Speeches and Articles

Martin is a member of the panel of leading Conservative thinkers who contribute regular articles for Conservative Home's online think tank CentreRight.com. Martin was asked to write regular articles on Islamic extremism and terrorism. To view Martin's articles there click the icon.

(Conservative Party Conference October 2006 - featured on BBC News 24)

This summer David Cameron said that the present Labour government were not doing enough to combat Islamic extremism and terrorism at home and abroad. He was right! Because Labour has been deliberately appeasing parts of the agenda of a number of Islamist groups in the UK in an attempt to hold onto its share of the Muslim vote which has significantly haemorrhaged because of an ill conceived war in Iraq.

Organisations with a significant Islamist influence within them have realised that they are not going to achieve an Islamic state in Britain overnight, so they have adopted a deliberate strategy of seeking to align British law with Islamic sharia law, either by pushing for changes to parliamentary law or by taking test cases to the courts.

The most important part of sharia is blasphemy against Muhammad. It can include any criticism of Muhammad or even the Qur'an and in many Islamic countries, such as Pakistan, where I used to work, it carries an automatic death penalty.

Now was it really pure coincidence that straight after the 2005 general election when Labour saw its share of the Muslim vote collapse from its normally rock solid 85% down to 70% largely due to an ill considered war in Iraq, when it lost safe Labour seats such as Rochdale and Hornsey and Wood Green to the Lib-Dems, not to mention George Galloway winning Bethnal Green; was it mere coincidence that immediately after that election - Labour announced incitement to religious hatred legislation - widely viewed by Islamic organisations as the 'Islamic blasphemy law' that they had been campaigning for since the Rushdie affair 18 long years before?

And when John Prescott and Ruth Kelly met with the leaders of some o these Islamic organisations immediately after the Heathrow terrorist arrests in August, they were asked for two things - Islamic festivals to become bank holidays and a partial implementation of sharia law in the UK! and Bless her naive little cotton socks - a couple of weeks later Ruth Kelly set up a commission to look into implementing one of those!

Now I've lived in two Islamic countries - I've been an aid worker in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I've also studied Islamic theology as part of my Ph.D.- and this is what an Islamic state with Sharia law actually means. Under the traditional interpretation of Islamic law

- only Muslims can be part of the government - non Muslims can be civil servants, but not part of government.

there is a compulsory death penalty for blasphemy against Muhammad, which can include any criticism of Muhammad or the Qur'an.

- while the death penalty exists for any Muslim who changes his religion - such as by becoming a Christian.

There is no way that this agenda is compatible with freedom and democracy - and we need to expose Labour's deliberate appeasement of parts of this Islamist agenda.

In the days following Christmas the Christian church has traditionally remembered the visit of the wise men to Jesus. The word magi is in fact a Persian loan word indicating their origin in either what is now Iran or western Afghanistan. The whole story reminds us that Christianity far from being a western religion in fact came to birth in the Middle Eastern world and that there are millions of Christians in the Middle East and the Persian speaking world whose churches predate much of western Christianity. Matthew’s Gospel records that after the visit of the magi the Roman puppet king Herod ordered the massacre of all children under two years old in Bethlehem. The tyrant it seems, as many tyrants are, felt threatened by even the hint of a possible alternative to his brutal rule.

As the Christian church remembers the visit of the magi, now is also a good time to reflect on the suffering of Christians in the region where Christianity originally emerged. The Middle East is unfortunately full of tyrants prepared to imprison, torture and even massacre anyone they think just might threaten their power. Think Qadaffi, think the Assad regime in Syria, think the Mubarak regime in Egypt. Yet even before these regimes began to fall a shadow had begun to rise – the empowerment of Islamists who want to enforce sharia (Islamic law) on the entire population of their countries, including on non Muslims. In parallel with this, and in many cases not unrelated to it, has been a significant increase in acts of intimidation including kidnapping and terrorist acts targeted specifically at Christians and churches, who form the largest non Muslim minority in most Islamic countries. These acts have generally aimed at securing the implementation of sharia enforcement on Muslims and non Muslim alike and in some cases have also additionally aimed at what is now being termed ‘religious cleansing’ – the attempt to create a ‘pure’ Islamic state by the eradication of non Muslim minorities.

In saying this it should be obvious that we are talking about sharia in the sense of a legal code that is enforced, rather than in the secondary sense of a codification of Islamic principles of daily life that individual Muslims may choose to live by – as Islamist apologists have sometimes disingenuously tried to claim. If individual Muslims choose to live a certain way they should, within the limits of British values, be free to do so.However, the enforcement of sharia rules on those who do not chose to follow them, including Christian minorities in the Islamic world is another issue altogether.

Whilst there are four schools of Islamic law in Sunni Islam which predominate in different geographical regions and a separate Shi’a form of sharia, the variations between them are largely a matter of detail in relation to the issues that I will discuss below.

Let us just for a moment look at what has been happening in terms of moves towards the spread of sharia enforcement in the last year, including the gaining of power by Islamist parties aiming at the eventual enforcement of sharia:

In Tunisa where the ‘Arab Spring’ began the Islamist Party Ennhada, which aims to create an Islamic state governed by sharia was legalised in March. Ennhada subsequently gained 40% of the seats in the National Constituent Assembly, making it the largest overall party. The new sense of empowerment felt by Islamists was clearly evident when on 16th September a group entered a Christian church in the town of Kef and attempted to turn it into a mosque.

In Libya the head of the Transitional National Council, Abdel Jalilil stated on 22nd October that laws of the new constitution will be based on Islam i.e. sharia, and any laws opposed to sharia would be abolished. He also called for the banking system to be Islamicised i.e. become regulated by sharia.

In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood (al Ikhwan al Muslimun) and the radical Salafist Jama’a al-Islamiyya formed a political alliance to fight October’s parliamentary elections. Islamist parties are currently estimated to have gained 70% after the second round of elections – a proportion that is not expected to change significantly in the third round due to take place on the 3rd/4th January. They will therefore dominate the 498 seats of Lower House which is charged with setting up a 100 member committee to draft a new constitution. Both the Muslim Brotherhood and Jama’a al-Islamiyya have stated that sharia should be enforced in Egypt. However, the Muslim Botherhood’s spokesman Dr Kamal el-Helbawy went even further and in an apparent allusion to recreating the early Islamic caliphate called for the borders between Arab states to be dismantled.

The Muslim Brotherhood has long been known to have infiltrated the Egyptian army, which since the fall of Mubarak has essentially run the country. It is therefore particularly disturbing that hundreds of Christian protestors were brutally attacked by the army on Sunday 9th October while they were protesting about the earlier torching of St George’s church in Aswan on 30th September. In the Army’s response to this peaceful protest 25 Christians were killed and hundreds injured as armoured vehicles drove straight at protestors, while generals from the ruling supreme council of the armed forces subsequently blamed Egyptian Christians for the violence. This was by no means the first such attack this year on Egypt’s Christian minority of 10 million who make up around 13% of the population. Attacks on Egypt’s Christian minority have in fact significantly increased since the fall of Mubarek. For example, on 25th June 200 extremists burned 8 houses belonging to Christians in the upper Egypt village of Awlad Khalaf – after rumours spread that a house one resident was building would be used as a church – new church buildings being forbidden by sharia. While on 30th June thousands of extremists looted and torched Christian homes and businesses in Kolosna in Minya province. Despite calls for help, the army and military police took three hours to arrive and even then took no action when properties were attacked. The violence erupted after a Christian husband tried to defend his wife from sexual harassment at a bus terminal. There has also been a big increase in the number of Christian women and girls who have been kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam, with any subsequent renunciation of Islam treated as apostasy which is punishable by death under the Maliki school of sharia which is dominant in Egypt. This is a growing problem for Christian minorities in a number of Islamic countries, including for example, Pakistan. However, in Egypt it has significantly increased since the start of the Egyptian revolution this year.

In Syria there is very real fear among the Christian minority that the Assad regime will be replaced by a radical Islamist government. These fears have been fuelled by pressure put on them and threats made by Islamists to take part in the uprising. For example, Adnan al-Noor a leading Syrian sheikh issued a warning, which many Syrian Christians understood to be directed at them, that all opponents of the revolution will be “torn apart, chopped up and fed to the dogs”. Syria has a Christian population of around 2 million making up approximately 10% of the population, although that number has been significantly increased recently by an estimated 350,000 Iraqi Christian refugees who have fled what is now effectively religious cleansing in central and southern Iraq.

In Morocco an Islamist party won the largest share of vote in elections conceded by King Mohamed in an attempt to avert an Arab spring revolution similar to Tunisia and Egypt’s. However, although there will now be an Islamist prime minister the King of Morocco will still have the final say on government policy relating to defence and religion.

In Iraq where the rule of the secular Ba’ath party has been replaced by a fragmenting coalition of religious parties, the past year has seen ever increasing attacks on Iraqi Christians and churches particularly in the central region. The specific targeting of Christians appears to be designed as a form of ‘religious cleansing’ to eradicate non Muslims from Iraq and has resulted in approximately two thirds of Iraq’s 1.4 million Christian population fleeing as refugees to neighbouring countries such as Syria and Jordan. This religious cleansing is a rare case where some Islamist understandings of sharia differ significantly from those of the classical schools of sharia. The latter base their understanding of sharia on medieval interpretations of the Qur’an which grant Christians dhimmi status (i.e. second class citizens who must pay the jizya tax), while Islamists base their understanding of sharia on their own interpretations of the Qur’an.

In Sudan the Sudanese civil war was essentially about the predominantly Arab and Islamic North trying to impose sharia on the mainly Christian and Animist South. On 9th July, in a rare sign of hope in the struggle against the imposition of sharia, South Sudan became independent as the world’s newest country. However, its long term security will always be an issue as sharia dictates that once an area has at any point in history once been subjected to Islamic law and government it becomes an act of ‘defensive’ jihad to fight to reimpose Islamic government and the enforcement of sharia.

Meanwhile in North Sudan on 12th October President Bashir announced government plans to adopt a completely Islamic constitution with sharia as the main source of national law. Already, some Christian pastors in the North have been warned not to hold services on pain of death. While women, including Christian mothers with young babies have been put in prison for not following sharia requirements such as being fully veiled and having a male escort when in public, a situation horribly reminiscent of Afghanistan under the Taliban when many widows with no male family left alive were arrested and imprisoned as they begged for food on streets.

