News from the New Party

Elephants and ostriches

Last Saturday we wrote on this website:

We have become used to solid performances from Tony Blair and his senior ministers where national security is concerned.  It is of the utmost importance that the new government conveys the same sense of determination and competence in this area as its predecessor did.  However, it is far too soon to say whether or not this will happen.

Three days later, all the signs are that it will not happen.  Worse still, the official opposition also seems to be in retreat from reality on what needs to be done.  Daniel Finkelstein in the Times describes the effect of the departure of Tony Blair on the behaviour of cabinet members, and we might also say on politicians generally:

Gordon Brown appointed a new Cabinet with very much the same sort of people who were in the outgoing Cabinet. But it will be a vastly different body because Tony Blair isn’t in it. Without him, without his leadership, without the pressure he exerted on his colleagues to behave as he wanted, all those familiar faces around the table will start behaving in unfamiliar ways. Tony Blair is the elephant that’s no longer in the room.

The immediate result of the elephant's departure is that the Labour Party no longer feels itself bound by Blair's determination to prosecute the War on Terror.  Indeed, the phrase itself is now no longer in the new government's vocabulary.  While the Brown administration settles itself back into a European-style, social-democratic comfort zone, embarrassing entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan will be managed quietly and unenthusiastically until they can be decently ditched.

We also learn from the Daily Express that the word 'Muslim' is not to be used by government ministers in relation to the current terror crisis, on the orders of Gordon Brown:

Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word ‘Muslim’ in connection with the  terrorism crisis. The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase ‘war on terror’ is to be dropped. The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more ‘consensual’ tone than existed under Tony Blair… Mr Brown’s spokesman acknowledged yesterday that ministers had been given specific guidelines to avoid inflammatory language. ‘There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the UK,’ the spokesman said. ‘It is important that the country remains united.’

Melanie Phillips is scathing:

For ‘consensual’, read bowdlerised, censored and dissimulatory; and for ‘united’, read defeated. This is a disastrous beginning to Brown’s premiership. The terrorism we face is a jihad carried out in the name of Islam, mandated by the principal religious authorities in the world of Islam and drawing on theological concepts in Islam. That doesn’t mean all Muslims go along with it; many do not, and many are indeed its victims. But to deny that it is a war which draws its authority from Islamic precepts is to deny the truth. That is why it is not enough for British Muslims to condemn these acts of terror. They have to acknowledge that what drives these acts is a part of the faith to which they subscribe — a part which they must renounce.

In the light of that, the Commons statement yesterday by the new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith — whose performance had our terminally frivolous and ignorant media drooling in pleasure this morning — was an absolute disgrace. Clearly following instructions to avoid telling the truth in this new strategy of ‘consensual’ dissimulation, she conspicuously avoided talking about Muslims or Islam. Instead, she spoke — absurdly — about ‘communities’ and insisted that these terrorist outrages were merely ‘criminal’ acts. Exactly which ‘community leaders’ will she be talking to, one wonders, about the problem posed by these purely ‘criminal’ activities? Hindus? Chinese? Rastafarians?

Invited, moreover, to agree with a daft and worrying statement (by the chair of the supremely moderate Sufi Muslim Council) that ‘such actions have nothing to do with Islam’ she eagerly concurred, saying:

Any attempt to identify a murderous ideology with a great faith such as Islam is wrong, and needs to be denied.

Yes, the British Home Secretary has actually said that terrorist outrages committed by al Qaeda have nothing to do with Islam.

In the meantime, how has the Conservative Party responded?  David Cameron has in his team an individual who has written an impressive, yet measured, introduction to the terror crisis we now face.  His name is Michael Gove, and the book is Celsius 7/7.  While Mr Gove's appointment as Shadow Schools Secretary no doubt enhances the Conservative Front Bench, we cannot help but think that he would be better employed as the Shadow Communities Secretary than Mrs Saeeda Warsi, who has actually got the job.  James Forsyth of the Spectator explains why, quoting her comments after the 7/7 London attacks:

"We must start engaging with, not agreeing with, the radical groups who we have said in the past are complete nutters," she said, suggesting a process akin to the Northern Ireland peace process that brought Sinn Fein into peaceful negotiations.

"We need to bring these groups into the fold of the democratic process. As long as we exclude them and don't hear them out, we will allow them to continue their hate," said Ms Warsi, who lives in Dewsbury, Leeds, home to Mohammad Sadique Khan, one of the London suicide bombers.

"It may not achieve results immediately, but it may stop the immediate violence."

The Scotsman, July 20th, 2005

The fallacy here is that negotiation is possible.  Sinn Fein/IRA had a political objective about which negotiation was feasible.  How do you negotiate with someone who wants you either dead or enslaved?  Here again, thanks to James Forsyth, are her comments on civil liberties and Iraq:

“Mrs Warsi, 34, the Conservative vice-chairman with responsibility for cities, asserted that the tightening of anti-terrorist legislation had turned Britain into "a police state".

The claims appear in an article that she wrote for Awaaz, a newspaper read by Asians that is distributed in the West Yorkshire towns and cities that were home to the July 7 suicide bombers. Readers were told by Mrs Warsi that the Government's anti-terror proposals were "enough to tip any normal young man into the realms of a radicalised fanatic".

Her article asks: "If terrorism is the use of violence against civilians, then where does that leave us in Iraq?"

The Times, 15th May, 2006.

In other words, the Conservative Party now has on its front bench somebody who equates our military intervention in Iraq with terrorism - an outrageous proposition more to be expected from the likes of George Galloway than from a serious politician of the Conservative Party.

Where does all this leave us?  It would appear that Daniel Finkelstein is right.  Now that the Blairite elephant has left the room, the political ostriches are heaving a great sigh of relief and choosing to bury their heads in the sand, ignoring the real issues that our former prime minister, whatever his faults, was big enough to address.  These are very worrying times.