Islamism & the "Far Right:" a False Equivalence

Cluelessness in London

Sometimes when I get tired of the terrible news from the United States I like to take a look across the Atlantic. Sometimes it’s better! Sometimes it makes me grateful to be in America. This is one of those times. Something remarkable happened in the British House of Commons on Wednesday, February 21st: Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, and Sir Keir Starmer, the Leader of the Opposition and likely next Prime Minister, bent the knee to Islamist intimidation and allowed threats of violence to dictate the business of the Mother of Parliaments. More precisely, Sir Lindsay broke parliamentary protocol to allow three separate votes on a ceasefire in Gaza on the grounds that this would protect MPs from threats to their safety.  As he told the House: “I don’t ever want to go through the situation of picking up a phone to find that a friend, of whatever side, has been murdered by terrorists.” 

This didn’t come about in a vacuum. For months since the attacks of October 7^th, Britain’s cities have seen repeated massive pro-Palestine protests, often accompanied by radical rhetoric against Israel and its Western supporters. Britain’s counter-terrorism chief Matt Jukes warned in January of increased “radicalization” occurring over the war in Gaza. Against this backdrop of heightened scrutiny of their stance on the conflict, left-wing Labour Party politicians and their staff complained of being fearful of violent attacks, even as one of their Tory colleagues, Mike Freer, said he was resigning in response to death threats and murder attempts from Muslims. In response to all of this the Home Office announced £31m of public funds to hire bodyguards for MPs “so as to protect the UK's democratic processes from disruption.” I know the feeling.

Of course, the real issue looming in the background of these extraordinary and ominous developments is the UK’s now enormous Muslim population, much of which seems far more concerned about the ethnic and religious war in the Middle East than the domestic politics of the country in which they live. Yet Britain’s political and media elite, rather than focus on the combination of mass immigration, identity politics, and anti-Western dogma that created this problem, have chosen to spend the weeks since talking mostly about Islamophobia and the Far Right instead.

The pretext for the shift was an incident of lèse-diversité involving (now former) Tory MP Lee Anderson, who said that Islamists controlled London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Anderson accused him of “handing over our capital city to his mates” (i.e. Islamists). This clumsily worded remark was all the excuse the media needed to declare that the real issue is Islamophobia in the ailing Conservative Party. It also opened the way for activist groups to demand investigations into “structural Islamophobia” as well as attacks from predictable quarters such as Scottish National Party leader Humza Yousaf, who called for an investigation into “institutional Islamophobia,” and a pile-on from so-called One Nation Conservatives like Sayeeda Warsi, who said his remarks revealed a “rot at the heart” of the Conservative Party. 

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parliament_at_Sunset.JPG

So far, so predictable. This is just the reality of contemporary Britain. Every year the nation gets more Muslim, and every year the nation gets more terrified of talking about Islam. What was more remarkable was the response of the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. Rather than seeking to refocus attention on the hijacking of the entire political process by mob rule (as former Home Secretary Suella Braverman called it), he instead reinforced the media and leftist narrative by “withdrawing the whip” from Anderson (that is, throwing him out of the Party), which precipitated his defection to the new, but genuinely conservative-seeming Reform Party. To make matters worse, he followed this up after extreme-leftist George Galloway’s victory in a Rochdale by-election with an address on extremism that only reinforced a sense of seriously disordered priorities.

Instead of pledging to fight back against Islamist intimidation of MPs or talking about how Galloway’s Gaza-centric campaign reflected the balkanization wrought by excessive immigration, Sunak instead feebly triangulated between Islamism on the one hand and the supposed rise of the Far Right on the other, telling us that they “feed off and embolden each other. They are equally desperate to pretend that their violence is somehow justified when actually these groups are two sides of the same extremist coin.”

This attempt to draw an equivalence between Islamism and the far right as equally threatening extremes between which Sunak’s Tories sit in the “Sensible Center” was seriously mistaken on at least three levels. 

For starters, it is glaringly at odds with the government’s own data about the realities of the terrorist threat in Britain. 

According to the 2023 CONTEST Report, the primary domestic terrorist threat comes from Islamism, which “accounts for approximately 67% of attacks since 2018, about three quarters of MI5 caseload and 64% of those in custody for terrorism-connected offenses.” It also accounts for 80% of the Counter Terrorism Police’s live investigations. A similar picture is evident on the Continent, where Europol’s director said in 2023 that “Islamist terrorism remains the biggest terror threat to Western Europe.”   