There has also been an increasing issue of religious cleansing taking place in North Sudan with President Bashir having announced prior to the separation that he intends North Sudan to be 100% Muslim (it is currently 98% Muslim). There are reports of daily air strikes, arbitrary arrests and executions aimed at non Muslims living in the border region of North Sudan, with Christian leaders being particularly singled out and tortured.

In Iran the enforcement of sharia has continued to become even stricter. In 2011 supreme court upheld the death penalty imposed on Christian pastor Youcef Nadarkhani because he had converted to Christianity from Islam. Although in recent years there have been a number of informal executions of converts from Islam, some of which appear to have been orchestrated by the government, apostasy from Islam is not against Iran’s penal code. However, the supreme court’s decision reflects the fact that judges are allowed to draw on fatwas (legal opinions of sharia judges) and Islamic sources where national law is silent and have done so in this case to formalise the death penalty for apostasy from Islam (i.e. leaving Islam for another faith).

In Pakistan 2011 saw the assassination of two liberal politicians who had voiced support for reform of the Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws under which, amongst others, Christian wife and mother of 5 Aasia Bibi who has been sentenced to death for allegedly insulting Muhammud. The assassinations of Salman Taseer, a liberal Muslim who was governor of Punjab Province and Shabaz Bhatti a Pakistani Christian who was minister for religious minorities were welcomed by leading Islamic scholars in Pakistan who viewed them as having committed the sharia offence of blasphemy and therefore deserving of the death penalty because they had advocated the abolition of part of sharia I.e. the blasphemy law.

In the Maldives a revision of the constitution in 2008 just before the dictator Abdul Gayoom departed had already left non Muslim Maldivians in a potentially stateless limbo by restricting the acquisition of citizenship to Muslims. However, Islamists have seen the new democratic process as a road to even stricter enforcement of sharia. In 2009, not long after the first democratic elections in 30 years, the Maldivian parliament almost unanimously passed a bill making the construction of non Muslim buildings illegal and criminalising the public practice of non Muslim worship, something that would put it in the same league of repressive sharia enforcement as Saudi Arabia. Throughout 2011 those concerned for human rights in the Maldives have been waiting to see if this bill will be formally passed into law by the President. It has been reported that the President, Mohamed Nasheed was elected to office in 2008 in the newly democratic country with help from the UK Conservative Party. That is an influence that one may hope foreign office ministers have been seeking to capitalise on to prevent the further encroachment of human rights that this bill represents.

In Uganda which is 85% Christian and only 12% Muslim a similar attempt is being made to introduce sharia. A Muslim Personal Law bill would empower Islamic sharia courts to act on matters of marriage, divorce and inheritance. This is not a benign cultural accommodation. It is precisely in these areas of family law that both women and non Muslims in a family with a Muslim father are significantly discriminated against by sharia. For example, in divorce a mother is automatically denied child custody of any child over 7 years old and of any younger child when they reach 7 years old. Sharia inheritance rules also discriminate against women, with daughters only being allowed to inherit half the share of an estate that sons do. The situation in Uganda is particularly pertinent for the UK as in 2006 an Islamic group regarded as ‘moderate’ by the then government made a similar request for the family law aspects of sharia to become part of UK law.

In Nigeria Christmas day 2011 saw a series of attacks by the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram including two targeting churches where at least 30 people were killed. These attacks were directly linked to the enforcement of sharia in Nigeria. Sharia enforcement has been steadily implemented since 2000 by state governments in Nigeria’s 12 northern states in defiance of the country’s secular federal constitution. It is estimated that 63% of the population of these states are Muslims, with the remainder being Christians and adherents of African Traditional Religions. The effective appeasement of these unconstitutional acts by a lack of effective action from the federal government has empowered radical Islamists such as the terrorist group Boko Haram whose declared aim is to make Nigeria a fully Islamic state with sharia enforced across all states . Boko Haram is seeking to extend sharia to the 7 states of Nigeria’s middle belt (roughly 55% Christian, 30% Muslim and 15% African traditional religions). Once that has been achieved a majority of states then will have implemented sharia enforcement. Islamists have indicated that they then plan to challenge Nigeria’s secular status and declare a fully Islamic state and with sharia also enforced in the 17 southern states (75% Christian, 20% African Traditional Religions and only 5% Muslim). These attacks by Boko Haram have been increasing over the last two years, but increased very significantly after the election of Christian president in April 2011 (sharia dictates that only Muslims are allowed to be head of state and only Muslims may be part of the government). The Christmas day attacks on churches were not the first this year. For example, two churches were bombed in Sileja in Niger state in the North Nigeria on 10th and 11th July with 3 Christians being killed. The targeting of churches is significant as sharia also dictates that new church buildings cannot be built.

In this highly combustible situation this year the Muslim governor of the Central bank of Nigeria published plans for the introduction of sharia banking. Sharia finance is a very recent newcomer on the financial scene even being avoided by the majority of banks in Saudi Arabia as recently as 2005. Other Islamic countries such as Oman still resist legalising it as they recognise it as part of the Islamist agenda to subject increasing areas of society to the Islamic clerics who act as sharia judges. The latter is unfortunately a lesson Gordon Brown as Chancellor and Prime Minister failed to heed when he naively legalised sharia finance in the UK.

In Senegal in June 2011 eight churches were looted and burnt to the ground in the capital Dhaka as extremists issued a ‘declaration of war’ against “new churches” being built in the city, sharia as we noted forbids the building of church buildings.

In Indonesia in September a suicide bomber blew himself up as a congregation were leaving a church service in Solo, Central Java. Islamists have been waging a violent campaign in Indonesia to eradicate Christianity from Indonesia and enforce sharia on the entire country.

These brief examples do not include many countries such as Saudi Arabia and Yemen where sharia is already enforced. These are simply a snapshot of some of the countries where the Islamist agenda of sharia enforcement has advanced in the last 12 months. The list is by no means comprehensive – in the past year Islamists have also for example launched violent attacks on churches and Christians in Ethiopia (69 churches and a Bible college burnt down, 3 Christians killed and an estimated 10,000 made homeless); In Somalia where a Christian was beheaded by the Islamist terrorist group al-Shabab- beheading being a sharia punishment favoured by Islamists, similarly a Christian was also beheaded in Afghanistan by Islamist terrorists; In Kenya Islamists are targeting Christians in the predominantly Muslim North, with al-Shabab launching a grenade attack on a church, one could go on…

What is happening is not a random unconnected series of events. They have historical precedent in the medieval interpretations of Islam that are termed classical Islam, which envisions the enforcement of Islamic government and sharia, if necessary by means of force, on Muslim and non Muslim alike. However, it is now being primarily driven forward by Islamist ideology. For the last thousand or more years churches in the Middle East have been subject to dhimmi status, a type of second class citizenship accorded Christians and Jews who are termed ‘people of the book’ (Ahl-i-Kitab) in the Qur’an. They have lesser legal rights than Muslims, they are excluded from holding political and judicial office though they may be civil servants, and are required to pay an additional form of taxation for non Muslims termed jizya. They are forbidden from building new churches and any adult male Muslim who embraces another faith faces the death penalty. The most serious offence in sharia is to denigrate the prophet Muhammad – which could of course include denying that one believes he is a prophet – this carries a compulsory death penalty. The testimony in court of a Muslim is given twice the weight of a non Muslim, similarly a woman’s testimony is only equal to half that of a man’s. These lead to appalling instances of injustice where sharia is enforced. For example, accusations of blasphemy are used to settle scores against both Muslims and Christians in countries such as Pakistan, although Christians are particularly vulnerable as the testimony of any Muslim accusing them is given greater weight than their word simply because they are non Muslims. Women who are victims of rape are particularly vulnerable as sharia requires them to produce 4 witnesses and if they cannot do so they risk being imprisoned for making a ‘false accusation’ – even if they are pregnant.

The idea that Muslims should govern non Muslims, which is central to both sharia and its concept of dhimmitude is something that is taught in Classical Islam – the interpretations of the Qur’an taught in madrassas that were fixed in medieval times. That is why, for example, dhimmitude – including the jizya tax was part and parcel of the life of Christians in Turkey in the nineteenth century Ottoman empire.

This is certainly not the view of many ordinary Muslims, particularly in Britain. Whilst some do have rather romantic notions about sharia, relatively few appear to have any real understanding of what it actually involves in practice and would probably be shocked to read some of the details in this article. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the enforcement of sharia and Islamic government around the world is the primary aim of all forms of Islamism. I write the above having personally witnessed what it means to live under a radical Islamist government where sharia is enforced on the entire population.

In February 2011 just as the Arab Spring was getting going I observed that the trend over the last 30 years in Islamic countries was for greater Islamisation, rather than for greater liberalisation. Regrettably that now appears to be the case with the Arab Spring as well. The recommendations I made then for British foreign policy in the Islamic world I believe are now more important than ever:

1. Prioritises long term aims over short term gains such as developing trade deals with North Sudan.

2. Focused on developing a functioning civil society so as to allow alternatives to Islamism to develop. This is a point that must be forcibly made to western leaning autocratic governments that are rightly afraid of growing Islamist movements in their own countries.

3. Focused on the promotion of basic human rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion etc.

4. Prioritises the promotion of these basic human rights over the promotion of ‘democracy’, which many Islamists see simply as a route to achieve their own ends.

5. Recognises that the medium term trend in most Islamic countries is towards greater Islamisation, rather than towards greater liberalisation. As such it must be realistic about the strategies being adopted by Islamist groups.

Crucial to achieving these will be combating the spread of sharia enforcement across the world. It is in Britain’s national interest that this becomes a central feature of British foreign policy:

The enforcement of sharia and Islamic government around the world is the central aim of Islamists – including violent Islamists. As I have demonstrated before, the aims of Islamists who use the ballot box differ only in their method, not their long term aims from those of violent Islamists, as can be seen where Islamists in countries affected by the Arab Spring have used democracy as a route to power. Although how long those countries remain democratic once Islamists gain power remains to be seen.

Once sharia is enforced lobbying by western governments is largely ineffective as it becomes almost impossible to dislodge it, as can be seen from this year’s assassination of two liberal Pakistani politicians who called for reform of the country’s blasphemy laws.

