Britain’s futile battle against extremism
by Liam Duffy, UnHerd:
Islamism is still evading government censure.
Back in 2015, word came down from on high that every British school was now bound by law to promote “fundamental British values”, lest they fall foul of Ofsted, or worse. Cast your mind back to the start of the year: it had kicked off with the murder of Parisian cartoonists, swiftly followed by grainy CCTV images of three Bethnal Green schoolgirls on their way to join Isis splashed across every front page. The year before, a plot to de-secularise a handful of Birmingham schools and instil an “intolerant Islamic ethos” was uncovered in the Trojan Horse scandal — which, despite subsequent revisionism, really did take place.
Britain had been caught completely off-guard by Islamist extremism, and reasserting fundamental British values appeared to be the answer. In fact, extremism was even defined by the Government as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”. The only problem: the reassertion of fundamental British values against this threat never really came. Many schools were confused and just did their best to keep Ofsted inspectors at bay. I saw “fundamental British values” hall displays made up of portraits of semi-obscure Royals and pictures of fish and chips. Elsewhere, the use of the word “British” before “values” made the mainly Left-leaning public and education sectors expected to promote them squirm. And so, in the absence of any revitalisation of British democratic values, Islamists largely just carried on going about their business.
Almost a decade later, Britain has once again been caught off-guard by Islamism, with the Government expected to unveil a new practical definition of extremism today. But this will always prove a very difficult task: “extremism” is a fundamentally subjective notion, and is open to an inherent risk of politicisation and abuse, particularly at a time when there seems to be less and less agreement on what our shared values actually are.
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