A former general of the British Army accuses UK Prime Minister David Cameron of being a “foreign policy irrelevance” for allowing his country to be sidelined in efforts by France and Germany to engage with Russia in efforts to solve the crisis in the Ukraine. Another ex-general, meanwhile, rebukes Cameron’s government for not doing enough to combat ISIS, and so does the UK Parliament’s defense committee.
Yet Cameron may not be unduly bothered by these criticisms. For in common with the rest of the British political class, he is preparing to fight the 2015 UK general election (to be held on May 7), mindful that foreign policy is hardly a popular subject following Britain’s ill-starred participation in the US-led occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. In so far as Britons are thinking about foreign affairs at all, it is in negative terms, with many hankering to vote in a referendum in favor of British withdrawal from the European Union, in the belief that they may thereby retrieve control of their borders and shut out unwanted immigrants.
Not that the idea of the UK turning itself into an inviolable island fortress is anything but an idle fantasy. After all, Britain’s capital city is the hub of pan-continental air traffic galore. Moreover, London’s multinational population, mushrooming at the rate of 100,000 per year, connects it with practically every part of the planet and ensures that there are few global political movements without their resident London representatives. Yet because of its extraordinary cosmopolitanism (and disproportionate wealth), London itself is increasingly seen by the rest of Britain as a foreign land, peopled by more or less undesirable aliens.
One recent resident alien hugely heightened British suspicions of London and the wider world all by himself: namely, Abu Hamza, the Egyptian-born former imam of the Finsbury Park mosque. Sentenced in January by a US court to life imprisonment for supporting terrorism, the one-eyed, hook-handed Hamza courted notoriety as Britain’s all too conspicuous “enemy within.” The sobering message of a new book, Abu Hamza: Guilty The fight against radical Islam, by the sometime Algerian journalist-turned-professional informer, Reda Hassaine, is that influential blind eyes were turned to the cleric’s sinister machinations. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Hassaine personally observed how Hamza enjoyed a free hand to promote radicalism among young Muslims from inside Britain and from overseas under the noses of the British authorities. He maintains the UK security services established a “covenant of security” with Hamza, an understanding that he would be left alone provided that he did no harm on British soil. He also maintains that Hamza did more than a little to nurture the toxic climate that led to the 7/7 London bombings of 2005 and earned London the unflattering sobriquet “Londonistan.”
It has often been claimed that militancy in the UK is indissolubly bound up with British support of US foreign policy. Yet if Reda Hassaine is to be believed, the Finsbury Park mosque was a hotbed of terrorist activity long before US interventionism in Afghanistan and Iraq. The less than straightforward truth perhaps is that the egregiously pro-Washington foreign policy of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair served to exacerbate radicalism that was already germinating in the UK. What seems certain to have exacerbated it yet further, it must be said, is official British disinclination to acknowledge major mistakes regarding foreign policy and national security: It is a circumstance helpful neither to democracy nor to efforts to counter terrorism that the much-trumpeted Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war, now four years overdue, is unlikely to appear before 2016.
Many will not vote at all in the coming British general election. Of those who do, not a few will vote for the United Kingdom Independence Party led by Nigel Farage, a politician adept at giving voice to widespread anger that the London political elite has betrayed Britain, not least by throwing open the country’s doors to undesirable aliens. It is no handicap to Farage’s cause that for great numbers of Britons no body of people these days appears more alien or undesirable than the London political elite itself.