Equally, where sharia is enforced it does not assuage the demands of Islamists as some on the liberal-left seem to assume. Rather, it gives them bridgehead from which to seek to expand sharia enforcement further afield, as can be seen from what is happening in Nigeria.

Further, once Islamists control an area, it is much easier for Islamist terrorist groups to train others for attacks on the West from there, as can be seen in the safe havens provided to al Qaeda by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamists in Sudan.

Or, take again the example of Nigeria, if sharia enforcement continues to spread, how long will it be before Boko Haram is training Nigerian extremists and sending them to Britain to engage in global jihad against us?

1. Make stopping the spread of sharia a key aim of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). The FCO's aims currently include:

pursuing an active and activist foreign policy, working with other countries and strengthening the rules-based international system in support of British values to:

•safeguard Britain's national security by countering terrorism and weapons proliferation, and working to reduce conflict;

To that list needs to be added “and working to stop the spread of sharia enforcement around the world.”

2. Annually report on the spread of sharia enforcement across the world and steps being taken by the FCO to prevent further spread.

3. Ensure that the UK asylum system takes full account of the persecution that minority groups face in countries where sharia is enforced so that victims of sharia receive a fair hearing of their case.

4. Sponsoring a UN resolution aimed at stopping the spread of sharia enforcement. Of course it would be opposed, but it would also push the issue up the international agenda and send a signal to countries toying with it that western democracies regard it as an unacceptable system that abuses human rights.

In writing this I am very aware that simply raising the issue of sharia will stir up considerable controversy. However, that is a controversy that needs to be aired, the enforcement of sharia is a central aim of Islamists – whether violent or non violent their aims are the same. It is therefore a nettle that needs to be grasped in terms British foreign policy if we are to be both safe as a country and promote our values abroad.

****************************************************************************************************************

The anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone, the world has moved on, perhaps too quickly. But two other anniversaries loom that should give us pause to reflect again on what has happened as a direct response to 9/11. The first is the start of initially small scale western military intervention in Afghanistan in late 2001. The second was the decision of the British government in autumn 2005 to send British troops to southern Afghanistan, on a mission about which the then defence secretary Dr John Reid publicly stated that he would be very happy for them to leave in three years time ‘without a shot having been fired’, stressing that the British peacekeeping troops he was sending to Helmand were completely distinct from the US led forces hunting al Qaeda.

The anniversary of both of these should give us cause to reflect – did we get it right? should we have intervened? and was there any alternative? could we have left Afghanistan without a shot being fired? They also allow us to reflect more widely about the general approach that British foreign policy has taken since 1997.

In the period between 1997 and the general election of 2010 there were two major shifts in foreign policy which provide a framework within which we must view policy towards Afghanistan. The first was a shift towards a foreign policy that in British terms could be construed as Gladstonian liberal interventionism, which had significant parallels to some aspects of neoconservative foreign policy in the USA. However, as Blair was essentially a liberal in many aspects of his domestic and foreign policy that term seems most appropriate to describe his policy of liberal interventionism in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Iraq as well as Afghanistan. This approach to foreign policy contrasted with earlier more Conservative approaches to foreign policy that were based on the somewhat less interventionist approach that was summarised by the statement of the Conservative Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister Lord Salisbury that the British government’s ‘first duty is towards the people of this country to maintain their interest and rights; our second is to all humanity”.

The second shift in foreign policy after 1997 involved a series of measures that effectively reduced the ability of the Foreign Office to use traditional diplomacy and soft power options. These included a shift in the focus of foreign policy decisions away from the Foreign Office to No 10, which limited the usefulness of the human expertise and wisdom and that had been built up over many years at the Foreign Office. This intellectual treasury was itself allowed to wither as the importance of such traditional forms of diplomatic training such as language acquisition were downgraded and in an act of cultural and intellectual vandalism the Foreign Office Library was closed and the accumulated wealth of the wisdom and knowledge scattered never to be reassembled. At the same time one of the key levers of soft power – government funded overseas development aid was removed from the remit of the foreign office into a new and separate Department for International Development . What these accumulated steps meant was that in the last 14 years the soft power capability of the foreign office in terms of both cultural and linguistic understanding and leverage was significantly diminished.

In the light of that it is instructive to examine British policy toward Afghanistan- and particularly to examine whether we used all available soft power options or whether we relied too heavily simply on the hard option of military intervention. Those questions are particularly important as we approach the 10 year anniversary of western military intervention in Afghanistan and also arrive at 6 year anniversary of John Reid’s announcement of the deployment of British troops in southern Afghanistan.

Thereis no question that the Taliban were seeking to create in Afghanistan a radical Islamist state. Nor is there any question that Osama bin Laden and his associates, who the Taliban had invited to Afghanistan, were intent on using the county as a base to mount a global jihad, committing acts of large scale terrorism to try to force western countries to submit to Islamic law and government.

The question is, over the last 10 years has military intervention been the only option or have there been opportunities to use soft power that were overlooked or simply rejected?

One of the most intriguing incidents in this respect occurred early on in the fight against the Taliban. Hamid Karzai, who for reasons that I will explain below was most certainly no friend of the Taliban publicly offered to ‘forgive’ Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban if he would renounce terrorism and live peacefully in Afghanistan.

As a possible solution this would appear to most Westerners at best meaningless and at worst plain daft or dangerous. This was certainly how US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld treated it, as he immediately got on the satellite phone to Karzai and forced him to retract it. However, had the British Foreign Office had anyone with an in depth knowledge of the culture of Afghanistan,) particularly that of the Pushtuns from which the Taliban were predominantly drawn, they might have advocated a more cautious approach to what Karzai was doing. I have no direct information as to the number of Diplomats specialising in Pushtu at this time. However, even at the end of the last Labour government there appeared to be a significant lack of linguistic and cultural expertise on Afghanistan, with Rory Stewart MP reporting that of the 300 staff based at the British Embassy in Kabul in 2009 only two were skilled in Dari, which for government administration is far more widely used than Pushtu, with which it shares the status of being the national language. That lack of cultural expertise also of course raises very real questions about whether John Reid genuinely thought that British troops might leave Helmand after three years without a shot being fired, something he later denied. Although if he didn't mean that then what did he mean? It was certainly clear to those of us with personal knowledge of Afghanistan at the time, that deployment to the south would almost certainly result in body bags coming home.

So let me explain the cultural and political background to Karzai’s public offer to ‘forgive’ Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban if he would renounce terrorism:

1. The Pushtun (often mispronounced 'Pathan') tribal code known as Pushtunwali is centred around two cultural poles – hospitality and blood vengeance. One must offer hospitality AND sanctuary to anyone who asks for it. Karzai knew that this made it almost impossible for the Taliban, who were an overwhelmingly Pushtun movement, to accede to US demands made in the months following 9/11 to simply hand over bin Laden who was their guest.

2. Pushtun culture is very much an honour-shame culture. Honour is something that is acquired both by birth and by a lifetime of acting in a way that is seen as culturally honourable, particularly by following the dictates of Pushtunwali. Personal and family honour is probably the single most important thing to a Pushtun, once it is lost, it is lost for good. Honour can be lost in a moment. Betraying a guest to his enemy would for Pushtun be such a heinous crime that it would result in shame for the family who did it for many generations to come. Personal honour for a Pushtun is also about independence. Part of what it means to be a Pushtun is to be a landowner because in that sense he is not in debt to anyone.

3. Pushtun tribal code is based not on an abstract concept of justice in the way that western law is, (it is wrong to speed on an empty motorway because it is breaking ‘the law’), but on a relational concept of justice whereby only the person wronged can decide what happens to the wrongdoer. He can choose whether the wrongdoer is punished or instead choose to ‘forgive’ him – which means not so much ‘release him from an emotional ill feeling’, but decide that he should not be punished. If someone is offered and accepts forgiveness they become indebted to the person who forgave them. This itself would diminish their honour and standing in the community and – crucially – it would be an act of enormous shame to offend against the person who has earlier forgiven them.

I experienced this myself some years ago while living in a Pushtun area when a thief was caught stealing my bicycle. The thief pleaded with me to ‘forgive’ him – meaning ‘please don’t hand me over for punishment’. Knowing he would be badly beaten up by the local ‘police’ I forgave him – although he still suffered the shame of word spreading around the local area that he was a thief – and even more crucially he incurred a lifelong debt to me in terms of social and cultural obligation.

This was actually the cultural nuance of what Karzai was doing when he offered to ‘forgive’ Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban. i.e. he was in effect saying ‘Submit, place yourself in debt to me – so that you will never be able to lead a movement again and I will let you live in the land’. It was actually quite a big ask of Mullah Omar – but it was just about possible that in a country that was exhausted after more than two decades of war it might just have worked and brought peace. However, even if Mullah Omar had rejected it, Karzai would have outmanoeuvred him, as Mullah Omar would have lost credibility and Karzai would have potentially gained significant credibility including in the rural areas where support for the Taliban was strongest. In other words, even if Mullah Omar had rejected the ‘offer’ Karzai’s strategy was still a brilliant way of winning hearts of minds including among some of the rural Pushtun who wavered in their support towards the Taliban.

Realistically even if Mullah Omar had accepted Karzai’s offer he had had so many enemies that someone else would undoubtedly tried to exact blood vengeance! – but that is the way of the Pushtuns – blood vengeance is one of the two main pillars of Pushtunwali – the Pushtun tribal code.

It should be noted that the cultural nuances of Karzai’s offer to ‘forgive’ Mullah Omar meant that he was in no sense treating the Taliban as equals, but offering to place Mullah Omar in a wholly subservient relationship as a defeated enemy. This is wholly different from the negotiations with the Taliban that western governments have more recently pressured Karzai to accept, which are at best likely to be seen by the Taliban as ‘negotiating on equal terms’, and when combined with announcements of timetables for the withdrawal of western troops likely to be viewed as placing the Afghan government is a potentially subservient position to them.

However, as I indicated above, Karzai’s offer to forgive Mullah Omar wasn’t given a chance because as soon as Karzai made this ‘offer’ in a radio broadcast – US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld immediately got on the satellite phone to him and insisted that he retract it.