By contrast, what CONTEST calls Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism “amounts to approximately 22% of attacks since 2018, about a quarter of MI5 caseload and 28% of those in custody for terrorism-connected offences.” Overall, far right terror attacks in the UK so far this century have resulted in 3 fatalities and 10 injuries compared to 94 fatalities and 1819 injuries from Islamist ones. Three dead is three too many, but it is hardly equal to the threat of Islamism.

Proportionately, these figures are even more striking given that Islamists must look for their support among a Muslim population amounting to 6.5% of the UK total, whereas the Far Right can in principle address its message to a white population representing 80%.  It is a threat which can also draw succor from the fact a sizeable plurality of British Muslims candidly tell us they would prefer to live under Sharia law rather than integrate fully into British life and a significant minority of tens of thousands say they admire organisations like Al-Qaeda that are prepared to fight the West. Not unrelatedly, the 43,000 Islamists on the MI5 watchlist represent about 1% of the entire Muslim population of the country.

Moreover, as a prospective matter, Islamism is a more rapidly expanding force with immigration putting momentum on its side: as Matt Goodwin has pointed out, between 2010 and 2030, the number of Muslims in Britain is forecast to increase 94%, from 2.8 to 5.6 million. According to data I will release later, roughly 1 in 8 British children is born to Muslim parents. The threat won’t just grow - it will grow exponentially! The Far Right, by contrast, only ever rises (from a low base) in reaction to a perceived threat, which presently seems most likely to be provided by the sort of establishment immigration extremism that has prevailed in the UK since 1997 but which hopefully can be beaten at the ballot box before it engenders a threat on a remotely comparable scale. None of this is to make an excuse for right-wing terrorism. Terrorism is terrorism, and we should stop it wherever it arises. But in order to do so effectively, it helps to understand it.

This however leads us to a second problem with Sunak’s triangulating response to Islamist intimidation: it’s deeply misguided as a matter of electoral politics. He could have told voters that he understands how the unprecedented scenes in Westminster and British cities over recent months have arisen from the failed progressive paradigm that has governed all aspects of immigration and integration policy since Blair. Instead he sent out a further powerful signal that he is determined to reinforce it. 

It is simply delusional for the Tories to think that joining in with Labour’s distraction campaign against a far right phantom will benefit them politically. As an Opinium poll conducted after Anderson’s remarks showed, nearly three-quarters of Tory members believe that immigration has been bad for Britain and that multiculturalism is not working. 58% believe Islam is a threat to the British way of life, and they are twice as likely to have a negative view of immigrants as a positive one. The proportion of them who believe that Islamophobia is as big a problem as Islamism can, as such, be guesstimated at near zero. 

This poll moreover came out against a backdrop of others showing that 8 in 10 former Tory voters think the party would have a better chance of winning the election with a leader who embraces “traditional Conservative values,” something the party under Sunak steadfastly refuses to give them. In large part as a result, the Reform Party has siphoned off the votes of almost one third of 2019 Conservative voters from the Tory’s right flank.

The fact that support for Reform has risen from 4% when Sunak became Prime Minister to an average of 14% now strongly suggests that his kowtowing to the left on the central issues of mass immigration and integration is not the answer to their electoral woes. All he has achieved through this approach is to alienate right-of-center voters, while failing to win over any centrists.

This leads me to the most troubling aspect of his speech: as an ideological matter it was symptomatic of the Tory Party’s near-total surrender to concept creep over the meaning of “far-right.” 

Historically, this designation referred to violent anti-democratic movements that stood for totalitarianism, military expansionism, and supremacist ideologies that countenanced the enslavement or genocide of ethnic or religious minorities. Today the term “far right” lacks any connection to such a plausible definition. This was vividly demonstrated when Lord Pearson, who sits as an independent peer in the House of Lords,  tabled a parliamentary written question in June 2023 asking whether His Majesty’s Government has “adopted a common definition of “far-right;” and if so, what it is.” Replying on behalf of the Government, Lord Sharpe, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, cited an Intelligence and Security Committee report which defines “Far Right” as “an umbrella term to encapsulate the entire movement which has a Far-Right political outlook in relation to matters such as culture, race, immigration and identity.” 

It evidently escaped Lord Not-So-Sharpe that this definition is entirely circular: to say that “the far right are those with a far right outlook” is not informative but tautologous. I’m reminded of Ibram Kendi’s definition of racism. Not content with so obvious a cop-out, Lord Pearson persisted with another parliamentary question citing the previous answer and inquiring “what criteria are used to determine whether groups or individuals have a ‘far right outlook.’” Lord Sharpe responded once again, explaining that “far-right political outlook” means “views that Western civilisations are under threat from ‘non-native’ people and ideas.” 

