Interviewed on BBC television following last week’s conviction of three Muslim airline bomb plotters, the former British government minister Tony McNulty, was asked if Britain’s foreign policy was responsible for radicalizing young Muslims.
The routine British government response to this question has been to dismiss it as beneath consideration, and McNulty proceeded to restate it. What he was prepared to do, he said, was to sit down with young Muslims who feel outrage at the way Britain has joined the US in invading Muslim lands and explain to them the rationale behind British policy. His implication was that he would be able to show them where they had gone wrong in their thinking.
It is self-evident that no democracy can allow its foreign policy to be dictated by a minority on the basis of intimidation. The trouble is that British government policy in Iraq, if not in Afghanistan, has itself been widely viewed as a betrayal of democratic principle. What is more, thanks to the expenses scandal that in recent months engulfed MPs, there is now a perilous crisis of public confidence in the entire British political class, if not in Britain’s very system of parliamentary democracy.
Himself sullied by the expenses brouhaha, McNulty is a diminished spokesman for a government that took Britain into Iraq on the basis of what many believe to have been calculated deception. At present, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his colleagues are seeking to sustain a military commitment in Afghanistan by arguing that it is helping to keep British people safe, despite mounting evidence that for Britain its main consequence is a lengthening list of dead British soldiers.
Few can have failed to notice that, on the evidence of their trial, the convicted bomb plotters received instructions from a jihadist controller based, not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan. It is a dwindling number of Britons who doubt that the reason why Britain is in Afghanistan is because British foreign policy is made in Washington. In short, Britain’s geostrategic stance is felt to lack credibility by large swathes of British society, not just by Muslims who may feel especially incensed that Britain is at war in a Muslim country.
None of this means that British public opinion is in the smallest degree sympathetic to Muslims whose hatred of Britain’s foreign policy could issue in violence against British people. On the contrary, last week’s convictions of three aspiring homegrown terrorists were yet another grievous setback for law-abiding British Muslims. And the harm the convictions have done to their image has been hugely compounded by the endless exposure in news bulletins of a video in which one of the conspirators warns British people of the price they will pay for “messing with Muslims”.
Yet the convictions have most likely only exacerbated existing white British animosity toward Muslims. If hostility toward Muslims in Britain is growing, it is not least because of the economic downturn and the vast insecurity and ill feeling it is breeding. The street violence that broke out in Birmingham and Harrow this week between Muslims and anti-Islamic English nationalists is an ominous sign of the times.
Many believe the British government has been far too ready to indulge Muslims, while failing to insist that they integrate into British society. The emergent new conventional wisdom is that the 1960s doctrine of multiculturalism has backfired disastrously and created a dangerously ghettoized society, with Muslims more segregated than most. A number of prominent British Muslims are sympathetic to this view. The self-confessed former extremist, Ed Husain, author of the acclaimed confessional polemic, “The Islamist” (2007), argues that the British government’s subsidising of “moderate” Muslim organizations has been ill-judged, often playing into the hands of duplicitous fanatics.
The problem for the likes of Husain is that they are regarded by many young Muslims as sell-outs. And in fairness to their detractors, how can anyone have dealings with a government as morally tarnished as the British government is over foreign policy, economic stewardship and much else, without appearing morally tarnished too? The truth is that Britain has never been in more desperate need of a change of government, with ministers who do not give the impression of being nothing more than party hacks committed to a view of the world derived from Washington ideologues. If nothing else, the expenses scandal means that many all too familiar faces will soon vanish from British politics.
By this time next year, Britain may well have a new Conservative government led by David Cameron. From the point of view of British Muslims, the omens for a Cameron government are at best mixed. One of Cameron’s most voluble colleagues, Michael Gove, is a Zionist with close ties to US neoconservatives. At the same time, pro-Conservative newspapers persist in portraying Muslims as a far greater threat to British society than is officially acknowledged. The other day, the Tory pundit-cum-historian, Max Hastings, accused the Office of National Statistics of attempting to hide the fact that “Muhammad” is now the third most popular name for British boys — confirmation, he suggested, that the British Muslim population is expanding with disturbing rapidity. Some in the British media declare that the day is not far off when the “flag of Islam” will fly over Downing Street. Such outbursts can only fuel the sort of communal clashes witnessed in Birmingham and Harrow. Yet the campaigning theme that David Cameron has made his own — that Britain is a “broken society” — offers paradoxical potential for British Muslims. For if many are alienated, there are also many who brim with intelligence, verve and public spirit and who have a great deal to contribute to the debate about how Britain might reinvent itself as an exemplary multiethnic, 21st century society. The challenge that faces them is to demonstrate that Muslims are not a liability to British society but an asset. They do not have a moment to lose.