Intriguingly, prior to the 2001 western military intervention in Afghanistan, Karzai had actually had achieved significant success in using the importance of honour and shame in Pushtun culture to outmanoeuvre the Taliban. Prior to 9/11 Karzai’s father who was head of the royal Popalzai clan of the Pushtuns was murdered by the Taliban on the orders of Mullah Omar. This placed enormous social pressure on Karzai to exact blood vengeance.

Hospitality and blood vengeance, the two poles of the Pushtun tribal code are so incredibly important in the culture that they quiet literally affect the lives of virtually every rural Pushtun family, with senior male figures being under huge social pressure to take blood vengeance on a family who sometime in the past generation has killed one of their family. The importance of blood vengeance is well illustrated by Pushtun stories of how the sanctuary and blood vengeance obligations can be reconciled – such as the Pushtun who gave sanctuary to a man who knocked on his gate claiming to be fleeing from his enemies, only to learn an hour later that his ‘guest’ had just murdered the host’s own father. The host therefore entertained his ‘guest’ with full lavish Pushtun hospitality, then in the morning gave him an hour’s start, before setting off himself, catching up with his erstwhile ‘guest’ of the previous night and exacting blood vengeance.

Now I suspect that many readers at this point will be quite rightly thinking It’s all very well talking about cultural solutions, but some of those are pretty repugnant! Absolutely, we must make a moral judgement about cultural values and actions. However, what is interesting about Karzai, who as well as being leader of a Pushtun clan is also a Cambridge graduate and so has experienced both Afghan and western culture, is that he appears to be capable to coming up with cultural solutions that on occasions challenge some of the more morally questionable aspects of Pushtun culture such as blood vengeance.

Hamid Karzai’s response to Mullah Omar ordering the murder of Karzai’s father was to organise an enormous funeral procession of vehicles from his home in Quetta just over the border in Pakistan to Kandahar, which was the centre of Taliban ruled Afghanistan. The cortege was so enormous that everyone knew what Mullah Omar and the Taliban had done and the Taliban were utterly powerless to do anything about it. In effect Karzai created a cultural solution that shamed Mullah Omar and fulfilled his own cultural obligation to redeem family honour without actually exacting blood vengeance, which in any case he was at the time powerless to do against Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban.

Both of these examples, Karzai’s offer to ‘forgive’ Mullah Omar and the huge funeral cortege, point to the possibilities of such cultural solutions existing and the need for Britain’s Foreign Office to evaluate them. It is the need for such analysis that makes detailed cultural and linguistic knowledge of individual countries so incredibly important in the Foreign Office. However, as we have noted, it was precisely this area of the Foreign office training and accumulated expertise that that the last Labour government ran down.

Clearly there will be many occasions when soft power skills alone cannot prevent war. We will always need a foreign policy where the credible threat of hard power backs up soft power options and has on occasions to be used.

Would Karzai’s cultural solution – offering to ‘forgive’ Mullah Omar if he renounced terrorism – have worked? I honestly don’t know, There’s just a chance that in a profoundly war weary country it might, which of course would have given another enormous headache to western governments trying to sell that one to their electorates! However, even if Mullah Omar had refused the ‘offer’, Karzai would have out manoeuvred him and probably made significant gains in winning hearts and minds, which is ultimately only way that the war can be ended.

That certainly does not mean that western military intervention was not needed. I say that because after the 2001 western military intervention in Afghanistan, coalition forces found canisters of uranium at Kandahar airport, suggesting the possibility that a dirty radioactive bomb was being planned. It was the possibility that the Taliban were seeking to acquire nuclear material that convinced me that western military intervention was justified and that together knowledge that groups like al-Qaeda wish to create an Islamist state from which to launch attacks on western counties, continues to convinces me that this is a war that Britain definitely should be fighting.

However, what all of this also points to is that if we are to end the fighting in Afghanistan, we need to be able to understand and evaluate cultural solutions that may be proposed by people like Karzai. It also means that the FCO needs to understand the cultural significance of some of the solutions western powers have advocated – like approaching the Taliban to negotiate with them – which implies a degree of possible submission to them. It also means that we need to recognise that there are other Islamist groups in Afghanistan who share a similar Islamist vision to the Taliban, though not necessarily using quite the same tactics, and this includes some of those who western governments appear to regard as ‘moderates’ as I outlined last week in respect of former President Rabbani who was assassinated last week. Rabbani was in fact one of the founding fathers of Afghan Islamism.

That is why the reforms of the Foreign and Commonwealth office initiated by William Hague on becoming Foreign Secretary, are so very important. These reforms, which Paul Goodman outlined on Conservative Home a few weeks ago, reverse much of the neglect of the Foreign office that happened under Labour including:

1. Significantly increasing the number of diplomats around the world, particularly in the growing world economic powers of India and China but also in Brazil, Turkey, Mexico and Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, South Korea, North Korea, Mongolia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Angola, Botswana, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Panama, Peru, Pakistan, Vietnam, the Philippines and our presence in Taiwan.

2. A diplomatic excellence initiative which has focused on making the FCO good again at what should be some of its core skills – diplomacy, negotiation, analysis and understanding of language and culture in other countries. Reversing Labour’s neglect of Foreign Office language learning Mr Hague has increased its budget by £1 million a 30% increase, which is no small achievement at a time of budget cuts.

This is something that may not be exciting and headline grabbing in the way that some policy initiatives are, but it is something that the Conservative led government is very clearly getting right. Thank God we have got Hague at the Foreign Office!

*****************************************************************************************************************

On Tuesday afternoon it was announced that former president of Afghanistan Borhanuddin Rabbani had been assassinated by members of the Taliban.

It is tempting for western observers to regard Rabbani as something of a moderate when compared to the Taliban, yet the reality is that Rabbani was one the key founders of radical Islamism in Afghanistan. Although his methods differed from those of the Taliban and extreme radical groups such as Gulbadin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, the sort of the radical Islamist society he aimed at was not vastly different from theirs.

The difference between Rabbani’s version of Islamism and that of the Taliban is a little like the distinction that used to exist between revolutionary communists and other hard left socialists who were prepared to use the ballot box as a means to achieving the end of a socialist state. Both had a broadly similar vision of the sort of society that they wished to create, but went about it in different ways. It is in this respect that Rabbani’s career should act as warning bell not to become overly optimistic that moves towards democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic world will necessarily be accompanied by liberalisation. As I observed early in the Arab spring, over the last 30 years the trend has been for Islamic countries to become more Islamicised, rather than more liberal.

Rabbani’s career is also instructive in that it throws considerable light on how Afghanistan descended into warring factions of increasingly corrupt and brutal mujahidin groups that the Taliban were able to seize power from, claiming at the time that they were sizing power to clean up society.

Rabbani, who is reputed to have been born around 1940 in Badakhshan in north eastern Afghanistan, had a wider appeal than most Afghan Islamists because he combined radical Islamism with both the classical Islamic education of traditional Islam – he studied at a government madrassa (traditional theological school) before going to study in Ankarra and then at Egypt’s al Azhar university, and Sufism – the mystical devotional form of Islam – he wrote his thesis on the mystical poet Jami of Herat whose poetry is revered throughout Afghanistan. However, he also translated into Persian In the shade of the Qur’an – the radical Islamist text of the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb who along with Mawdudi and Hasan al Banna was the founder of modern political Islamism.

Islamism in Afghanistan emerged in the late 1950s from a group of university professors who after studying at government sponsored madrassas in Afghanistan had gone on to al Azhar University in Cairo, the centre of Islamic scholarship in the Sunni world. This group which became known as Jam’iyyat-i-Islami (the Islamic society) began to translate into Persian the works of foreign Islamists such as Qutb and Mawdudi, the former being undertaken by Rabbani.

The ‘professors’ as they became popularly known influenced a generation of students in Kabul to become Islamists. The student youth movement that emerged, Sazman-i-Jawanan-Musulman (the Organisation of Muslim Youth) became much more open about demonstrating their Islamist beliefs , particularly in the face of Communism whose influence was also spreading rapidly among students in Kabul. When the Afghan Communist Party was founded in 1965 Islamist students openly distributed a leaflet called ‘the Tract of Holy War’, with violent fights between the Islamist and Maoist students in Kabul erupting during the following years. The movement spread mainly among students in the western style education system – the university, polytechnic and secondary schools, although also included those from the madrassas (traditional Islamic theological schools). Those who were inspired to join included the future leaders of the radical Islamist mujahaddin factions including Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was a student at the polytechnic, Gulbadin Hekmatyar later leader of the notorious Hezb-i-Islami group, who was then a student in the engineering faculty of Kabul University.

During the 1960s and 70s the student movement was the most visible expression of the Islamism in Afghanistan, yet at a more secret level the professors, including Rabbani functioned behind it. The movement was led by a shura (council), which in 1972 Rabbani became the Amir (president) of, with Sayyaf – later to become a notorious mujahhadin warlord as secretary until he was replaced in 1975 by Hekmatyar, who was to become even more notorious. While the students undertook sometimes violent demonstrations on the streets, at its top the professors provided the ideological inspiration for the movement. Rabbani was central to this, editing a journal promoting the implementation of sharia (Islamic law) which was published by the faculty of Theology at Kabul University where Rabbani now taught.

In 1973 the king’s cousin Daud, with the assistance of the communists carried out a coup d’etat to become president. The newly installed Communist minister of the interior immediately arrested leading Islamists. Rabbani who had been smuggled out of the university by students pragmatically made a desperate attempt to deal with Daud by promising him the support of the Islamist movement if he would ditch the Communists.

Daud declined and the Islamist movement split into two factions which eventually became the Jam’iyyat-I-Islami led by Rabbani and the extreme radicals of Hezb-i-Islami led by Hekmatyar. The split was initially over tactics – the younger radicals led by Hekmatyar wanted a general uprising against the Communist government, while those following Rabbani saw the need to build strong support among the ulema (traditional Afghan clerics), traditional leaders and ordinary Afghans across the country before an uprising could succeed. The initial uprising that happened was, as Rabbani foresaw a disaster, that was followed by brutal state repression, including the imprisonment and eventual execution of hundreds of Islamists without trial. However, it hardened and embittered the split in the Islamist movement with two separate parties Rabbani’s Jam’iyyat-i-Islami and Hekmatyar’s Hezb-I-Islami emerging between 1976 and 1977.

