The beginning

From James Forsyth in The Spectator.

Today is the 18th anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declaring a Fatwa on Salman Rushdie for writing the Satanic Verses. It was a wake up call to the coming challenge to the freedoms of a liberal society but one that we failed to heed.

The Rushdie affair demonstrated the spinelessness of the British political class in the face of Islamic extremism. The Crown Prosecution Service refused to prosecute those who openly called for Rushdie’s death. The Islamist Kalim Siddiqui amazingly got away with telling a public meeting, “I would like every Muslim to raise his hand in agreement with the death sentence on Salman Rushdie. Let the world see that every Muslim agrees that this man should be put away.”

Both Labour and Tory politicians embarrassed themselves and failed to grasp how essential it was to protect the right to free expression. The Labour deputy leader called for the paperback edition not to be published and some backbench Tories whinged about how much Rushdie’s protection cost. Indeed, Rushdie ended up being pressured into contributing to his own security costs. All in all, a shameful episode.

The first of many to come, all with the same message, "Try it on. We'll just fold and probably apologise as well".

Men of Valor, Parts II & III

I haven't been keeping up. Part II of Michael Yon's Men of Valor makes a very positive analysis of the British effort in Basra (more positive than most we are going to hear in the near future) and then describes a battle and some true heroics, especially from the mechanics.
A couple of well-turned phrases.

The place is like a toilet used as an oven.

There is a clear battlefield conversion from ink to blood to ink to blood.

The centre piece of Part III is an account of the largest attack on the British since 2003, and yet was only the first of a month of attacks on a small Coordination Center. It includes this:

As for recognition at home, the British soldiers say that it rarely happens, but they did tell me about one lady who gives them great moral support. They say she writes a handwritten letter to every wounded soldier in 4 Rifles. She writes a handwritten letter to every family of a soldier who is lost. She writes letters to the battalion often.

The lady is the Duchess of Cornwall.

If you haven't already read them, it's worth the time.

Who's got the six-pack?

Madeleine Bunting at The Guardian

The abolition of the slave trade is a painful reminder of British imperial history, which we have, incredibly, managed to largely forget. Who remembers the Bengal famine or Hola camp, the empire's opium trade with China or our invention of concentration camps in the Boer war? We too easily overlook how empire was a linchpin to British national identity, vital to welding Scotland and England together. Indeed, historian Linda Colley suggests three ingredients for British identity: "Great Britain is an invented nation that was not founded on the suppression of older loyalties so much as superimposed on them, and that was heavily dependent for its raison d'etre on a broadly Protestant culture, on the treat and tonic of recurrent war, especially war with France, and on the triumphs, profits and Otherness represented by a massive overseas empire."

I have already written on the absurdity of beating ourselves up over the slave trade, but that is beside the point. Notice how the events we have to come to terms with are all events we are supposed to be ashamed of. Coming to terms with history for people like Maddy of the Sorrows is always penitence for wrongs done to others, who are implicitly assumed to be innocent. The analysis she quotes is one done from Zero, that is, as if the starting point were Eden or Rousseau's noble savage, so that everything that comes from the past, such as social cohesion and the national sense of self, is an artifice. The pre-Protestant, pre-imperial country just disappears as if there were no continuity between Chaucer's England and Disraeli's Imperial Britain.

In a sense, the real problem (if that is right word) for British identity is its success. What holds this country back from the moist embrace of Europe is the difference in starting point between these islands and the continent. France, Germany and Italy needed Europe as a bulwark against their past political failure and the fear of similar future catastrophe. Just count the systems of government employed by those countries over the 20th century. Contrast it with the one system that has been evolving here (with a brief interuption in the 17th Century) since the Norman invasion. Only a fool rushes to change something that has been so successful, and while economic forces push us towards the EU, we are rightly very diffident about the political cosiness that would seem to follow.

Perhaps there is no clearer sign of the difference bestowed by Britain's historical success than its willingness to act while the Europeans talk. The great question remains hovering over the continent: will it ever have the confidence to match its economic muscle with a military six-pack? While that question hovers unanswered, the UK does well to keep its distance and to re-assert its identity not just in the microcosm of these islands, but in the macrocosm of the Anglosphere. Of course, it is just that confidence here that Madeleine Bunting and her ilk most want to undermine.

Faith-hate

And speaking of Islamophobia.

Jewish people are four times more likely to be attacked because of their religion than Muslims, according to figures compiled by the police.

In London and Manchester, where Muslims outnumber Jews by four to one, anti-Semitic offences exceeded anti-Muslim offences. The figures do not record the faith of the offenders.

There have been no prosecutions of those committing attacks on Jews.

(via Harry's Place)

Finally

Tony Blair has boldly said what has needed to be boldly said for quite some time now (and what John Howard has, in fact, been boldly saying for some time now). That, in this country, all cultures are not equal, that there is a hierarchy of values in which some abrogate others.

When it comes to our essential values - belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country and its shared heritage - then that is where we come together, it is what we hold in common.

It is what gives us the right to call ourselves British. At that point no distinctive culture or religion supercedes our duty to be part of an integrated United Kingdom.

Being British carries rights. It also carries duties. And those duties take clear precedence over any cultural or religious practice.

We must demand allegiance to the rule of law. Nobody can legitimately ask to stand outside the law of the nation. There is thus no question of the UK allowing the introduction of religious law in the UK. Parliament sets the law, interpreted by the courts. All criminal matters should be dealt with through the criminal justice system.