Britain’s institutions are being bullied into submission by “Islamists, the extremists and the anti-Semites” while politicians hide behind the lie of a “successful multicultural society”, Britain’s former Home Secretary Suella Braverman writes in the wake of a miniature constitutional crisis in Britain’s Parliament this week.
The Speaker of Britain’s House of Commons broke with convention this week to change the normal business of the house to, he claims, reduce the risk of its members and servants being murdered by terrorists. While an ostensibly laudable notion, the admission that the business of a Western democracy is being steered by the threats of radical extremists from without has triggered alarmed responses from several political figures, not least among them former Home Secretary (interior Minister) Suella Braverman, who has been one of the more forthright voices on migration and security in recent years before she was unceremoniously removed from post by her more progressively-minded master.
Serving her take on the week’s events, in which the Speaker said he acted because he wanted to avoid another member of parliament being murdered by a terrorist, or another terror attack on the parliament itself, Braverman said the problem of antisemitism and Islamism in Britain had been ignored and allowed to fester, to disastrous effect. Now, she remarked those issues had grown sufficiently strong that: “we see their influence in our judiciary, our legal profession and our universities… The truth is that the Islamists, the extremists and the anti-Semites are in charge now.”
Politics, institutions, and the country itself is being “bullied” by Islamists, she said, and politicians remain too afraid of accusations of racism to do anything about it. In all, Britain is “sleep-walking into: a ghettoised society where free expression and British values are diluted. Where sharia law, the Islamist mob and anti-Semites take over communities. We need to overcome the fear of being labelled Islamophobic and speak truthfully.”
Braverman’s comments in an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph come not only after the revelation that a Parliamentary vote was, in effect, spiked due to a combination of concerns about terror attacks on members of the house and party political considerations but as the counter-extremism system supposed to protect the UK comes under fresh criticism. Sir William Shawcross, a British government commissioner who conducted a review into the ‘Prevent’ counter-terrorism strategy and found it wanting warned this week his recommendations for improvement hadn’t been acted upon and the public remains “at risk”.
Sir William said: “The government has published a report saying that they have made some of those changes that I asked for, that I proposed – but not enough” and that some of his key findings had not been acted upon. He also pointed out the heightened terror threat to Britain in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel, and said the UK’s counter-terror apparatus should “pay much more attention to the Hamas support network… There are unfortunately quite a lot of Hamas sympathisers and some operatives in this country”, reports the BBC.
Braverman also remarked on these failings, pointing out that again, accusations of racism had been used to destabilise the Prevent programme from protecting the British people. She said of the system, which is intended to identify potential future radicals and then deradicalise them, that: “It has been labelled “Islamophobic” and “racist” because, in the main, it is set up to tackle the most dangerous terrorist ideology facing our country: Islamism… We need to get over our cultural timidity to refer budding Islamists, where they are a threat, into the programme.”
The Conservative Party has, both in coalition and alone, now governed the United Kingdom for approaching 14 years. While many of the issues now being urgently discussed by right-wing politicians have their roots long before this long period in power, they have generally been neglected, if not outright promoted, by the Conservatives during the past decade, leaving criticism in many cases ringing hollow.
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