Hezb-I-Islami became increasingly radicalised and adopted the theological concept of takfir (declaring other Muslims to be heretics and therefore legitimate objects of jihad) which had been developed by the medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyya. This enabled them to declare jihad against other groups that opposed them including Jam’iyyat.

This intra mujahaddin acrimony developed further in 1979 when Hezb-i-Islami itself split over the degree of extreme radicalism that should be promoted with Hekmatyar wanting an even more radical version than Yunus Khalis who split away to form Hezb-i-Islami (Khalis). Although it should be noted that in practice both groups now appear to be working in at least loose cooperation with the Taliban.

In 1978 the Communists enacted a coup which replaced the Daud republic with a fully Communist government, uprisings against the government in the north east and south together with an appeal for help to the Soviets from the embattled Afghan Communist government gave Soviet Russia the excuse it had long been waiting for and led to the Soviet invasion of December 1979.

Whilst the Islamist movement that Rabbani and others had inspired and nurtured fought the Russians, aided by an ample supply of weapons supplied by western governments, the various factions of it also fought each other.

When in 1992 the mujahaddin ousted the puppet Communist government left behind after the Soviet withdrawal, Rabbani became president with Massoud as his defence minister. However, the country quickly descended into a bloody civil war between the different mujhaddin factions with particular animosity between Rabbani’s Jam’iyyat-i-Islami and Hekmatyar’s Hezb-I-Islami. By this stage the good people had largely got out of the mujahaddin and soldiers of all parties including Rabbani’s carried out atrocities including murders, rapes, enforced prostitution and general robbery and banditry. It was this situation that initially allowed to Taliban to claim that they we resizing power to clean up the situation, before they too were seen to be both even more extreme and at least as brutal as the mujahaddin.

Thus, whilst the ’ Northern Alliance’ of different mujahaddin groups that Rabbani nominally led did with western military assistance defeat the Taliban after 9/11, they were deeply distrusted by a large number of ordinary Afghans. Moreover, it was their corruption and brutal abuse of power that was the seedbed from which the Taliban had been able to rise to power.

I began by saying that it will be tempting for some western observers to regard Rabbani as something of a moderate when compared to the Taliban. There is some truth in that. Yet he was also in many respects one of the founding fathers of radical Islamism in Afghanistan who had a vision of what Afghan society should be like that was not really that dissimilar from that of the Taliban. He just took a slightly more pragmatic approach to achieving it.

Are there lessons to be learnt from the career of Rabbani? Undoubtedly many, but perhaps one of the most pertinent at the moment is that when we look at what has been called the Arab spring. There will be many ‘leaders’ there who to the casual observer may appear to be ‘moderate’ in comparison to others. They may even espouse democracy. However, what we should be concerned about is not so much the road they want to travel, but the destination they want to use it to reach, the sort of society they ultimately want to create. There may be Islamists who for now at least want to use moderate means, but in terms of end destination there is no such thing as a moderate Islamist.

*******************************************************************************************************************

The riots are symptomatic of a decay in British culture. Something in British culture has died, or is at least close to the point of death. By that I certainly don’t mean the dilution of British culture by the arrival of those from other cultures. In fact, during the riots we have seen some of the best of British cultural values from a wide variety of people within our society, from the moral courage of Tariq Jahan who called for peace, not retaliation after his two sons were murdered trying to defend their property, to the physical courage of ordinary policemen faced with menacing mobs, to the ordinary members of the public who turned up armed with brooms to clear up riot damaged streets.

What I mean is that the rioting we have seen is symptomatic of the decay of something in British culture that for the last century or more made it in many respects the envy of the world.

I start from the premise that when teenagers wearing designer fashion items organise themselves with blackberries to smash shop windows and loot shops, then the underlying causes of this are more likely to be about greed and envy than anything else. Insofar as we need to look for an underlying cause at all, the questions we should be asking are, why that greed and envy has taken such a hold among some young people that they are prepared to engage in the sort of violence and looting that we as a nation has been shocked to see this week.

At the most basic level the riots raise profound questions about why the normal means of instilling moral boundaries in young people, the traditional family and the education system, have in the case of those rioting, clearly failed to do so, as John Glenn has earlier outlined. The breakdown of the former has been addressed extensively by the Social Justice Policy Commission chaired by Iain Duncan Smith, but arguably could be given more prominence in government policy. However, questions certainly need to be asked about liberal approaches to education, particularly the promotion of moral pluralism in the state school system. This goes back at least 30 years and is summed up by the phrase ‘there is no such thing as right and wrong it’s just want is “right” for the child’. As a young teacher in the 1980s I sometimes wondered how long it would be before a child turned that one on its end and questioned the school discipline system itself!

However, there is a more subtle shift in British culture that involves the media. In a nutshell, it is true to at least some degree that young people used to have heroes for role models, now they have celebrities.

As a teacher I have talked to numerous teenagers who have told me with absolute seriousness that their career ambition is to be a pop star or to marry the likes of Peter Andre. It can sometimes be quite difficult to get them to see that they might just need a plan B! Of course what is really going on is that they want to have the trappings of the celebrity lifestyle that they see endlessly portrayed on TV and in magazines. And therein I suggest, lies the cause of the greed and envy that we have seen so violently manifested on the streets of Britain’s cities. A toxic combination of a gradual, but persistent undermining of the traditional means of instilling moral boundaries, combined with the greed and envy that the promotion of celebrity lifestyle culture by the media has created a hunger for. As Robert Halfon earlier observed the riots were a grotesque manifestation of our ‘I want it now consumerist society’.

The promotion of celebrity culture by the media to its current extent is a relatively recent phenomena in British culture. One does not need to go back more than a few decades to reach a time when the role models that were given to young people were heroes rather than celebrities. A whole generation of boys grew up reading comics that told stories of heroism, often though by no means exclusively, during two world wars. Now the magazines are more likely to be about celebrities often graphically portraying their inability to make wise lifestyle choices with the riches that they have acquired seemingly effortlessly at a relatively young age. It is envy and greed to have the trappings of that lifestyle that we have seen manifested on the streets of our cities this week.

Much of this is the fault of the media. It’s not that teenagers don’t want good role models, they often just don’t see them in the media. Some months ago a group of teenage boys talked to me with deep admiration about the British soldiers who strapped themselves to the outside of a small helicopter to go back into a Taliban stronghold to try to rescue one of their wounded colleagues. But the truth is such stories tend to get drowned out for many teenagers by the constant barrage of celebrity lifestyle gossip thrown out by the media.

Yet there is a profound difference between heroes and celebrities. Heroes endure pain and hardship and are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others and are more likely to be self-effacing than publicity hungry; Celebrities on the other hand are perceived to get rich quickly, are self-promoting, constantly after the next personal media exposure, perhaps because in the case of at least some, there appears to little more to them than that. Heroes and celebrities as role models are almost exact opposites.

Most societies have a concept of an 'ideal man', which people aspire to be like. Sometimes, though not always, this is epitomised in an historical figure. It is a figure that people in that culture and particularly leaders of that nation aspire to be like. It is a role model of the values that are important to that society. Among the Pushtuns whom I worked amongst in Afghanistan, the ideal man was epitomised by Ahmad Shah Abdali (d.1773), founder of modern Afghanistan, who as both mystical poet and warrior-king is viewed as the ideal Pushtun leader.

John Buchan very much expressed the existence of this ideal man concept in British culture in his fictional character Richard Hannay. Hannay does not have a particularly affluent upbringing, but he is a hard worker. He is also brave and a protector of the weak, who is prepared to stand up to bullies. He is loyal to friends and deeply
patriotic to Britain. After rising through the officer ranks in WW1 to become a major general Hannay marries Mary a beautiful, intelligent and equally brave young English woman (who expresses the ‘ideal woman’ concept in British culture), then settles down to a quiet family life in the English countryside. However, He is prepared to leave behind family and home and all he holds dear when called upon to come to the service of his country again.

John Buchan’s own life in many respects ended up epitomising this ideal man concept
in British culture. Born the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister of fairly limited financial means, Buchan attended a local grammar school before winning scholarships to Glasgow, then Oxford universities, eventually becoming a lawyer and journalist. During WW1 he was initially war correspondent for the Times, then joined the army, ultimately becoming director of intelligence. He was a Conservative MP from 1927-35, before being elevated to the House of Lords on his appointment as governor general of Canada.

The point is simply this, we have in the past had a significant part of British culture that set out an aspiration of what the ideal man and ideal woman was. That encapsulated the values that we most highly esteemed in our culture, such as courage, self sacrifice, loyalty, patriotism, truthfulness. These ideals were something that political leaders as well as others at least aspired to be like. In the last few decades though, many of these values have been undermined by amongst other things liberalism and replaced by celebrity lifestyle as a role model for many young people.

The greatest blame for this clearly falls on the media and not merely the News of the World and the Sun, although the’ red tops’ promotion of gossip must certainly bear a share of the blame.

However, we have also moved in our political culture, almost unconsciously from an era during the time of Mrs Thatcher’s government when cabinet ministers manifestly epitomised those values of the ideal man/woman. Think for example, of Airey Neave DSO, MC, MP, the first British POW to escape from Colditz, lawyer at the Nuremburg war crimes tribunal, later brutally assassinated by Irish republican terrorists; Willie Whitelaw MC, MP; Lord Peter Carrington MC, who immediately after the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, insisted on taking ministerial responsibility and resigned, sacrificing his own career to ensure that the government and nation went to war united. However, today some senior politicians from all three main parties are more likely to have had a career as a political lobbyist or worked for a PR firm , though this is most certainly not true of all. Similarly, judging by the last ten years or so many government ministers would do anything, rather than sacrifice their own ministerial careers.

So, I would suggest that the challenge for the media from this week’s riots is to examine themselves to see what values they are actually promoting that make a minority of young people see celebrity lifestyle as their role model and inculcates such an attitude of greed and envy that will do almost anything to achieve it.

However, there is also a challenge for politicians in the wake of recent events is to ensure
that the role model they present is more based on the sort of values that have historically underpinned British culture, such as courage, loyalty, patriotism, truthfulness and self sacrifice, rather than on the celebrity lifestyle culture that in many respects has superseded it.

******************************************************************************************************************

On Friday the government announced a new Coastal Communities Fund worth around £23 million to support the economic development of coastal areas. Businesses, charities and other local organisations can submit bids to fund a range of projects which could include developing renewable energy, improving skills or even environmental protection.