This is, I wearily admit, is an improvement on the previous evasion. But it is still absurdly inflationary. As has been pointed out elsewhere, this definition would plausibly encompass both the government’s and Intelligence and Security Committee’s own oft-repeated claims that the UK and broader West are threatened by the (non-native) governments of China and Russia as well as by foreign Islamist groups. Moreover, it could easily be read to encompass any claim that there are serious costs associated with mass immigration of “non-native peoples” into the West. Consider, for instance, one of the most famous findings in the scholarly literature, Robert Putnam’s discovery that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods “[t]rust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.” Despite the fact this finding has been replicated by others and is clearly relevant it could amount to a far right view on this definition, an implication sufficiently costly as to discredit it too. 

Nor do matters improve much when we turn to the new definition of “extremism” just unveiled by Michael Gove as part of the effort to “combat the far right and Islamist threat.” It describes it as involving “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance that aims to negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights; or intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve [this].” Aside from the fact that the second prong of this definition would seem (for better or worse) to rule out advocacy of, say, a non-monarchical system as extremism, there are two glaring problems with it. 

PM address on extremism, 1 March 2024. Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-address-on-extremism-1-march-2024

First, the new proposed definition will - like the definition used by Prevent before it - still be based on values. That is to say, it is based on what people think rather than what they do. As such, it is an example of what the philosopher Quassim Cassam has called ideological extremism rather than methods extremism. There are several major disadvantages with this approach. Unlike methods extremism which involves the use, threat or direct incitement of physical violence to achieve political or religious ends, ideological extremism is far more subjective. What “fundamental rights” do we have, after all, and how are they to be ranked when they conflict? The answers will reflect clashing ethical intuitions rather than the sort of hard facts we can adduce about violent methods. It is also relative, as what is deemed ideologically extreme now was mainstream twenty years ago; just consider the definition of marriage or the connection between sex and gender. Needless to say it is also far more intrusive upon our innermost freedom of thought.

Second, the new definition will be interpreted by bureaucrats rather than courts and ones whose institutions skew to the left ideologically. They are also subject to resource constraints and incentives for conflict aversion that will generally incline them to use these vaguely worded rules to side with the most fashionable and/or threatening side in a dispute. When deciding on what constitutes “hatred or intolerance,” for instance, do we really trust the Home Office to apply this evenhandedly between (say) small numbers of gender critical feminists or immigration restrictionists on the one hand, and thousands of Hamas supporters marching through London on the other? The fact that training materials under the Prevent counter-extremism program are known to have included the likes of Brexit voters, Douglas Murray and “cultural nationalism” as examples of right wing extremism show that a skeptical response is far from unfounded. Doubts about their impartiality seem more rational still, given the well documented fact that the mainstream media who socialize our bureaucratic hive-mind are statistically far more likely to decry political extremism on the right than on the left. This is especially true after the Great Awokening shifted the Overton Window sharply leftwards on matters like race, diversity, and gender over the last decade.

One might, in conclusion, wonder why an ostensibly center-right party has been willing to go along with scaremongering about the “far right” based on such incredible conceptual drift. As Frank Furedi has argued elsewhere, the answer probably lies in their recognition of the fact that “the political and ideological hegemony of the centrist technocratic elites is fast unraveling.” In a political context which has seen parties regarded by Tory elites as “Far Right” win elections or enter government in Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland, ascend to second place in the polls in Germany and be projected winners in upcoming elections in the USA and France, they have boxed themselves into a small neoliberal electoral niche. Perhaps they now see their main function as a sort of ideological containment, preventing a bolder offer that would appeal to socially and culturally conservative voters from being presented to the British people by stigmatizing it as extremist. That strategy may have worked so far in Britain but I do not think it will continue to do so. And I worry about how much Islamist extremism (and, for that matter, genuinely far-right extremism) will grow in the meantime.

As such, we can say that in promoting the fantasy of a far right equal in numbers or in menace to contemporary Islamism these cowardly centrists are guilty not only of perpetrating a statistical fraud on the public, of political incompetence and of philosophical illiteracy, but also of corrupting our political vocabulary in a disreputable attempt to salt the earth to their right so as to prevent a future democratic populist force from fixing their own disastrous legacy on immigration, integration and wokeness - which is to say, the very things that created the objectively greater Islamist threat in the first place. They need to find both the intellectual courage to look at terrorism objectively, and the moral courage to do something about its real sources. Please, I pray, let them do so soon.