Douglas Murray

The Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) is a strange beast. Its membership largely consists of Asghar Bukhari and his brother. Occasionally another person appears on television claiming an affiliation to the group - an affiliation promptly proved by use of the organisation’s modus operandi, viz furious shouting backed up by ferocious stupidity. Anyhow, it has long been plain that Asghar lives in the fever swamps. I suppose Sky just think he makes good noise. But today brings a particularly moving example of where this can lead. Thanks to the excellent Jamie Palmer (@jacobinism) who reads Asghar’s Facebook rants so the rest of us don’t have to, the world can now read a real gem. Here it is. But first a warning. This is not, it seems, a spoof.

Today's Times carries an interesting story. A new report from the Department of Education reveals that: ‘Almost one in three of England’s primary school children is from an ethnic minority – the highest level yet.  One pupil in five speaks English as a second language.’ There follows some information about how these numbers are putting an ‘unprecedented pressure’ on schools which now ‘struggle to cope’ after a 2.1 per cent increase in pupils at state primary schools in one year alone. The extraordinary thing about stories like this is that they just sail by.  No politician has anything much to say about it.

Freddy’s blog on the so-called ‘rape culture’ that we in Western democracies are all meant to be struggling under reminds me of an unwittingly important moment on BBC3 last year.  It was provided by our colleague James Delingpole when he appeared on something called ‘Free Speech.’  This is an almost comically appalling ‘yoof’ programme which I did once from an ice rink in Doncaster alongside a Page 3 model and Owen Jones. Anyway, on the occasion that poor James appeared one of the subjects that came up was ‘rape culture’.

The former Chief Rabbi, Lord (Jonathan) Sacks, is one of the most interesting thinkers, writers and speakers about today.  His interventions into the public debate rarely fail to encourage thought, knowledge and indeed wisdom.  I had the pleasure of interviewing him last year for the magazine just before he was due to give a major lecture in London titled ‘Confronting violence in the name of God'. The themes of that interview and talk are now significantly expanded into a book due to be published later this month.  It is called ‘Not in God’s Name: confronting religious violence'.

Does anybody else remember life in Britain before the year 2000?  Despite the distressing increase in the number of walking, talking human beings one meets who were born since the millennium, there must be some other people who remember those times.  Yet what a picture of that era is now being painted. Take the incredibly glitzy and celeb-driven campaign currently running thanks to the campaign group ‘Liberty’.  No less a site than The Spectator has run the ads. And understandably so. For they are not only well-funded but feature the icons of our time.

 Lampedusa The young hang about in packs or speed around town, two to a scooter. Old women group together on benches around the town square in front of the church. The men continually greet each other as though they haven’t met for years. The likelihood is small. With fewer than 6,000 inhabitants, and as close to Libya as it is to Italy, Lampedusa is the sort of place from which any ambitious young Italian would spend their life trying to escape. Yet every day hundreds and sometimes thousands of people are risking their lives to get here. ‘Please tell people we have nice beaches,’ one islander pleads.

New York Brooklyn is the hipster heaven of New York, which is perhaps why it was there that a bust of Edward Snowden was unveiled yesterday.  Not that it stayed long.  The bust of the former National Security Agency contractor was put on a pedestal sometime on Monday with the word ‘Snowden’ glued on the base at the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument at Fort Greene Park.  It was taken down a few hours later by parks and recreation employees. I don’t want to read too much into this, but the brief deification and bringing down of Snowden’s image does seem apposite.

To the extent that Britain has philosophers, we do not expect them to address issues of any relevance to the rest of us. They may pursue some hermeneutic byway perhaps, but not the urgent or profound issues of our time. Roger Scruton has always been an exception in this regard, as in many others. He has spent his adult life thinking and writing about the nature of love, the nation state, belonging, alienation, beauty, home and England. But even his closest readers may gulp at the relevance of his latest subject matter. His new novel, The Disappeared, is set in the north of England and centres on the recent rape-gang cases. It’s a gripping, disturbing narrative dealing with abduction and abuse but also love, escape and a type of redemption.

I have been most interested in recent posts here by Alex Massie and Matthew Parris.  Here is a poll which might interest them both. YouGov recently carried out a survey in the UK which sought primarily to judge public opinions on the issue of posthumous pardons to people convicted of homosexuality. So far so hip, cool and with the beat. But the poll also asked respondents whether they think in general that homosexuality is 'morally acceptable' or 'morally wrong'.  What do you think the figures were?  Well in most regions of the UK those people who thought homosexuality 'morally wrong' sat at around 15 per cent.  About what one might have expected.  But what do you think the figure was in that enlightened beacon of progressive diversity which is our capital?