by Chris Bayliss, The Critic
The British individualistic tradition has served us well. There is no need to look for civilisational inspiration elsewhere
After the Greens’ victory at the Gorton & Denton by-election back in February, there was renewed attention paid to the nature of the underlying coalition that was at the time sustaining the party’s stratospheric rise in the polls. How could a party that was promising some of the most radically permissive social policies around gain such a strong foothold among a deeply religious minority group with an austere approach to individual morality?
The most plausible answer to this was that Britain’s South Asian Muslims regarded themselves as immune to the social effects of the Greens’ policies on things such as drug use and transgenderism. Their tightly-knit extended family structures act as a firewall against cultural decay in the rest of British society, meaning that the community could take the foreign policy aspects of the Green platform — along with the gesture of sectarian defiance a vote for them symbolised — while turning a blind eye to their domestic policies.
Commentator Rakib Ehsan touched on this in his essay in the Telegraph last week, as he commented on the “none-of-my-business” approach from some British Muslims toward British society as a whole, and the stronger sense of responsibility toward the country which he felt that British Muslims owed the UK.
This was one of a number of observations in a long and well-written piece which Ehsan contributed toward a six-part series run over the course of the week in the Telegraph, on the subject of race, religion and integration. But the various strands of his narrative were wrapped around Ehsan’s one consistent point that he has made in many articles and essays in the past. This point is that British conservatives ought to identify inspiration in Islamic social customs; specifically those of the predominantly South Asian Muslim populations present in Britain.