The fund, which will start in April 2012 will be financed from 50% of the revenues of the Crown Estates marine activities. The Crown Estate owns virtually the entire seabed from the foreshore out to the 12 mile limit of UK territorial waters as well as half the beds of estuaries and tidal rivers. It obtains money from activities such as leasing the rights for renewable energy generation and licensing the dredging of sand and gravel from the sea bed.

The creation of the fund by is welcome news for coastal communities who were largely neglected by the previous Labour government. This neglect was shockingly revealed in a report on Coastal Towns produced by the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government in 2007. The Conservative Party began to address it in earnest with a report published in 2009 entitled ‘No Longer the End of the Line, Our Plan for Coastal Towns’ produced by Mark Simmonds MP. This week’s announcement of the creation of the Coastal Communities Fund is a further welcome step in the right direction.

The issues facing coastal communities can broadly be categorised into three groups of which this new initiative begins to tackle one:

Economic – many of these are derived from what we could call the ‘half sphere problem’ – coastal towns have only half the sphere of influence for their businesses and for workers employment opportunities that inland towns have, simply because half of that geographical sphere is in the sea! However, they also often struggle with poor transport and communications infrastructure, with some rural coastal communities not even being able to get mobile reception let alone decent broadband. Lack of updated transport links to the rest of the UK is often another issue. In the last 30 years many businesses have relocated out of coastal towns because of the relative difficulty of getting goods to market. Coastal communities – including even large towns are often some of the most inaccessible places in the UK. For example, much of the East Anglian coast where I live, which includes large, towns such as Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth as well as remoter rural areas, is about two hours drive from the nearest motorway and an hour from the nearest dual carriageway link to the rest of the country. This is despite being only around 100 miles from London. Tradtional industries sucha s shipbuilding and fishing have collapsed, while seaside tourism in many resorts has suffered from the rise of air travel and cheap foreign holidays since the 1970s. This has led to declining visitor numbers, closure of hotels which often become bedsit land and urban degeneration with its associated social problems. The economic challenge for seaside towns is to either renew and reinvent themselves or face further decline (see ‘the Butler model' opposite)
Demographic – a higher than average number of older people which leads to higher costs for local authorities, combined with the drift of younger highly qualified young people away from their home areas due to lack of professional jobs. The situation is exacerbated by the rise in second home ownership in many coastal communities that have pushed house prices beyond the reach of many ordinary local people. It is high time the government considered allowing local authorities to impose local stamp duty on the purchase of second homes in order to fund affordable housing.
Physical challenges – such as coastal erosion and flooding. Currently the Environment Agency has the power to regulate sea defences, but has no statutory duty to undertake work to prevent coastal flooding or erosion itself. Consequently, with no local accountability, in many instances it actually prevents local landowners from investing in their own sea defences. It does so because it believes, perversely, that coastal erosion is actually beneficial in some rural coastal locations by providing sediment for other local beaches, something that is not supported by the scientific literature. Illustrative of the impact of such skewed thinking is the case of a landowner in the council ward I represent – who is losing 17 acres of farmland a year to coastal erosion. He is prepared to spend £200,000 of his own money on sea defences, but is not being allowed to. This 'regulate others but don't have to do anything yourself' status of the Environment Agency urgently needs reviewing and was potentially made worse by the 2010 Flood and Water Management Act which was rushed through at end of the last parliament without proper scrutiny. Section 38 of this allows the Environment Agency to actually create coastal erosion and flooding…

Thus the announcement of this fund goes someway towards beginning to address the first of these challenges, the economic issues. It is of course not designed to address all economic issues facing coastal communities, there are many issues such as road building that only major government investment in infrastructure can tackle. It is nonetheless a helpful and welcome start.

However, there are three areas that the government will need to exercise care with as it sets up this fund.

1. The new fund should add to, not detract from existing coastal funding – such as that announced last year for sea defence.

2. The principle of priming the pump to help coastal communities help themselves is extremely welcome. However, this principle needs to extended – as I have argued previously to sea defence, allowing local landowners within certain limits to defend their own land against coastal erosion.

3. There is a potential conflict of interest in the use of Crown Estate revenues which will need to be closely monitored. The Crown Estate derives substantial revenue from licensing dredging, with increasing amounts currently (21%) of sand and gravel used in the construction industry coming from the sea bed since the 1960s. However, there has long been held to be a link between extraction of sand and gravel from the seabed and coastal erosion, which at least in the case of East Anglia has increased very significantly in this same time frame.

Nonetheless, the creation of this Coastal Communities Fund designed to prime the pump to help communities begin to help themselves is a very welcome small step in the right direction.

******************************************************************************************************************

On Thursday Labour Shadow Transport Secretary Maria Eagle made the extraordinary claim that the planned coastguard station closures were the result of the coalition cutting the transport budget “too far and too fast”. I say ‘extraordinary’ because what the government is proposing is a somewhat scaled back version of a closure plan that was drawn up by the last Labour government of which Miss Eagle was a minister. In fact, I exposed part of that plan on Conservative Home – the closure of at least one of the main coastguard stations on the East Coast - more than two months before the general election.

Faced with a shadow Transport Secretary who apparently does not even know what her own party’s policy was when they were in government little over a year ago, it would seem that Philip Hammond and his team have little to worry about!

What should perhaps concern Mr Hammond more is the relationship between his department’s decision making and the government’s localism agenda. The responses to the government’s consultation on the coastguard closure plan were overwhelmingly against closure, with a particular fear that the local knowledge and expertise coastguard officers have would over time be lost if regional Maritime Rescue and Coordination Centres were replaced by more nationally based ones.

The coastguard consultation is not the only area of conflict between decision making at the Department for Transport and the ideal of localism. I will give just one other example – though there are many that could be used:

Earlier this year the government held a local consultation along the stretch of the North Suffolk where I live on a proposal to make the coast between Southwold and Lowestoft the only area in UK waters where offshore oil transfers between tankers would be allowed. The previous Labour government had quietly agreed with tanker companies that this would be the ‘preferred location’ for such transfers, a decision that led to the coast suddenly finding the largest number of tankers in the western world anchored off it. Tankers carrying Russian oil from the Baltic were unloading into large supertankers that were too big to negotiate the Baltic.

The then local MP, the admirable John Gummer (now Lord Deben) worked tirelessly to persuade Labour ministers to ban these transfers. The North Suffolk coast is an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), has natural nature reserves, a RAMSAR site of international environmental importance, is a site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and tourism directly employs 12% of local people in an area with few employment alternatives…one could go on. The ban was eventually brought in, but within weeks of the new parliament sitting the shipping minister Mike Penning MP was persuaded to suspend the banning order. When several of us living in the area enquired how this had happened without any consultation, we were told by the government’s chief shipping adviser that there had been a ‘consultation’ and it had been advertised on the Department for Transport’s website. In fact, no such consultation either past or present was listed on the DfT website, nor were those of us who had taken part in previous consultations on the issue informed. Eventually, after much pressure the minister announced a further consultation just for local residents. We were assured that this was a genuine consultation and the decision had not already been taken. The majority of the responses were strongly against the tanker transfers being allowed. The strength of local opinion was clearly demonstrated in a public meeting in Southwold in April. Anyone who says public meetings are dead should have been there. The hall was packed with around 300 people from the surrounding area and, despite a few people from outside the area brought in to speak by the tanker companies, was overwhelmingly against the tanker transfers being allowed there. A sentiment that was made even stronger by the fact that a tanker had recently nearly sunk a local fishing boat and not even stopped. I sat in that public meeting watching local people trying to take control of their own local environment, and thought – “this really is the big society, and it may not always be comfortable to government, but this really is the big society working”. It was local people wanting to take control of and protect their own local environment and the jobs that depend on it. Then despite all of that, and despite protests form the Shetland Islands council where the oil transfers had previously taken place inside a safe harbour, the shipping minister decided last month to make the North Suffolk coast the only UK area where tankers could transfer oil between each other at sea. You can imagine the local reaction.

This has been compounded by the government’s decision this week to go ahead with the closure of both Great Yarmouth Coastguard station which covers the East Anglian coastline north of Southwold and the Thames (Walton on the Naze) coastguard that covers the East Anglian coast up to Southwold – which now of course has the largest anchorage of oil tankers in the western world. The area is also only a few miles away from where the Eleni V oil spill disaster happened in 1978 after that tanker was hit by another ship in days when there were far fewer tankers off the coast than today.

This issue of central government decision making versus localism has come to the fore with the coastguard closure programme that the coalition has inherited from Labour. There are of course strengths in both sides – central government has to look at the ‘big picture’ and use professional advice from senior public servants relating to issues such as the use of new technology by the coastguard. However, local consultation has great strengths too, local people have specific local knowledge that can sometimes be as important as that of senior civil servants based in London. For example, many of those living and working on the East Anglian coast are very aware that the pattern of sandbanks both offshore and in estuaries is constantly shifting. This is because uniquely, the Southern North Sea functions as a sediment trap collecting sediment from other areas as a result of its funnel shape. The area also has the unusual feature of rotating tidal currents, which rotate around a point of zero tidal rise (termed an amphidromic node) located between North Suffolk and the Netherlands. These currents help create constantly shifting sands in inshore waters and estuaries which mean that technology alone cannot be relied on to ensure maritime safety, local knowledge is also essential.

Clearly, the government has to find an effective way of bringing its localism agenda into central government decision making. If it does not then it risks killing the localism agenda before it is even properly born. At the moment it appears to be struggling to do so.

However, one way to do this relates to how the government conducts consultations. During the time of the last Labour government many public consultations seemed to be little more than a perfunctory exercise, with the policy effectively predetermined and civil servants employed in finding ways of answering whatever objections were raised, without actually changing the proposed policy. This has understandably led to a significant degree of scepticism by many people about public consultations and who can blame them for that?

However, therein lies both the problem and potentially the solution to the tension between localism and central government decision making. There needs to be a change of culture in Whitehall. That culture shift needs to move from the ‘Whitehall knows best’ mentality that is so deeply ingrained in the senior civil service, to viewing consultation responses, particularly local consultation responses, as somewhat akin to the House of Lords. In other words they need to be treated as a revising chamber – as a process that will refine, revise and even on occasions lead to the demise of proposed government policies because they have been demonstrated to be inadequate, unworkable or detrimental to the local area. That of course is what consultations should always do – but the simple fact is that for several years now that does not appear to have been given the weight that it should have been. It is that culture shift in Whitehall that is urgently needed if the government’s very right localism agenda is to survive.

