodoxy constituted a ‘gaffe’.

I am out of the country at the moment and I see that Ed Miliband has used the opportunity to ‘say’ in an interview with the ‘Muslim News’ that he will outlaw ‘Islamophobia’ if he becomes Prime Minister. I use ‘say’ because ‘Muslim News’ has never seemed to me an especially reputable outlet for news, Muslim or otherwise. And I say ‘Islamophobia’ in scare quotes because, well, the term deserves them. There are many things to say about this, but allow me confine myself to three points: If Ed Miliband does become Prime Minister and chooses to make ‘Islamophobia’ illegal would he mind letting us know what he thinks ‘Islamophobia’ is? After all a ‘phobia’ is an irrational fear.

So farewell then Lutfur Rahman. On Thursday the Islamist-aligned Mayor of Tower Hamlets was found guilty of electoral fraud. The poll in which he was 'elected' has been declared void and he has now been barred from office. There is much to be said about this and the implications for British democracy as a whole of what went on in Tower Hamlets. But this is also a time when certain people should be given a huge amount of credit. The lawyers and the four local residents who brought the case obviously deserve admiration for their tenacity and their principled stand against corruption in public life. But it is also worth mentioning two journalists. After all, the profession has gone through a bad time of late.

I have been wondering why nobody so far in this election seems to have made any mention of what most people recognise to be the biggest security problem facing this country. But then I discovered that the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, last week appeared at the Al Falah Islamic Education Centre in West London. He used the opportunity to express, er, ‘concern about the level of Islamophobia in the capital’ and to insist that 'an alternative word needs to be found to describe extremists who claim to act in the name of Islam'. According to the Evening Standard: ‘Mr Johnson, whose great-grandfather was a Muslim, added that a "problem in the language" needed to be resolved, with the issue discussed with the Muslim Council of Britain.

Yesterday's Mail on Sunday had an interesting account of a meeting in London of Nazis, neo-Nazis, British National Party types and anti—Semites of various other hues. The paper infiltrated the meeting and exposed what was said - which is a very good service and deserves praise. But I challenge anyone to look through the photos and biographies of the few participants who gathered at Victoria station and then in a nearby hotel and not reflect that this is a gratifyingly washed-up and pathetic movement. During their deliberations they appear to have gone over the usual stuff about how they think the Holocaust was made up and been used by Jews for their own advantage and so on.