And a good place to start would be the coastguard closure programme that the government has inherited from Labour...

******************************************************************************************************************

1. ATL has become politicised When I first qualified as a teacher I joined the union that is now known as ATL. I joined it for exactly the same reason that most teachers join a union - they want someone to back them up if a student makes a malicious allegation against them. I joined ATL specifically because it was a union that was not politicised and did not take strike action over pay. When I returned from working overseas and rejoined ATL I was shocked to discover that the political neutrality that had been such a hallmark had gone out of the window. When the union had been led by Peter Smith, although himself a Labour Party member, he has very carefully steered it away from political involvement to just looking after teacher’s interests. Not so, I discovered with Dr Mary Bousted as General Secretary. I found the union I had joined had not only joined the TUC – although what tangible benefit that brought to teachers is far from clear, but was also issuing political statements on behalf of its members (though neither I nor I suspect thousands of other ATL members were ever directly consulted). These included statements opposing not only academies but also faith schools – even though more than a quarter of ATL members worked in voluntary aided and voluntary controlled schools. In other words an ideological political agenda was being prioritised over the interests of teachers.

2. The NASUWT are not striking on Thursday. Whenever, there has been a teachers’ strike in the past the two unions that have generally called their members out on strike have been the NUT and the NASUWT. ATL has never carried out a strike in its 147 year history. It will therefore strike many teachers as extremely odd, if not disconcerting that Dr Bousted persuaded ATL to hold a strike ballot when the NASUWT was not proposing strike action.

3. ATL has presented deeply misleading information about the strike to members. In a letter recently sent to members (which is also available on the ATL website) instructed members:

Don’t turn up for work at any time on Thursday 30 June and don’t prepare any work yiu would have carried out on this day – including planning lessons.

“A strike creates a moral dilemma for some members. But you should respect the democratic decision of your union – a huge majority of your colleagues voted for this action.”

Actually that’s not true – of the 78,342 ATL members eligible to vote, 50,779 (65%) did not vote at all and of those who did only 22,840 (29%) voted to strike. That is hardly ‘a huge majority’ of ATL members.

4. I and many other teachers joined ATL precisely because it was in practice a non striking union. In fact that is almost certainly why so few members even bothered to return the ballot paper. It is somewhat ironic that in the latest edition of the ATL magazine Dr Mary Bousted castigates the government for changing the terms and conditions of the teachers pension scheme after members had entered it.

“ On pensions – I think that…critically, for everyone who’s been in teaching , you entered with a particular contract, as it were in broad terms…for people who’ve been in the profession, we shouldn’t later the terms on which they entered. I think that’s part of the broad contract that you expect. You came in on a certain basis. You should proceed on that basis.”

So, why Dr Bousted are you changing the very basis on which many of us joined ATL – that of the 3 major teaching unions it was the one that throughout its history had been a non striking union?

5. Dr Bousted’s SKY TV interview on Sunday. In a rabble rousing speech she compared former Labour cabinet minister Lord Hutton’s pension proposals to Robert Maxwell’s criminal plundering of pension schemes, but went on to claim that the government’s pension proposals would means that “there will be no honourable teaching profession. Good teachers won’t want to go into the profession because it won’t be worth their while to do so.” Leaving aside the rather inherent contradiction of people being supposedly ‘good teachers’ but not yet in the profession, Dr Bousted has delivered a professional insult to the entire teaching profession. Does she really think that teachers teach just for the money? Has she never heard of teaching being a vocation?

6. Coercion: The ATL letter referred to earlier that was recently sent to members contains a section entitled: “Are there any exemptions to the strike call?” This states that in rare circumstances ATL members may be exempted from taking strike action and says “Requests for exemptions will be assessed on a case by case basis. You should contact your branch secretary if you want an assessment…” frankly, that sounds horribly reminiscent of the trade union bully boy tactics that we saw in the 1970s. This is quite shocking coming from a union that many of use joined precisely because it did not call members out on strike.

7. There is a lack of clear information about the cost of the teachers pension scheme. What is clear though is that life expectancy in the UK is steadily increasing – currently at a rate of one additional year’s life expectancy every 3 years. With nearly half a million people drawing pensions averaging (according to ATL) £12,000 that means that the teachers pension scheme must be paying out additional £6 billion pounds every 3 years. That £6 billion either has to come from teachers paying higher pension contributions (the government’s proposal) OR the taxpayer – which seems particularly unfair on taxpayers who work in the private sector. ATL together with other teachers’ unions have drawn attention to a recent Public Accounts Committee report that the unions argue means that the status quo can be maintained in terms of teachers pensions. The Hutton report suggests otherwise however. Most teachers have only heard what their union has said on this issue. It is therefore critical that the government urgently and publicly explains to teachers ahead of Thursday’s strike why additional pension contributions are now required.

*******************************************************************************************************************

Unless this question is clearly answered first, we will be in danger of lacking clear war aims (which appears to be the case) and appropriate political and military strategies to achieve them, and still less will we be able to bookmark on the calendar any particular dates for the end of our involvement in hostilities. Broadly speaking, in the last century there have been two sorts of war Britain has been involved in:

1. Wars that have the potential to be ended by negotiation. Arguably, the first world war fell into this category. In fact, some historians have suggested that had a world statesman of the calibre of former Conservative Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister Lord Salisbury been around, then the war itself might have been avoided.

2. However, there are other wars where the intentions of the enemy are such that the only safe outcome for us is either a) a holding operation that neutralises the enemy in at least the short term by containing them (something that arguably we are currently doing with the Taliban and other Islamist terrorist groups in Afghanistan); or b) in the longer term total military and political defeat of the enemy. This was the case in world war two where Nazi ideology led to genocide and attempts to impose Nazi rule and ideology on the rest of Europe and elsewhere meant that there was no safe alternative but to continue the war until the Nazis were totally removed from power.

I have argued before that one cannot negotiate with the Taliban or with other Islamist terrorist groups in Afghanistan such as Hezb-i-Islami. I speak from personal experience, as an aid worker in Afghanistan I had to negotiate with senior members of both organisations; Neither can they safely be appeased , anymore than Hitler could be appeased in the 1930s. In fact, the parallels there are quite striking, these organisations have an ideology that the believes the rest of the world should be invited to submit to being governed by, and if they refuse, should have war declared on them until they submit; they allow no dissenting opinions – murdering and torturing their own people; they run their own secret police; dispense what is in practice summary justice…and even made religious minorities wear yellow cloth badges pinned to their clothes; Moreover, they have shown utter ruthlessness in their craving for power. Gulbaddin Hekmatyar leader of one of the Hezb-i-Islami factions, is probably the only prime minister in modern world history to have bombed and shelled his own capital city into ruins, because he wanted to be President, rather than merely prime minister. Significantly, he has been lurking in the shadows biding his time while the Taliban fight the Afghan national army and coalition forces. However, when coalition forces withdraw, make no mistake he will be there.

The battle of Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton and Harrow, but there is a sense in which world war two was won on the playing fields, or rather in the debating chambers of Westminster. It was there that in the 1930s when Winston Churchill led a war weary nation that desperately wanted to avoid a repeat of WW1 to believe that Britain should again be prepared to make the highest sacrifices that involved human life, money and moral courage. He faced many critics, not least among his own party who saw balancing the budget as the most important need of the hour.

It took great moral courage to take the stand he did. Yet there is a very real sense in which wars are won – or lost by political courage. Great victories come through great battles and great battles require great courage – in this case both moral and political.

History will give its verdict on the news from Washington this week – President Obama’s announcement of a withdrawal of 33,000 US troops from Afghanistan ahead of next year’s US presidential elections. Leaders of great countries need to remember that they are writing future world history, not merely seeking to influence election results.

If a major western leader has judged that the conflict in which we are engaged in Afghanistan is one that can simply be negotiated to an end, then there must also be an underlying assumption that like the first world war there may be pride, tribalism, ambition, militarism, but there is no lasting threat to our own security from an evil expansionist ideology.

If that is indeed the case, then based on both academic study and personal experience of living in Afghanistan during the time of Taliban rule, I respectfully beg to differ.

******************************************************************************************************************

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”, so wrote Mark Twain to the New York Journal after the newspaper had published his obituary. The same is very much true in relation to the Taliban and other expressions of violent Islamism.Usama bin Laden’s death will not signal its end. In fact one of the key issues that governments on both sides of the Atlantic should now be on is whether the death of bin Laden will impede or exacerbate Pakistan’s slide towards radical Islamism?

The simple fact is that the events of the last few days have the potential to make Pakistan even more unstable.

The problem goes back to both the nature and the extent of the influence that the military has had over successive Pakistani governments since independence. While in some Muslim majority countries, such as Turkey, the military has historically acted as the guardian of a secular state, in Pakistan the military has played a very different role by deliberately sponsoring Islamism.

The reason for this is that within the Pakistani army there is an endemic belief that main role of the Pakistani government is to protect the country against India. In the eyes of the army particularly, this takes precedence over what other countries would see as the normal functions of government, such as maintaining the institutions of a functioning democracy, law and order, education and development etc., i.e. what is sometimes called ‘nation building’.

This mind set – that the primary function of the Pakistan government is to defend the country against India - led the army and more particularly its all powerful Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) agency to sponsor Islamist terrorists engaged in ‘jihad’ against India in Kashmir. In the early nineties it is reputed to have supported the creation of Harkat al Ansar, a radical terrorist group that kidnapped and murdered westerners in Indian Kashmir and developed strong links with al Qaeda. At about the same time the ISI’s sponsorship of Islamist terrorist groups was extended to the Afghan Taliban, whom the ISI are also widely reportedly to have played a key in establishing among the madrassas along Pakistan’s North West frontier with Afghanistan. Sponsorship of the Taliban fulfilled the twin aims of seeking to neutralise Indian influence in Afghanistan by creating a pro Pakistani government there and also provided training camps which could be utilised by the ISI to train Kashmiri Islamist terrorists. The ISI thus supported Islamist terrorist organisations that in turn themselves directly aided al Qaeda and bin Laden. Illustrative of the extent of this support was the fact that when the Clinton administration responded to al Qaeda’s bombings of its the East African embassies by firing cruise missiles at camps in Afghanistan where bin Laden had been living, these were actually Harkat al Ansar camps and alongside the terrorists at least five ISI instructors were killed.

There is in fact a remarkable degree of schizophrenia within the Pakistan army, and particularly the ISI. Many officers who are otherwise largely secularised and liberal and may even have trained at western military academies, nonetheless support Islamist terrorist groups because this is seen as a tactical bulwark against India. Musharraf was a classic example of this.

Pakistani ISI’s support for the Taliban pre 9/11 has been extensively documented. It was one of the reasons that in 1993 President Clinton placed Pakistan on a watch list of state sponsors of terrorism.

After 9/11 under intense US pressure the Pakistani military claimed to have to have joined the US led coalition in fighting al Qaeda. However, the double think within the Pakistani military appears to have led the Pakistani army to think that they could one the one hand work with the US in fighting al Qaeda, while at the same time still sponsor Kashmiri Islamist terrorists. Moreover, because the ISI, the most powerful part of the Pakistani military and a law unto itself, had been deeply involved for years with the Taliban, it appears to have continued covertly to help the Taliban even while the Pakistani army was receiving huge amounts of western military aid because of its commitment to hunting down al Qaeda. In short the Pakistan army and more particularly the ISI played a double game, getting the USA to deliver its shopping list of desired military hardware, while at the same time continuing its support for Islamist terrorist groups. This double think in the Pakistani army was encouraged by an over emphasis on the part of the USA on the hunt for al Qaeda and bin Laden, relative to the importance of combating other Islamist terrorist threats in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region. For anyone who wants a more detailed account of this, I highly recommend Ahmed Rashid’s excellent volume Descent into Chaos: Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Threat to Global Security (Penguin,2008) which provides an accessible account of this.

So what impact will the death of bin Laden have on Pakistan? On the one hand if it leads to a lessening of al Qaeda operations in Afghanistan or even a relocation of its main leadership to elsewhere, it could force the Pakistani military leadership to make a choice. No longer could they hide behind the smokescreen of fighting al Qaeda while still supporting other Islamist terrorists. However, the real question is which way would it choose to go?

One of determining factors may be cultural. Honour (izzat) and shame are hugely important in Pakistan. The fact that the US military felt it necessary to not only violate Pakistani national sovereignty in the raid on bin Laden, but to actually keep the Pakistani government and intelligence service in the dark brings huge shame on a very proud country, where personal, let alone national honour is hugely important.

1. Most Pakistani Muslims are traditionalist Muslims, not radical Islamists. However, in most countries traditionalists can be swayed either towards the west or towards radical Islam by what they see happening in terms of western foreign policy in the Islamic world. Pakistan is embarrassed, even the ISI has publicly said that they are embarrassed. The question is will this in the medium term swing Pakistan both at military and governmental level and at a more popular level in a pro western or radical Islamist direction? The British and US governments need to use enormous amounts of wisdom, tenacity and diplomacy in how they address this. Firey public statements of condemnation by politicians that are geared for domestic consumption could actually tip Pakistan in the wrong direction.

2. Academic studies have shown that when Islamic countries, including Pakistan have faced national crises, many people react in one of two ways. Either they decide that Islamism is not working and that they need to look at alternatives or alternatively they conclude that these disasters have hit their country as a form of retribution because they are not being radically Islamic enough and so react by becoming more radicalised than they were before. It is likely that both responses will happen in Pakistan.

However, in conclusion, we may say that far from ending the Islamist terrorist threat – the death of Usama bin Laden has in at least the short, if not the medium term, probably destabilised Pakistan. The Taliban are still there – the frankenstein monster that the ISI helped bring to birth now is not simply an Afghan movement, but is now also a Pakistani movement too.

The real question is which way will Pakistani slide? Will the Pakistani army and especially the ISI finally realise that their own sponsorship of Islamist terrorist groups has unleashed a monster that threatens the very existence of Pakistan far more than India ever will? Or will there be a boost to radical Islamist parties. Some of these such as Jaamat Ulema i Islam, who hold sway in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province have long been supporters of the Taliban and other jihadist groups and at least sympathetic to al Qaeda. If this were the case then in the next few years Pakistan could slide into having a radical Islamist government that controls the country’s nuclear weapons.

******************************************************************************************************************

In this week’s speech on immigration David Cameron raised an issue which seems to have escaped the headline writers. This was a subtle, though highly important shift in government attitude towards culture.

Whilst clearly emphasising how much ‘good immigration’ had contributed to Britain, Mr Cameron also made it clear that there were broad, though distinct limits to the level of cultural diversity the government is prepared to tolerate. In particular, he emphasised that certain ‘cultural practices’ were simply beyond the pale:

For a start there are forced marriages taking place in our country, and overseas, as a means of gaining entry to the UK. This is the practice where some young British girls are bullied and threatened into marrying someone they don't want to. I've got no time for those who say this is a culturally relative issue - frankly it is wrong, full stop, and we've got to stamp it out.

There are other problems with what's called the family route. We know, for instance, that some marriages take place when the spouse is very young, and has little or no grasp of English. Again I don't believe we should allow cultural sensitivity to stop us from acting…So however sensitive or difficult a subject it may be, we are tightening up the family route.

Mr Cameron is of course absolutely right and chimes in with what many ordinary British people have intuitively thought for a long time about so called ‘cultural practices’ such as forced marriages.

However, what is hugely significant is that by emphatically describing such cultural practices as ‘wrong’ and needing to be stamped out David Cameron has signalled a a subtle, but nonetheless incredibly important and long overdue shift in government attitude towards culture. He has in one speech removed the foundation of multicultralism that under Labour no one was allowed to question - the dogma that ‘all cultures are equally valid’ and therefore implicitly ‘good’.

Yet the simple fact is that not everything in every culture is ‘good’. Take for example the practice of Suttee – the expectation placed on some Hindu widows that they should burn themselves alive on their husband’s funeral pyres. Today few would deny that the British Governor General Lord Bentinck was right to ban it in 1829, although there were certainly British voices at the time arguing that it was a cultural practice that ought to be tolerated.

Do not get me wrong, I am not for one minute suggesting that British culture is somehow superior to all other cultures. There is both good and bad and much that is morally neutral in every culture, including mainstream British culture. In fact, it is only when you have lived in another culture that you can properly evaluate your own culture. It was only when I lived in Pakistan that I could both see the strengths in British culture – such as respect for privacy, and the weaknesses – the Pakistanis seriously put us to shame when it comes to hospitality!

When it comes to immigration it is against key historic British values that we need to assess cultural practices. These are in effect the conscience of British history, values that we have over time and many generations developed and which as a nation we have come to believe to be right. They include most fundamentally the equal dignity of all human beings, which is reflected in the protection which British law offers indiscriminately to all people regardless of gender, religion or even nationality. It also includes such values as freedom of speech and freedom of religion, values which historically have attracted to our shore many fleeing persecution overseas.

However, it is evident that whilst the cultures prevalent in some countries share very similar values to our own, others are more distant from these values. For example, in Somalia the practice of female genital mutilation (euphemistically called ‘female circumcision’) is widely imposed on girls. Somalis are also one of the immigrant communities that as a whole have integrated much less than many other groups into mainstream British society.

The implication of this for community cohesion is that we need to start paying more attention to the cultural impact of immigration, rather than primarily focusing on its economic impacts. In particular:

1. We need to focus not just on net migration, where the number of new arrivals is offset by the high volume of British people emigrating. At a time when more than 10% of people living in Britain were born abroad and one in four babies is born to a foreign mother, we clearly also need to look at total immigration and its impact on community cohesion to historic British values.

2. We may need to look at whether the immigration cap should have a positive bias towards people from countries whose cultures have the greatest degree of convergence with historic British values.

*****************************************************************************************************************

Human rights are more important than democracy in Islamic countries

As David Cameron today becomes the first western leader to visit post Mubarak Egypt, Paul Goodman has highlighted some important questions the visit raises about what British foreign policy in the region should be. Are we pro-democracy in the region, or not? If we are, what does that imply for our relationship with allies that aren't democracies, such as Jordan and Morocco (let alone Saudi Arabia)?

Any approach to the current crises in the Middle East must recognise that since the 1970s the overall trend in most Islamic countries has been towards greater islamisation, rather than towards greater liberalisation.

As such the primary need of such countries is not for democracy, but for basic human rights to be guaranteed. Without this emphasis the advent of democratic reforms are likely to be used by well organised Islamist groups to speed up the Islamisation process, which will itself severely restrict basic human rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, academic freedom and fair and equal treatment for all by the law.

In the period between the end of the second world war and the oil crisis of the 1970s there was generally speaking a period of liberalisation in Islamic countries. Many newly independent countries were seeking to ‘modernise’ and although Islamic law (shari'a) was still at least informally applied at a local level, western style systems of law were becoming dominant. The constitutions of newly independent Muslim majority countries were typically based on secular law, although sometimes retaining a special status for certain aspects of shari'a.

However, since the 1970s there has been a reversal of this trend, with increasing attempts to apply and enforce shari'a instead. This has led to serious restrictions on basic human rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion and academic freedom.

For example, between 1982 and 1986 Pakistan introduced the so called ‘Blasphemy laws’ (sections 295b and 295c of the penal code) which effectively made any criticism of the Qur’an or Muhammad punishable by either life imprisonment or execution. This amounted to an enormous erosion of both freedom of speech, academic freedom and religious freedom. Effectively this meant that any non Muslim who was asked whether they believed the Qur’an was ‘the infallible word of God’ faced the most severe penalties.

This islamisation process has not been limited to criminal law, but has also included attempts to replace secular family law with shari'a – moves that effectively deprive mothers of child custody and even access rights and attempts to Islamise the banking and finance sectors by making them shari'a compliant. The latter particularly, has been resisted with varying degrees of success by ruling elites in the Arab world, as they have recognised it would give control over a large area of economic life to Islamic judges.

It is this political power struggle between autocratic, often western leaning governments and Islamic leaders, whether clerics or Islamist leaders, that poses the greatest threat both to basic human rights and to Britain’s long term interests in many Islamic countries. The focus of Britain’s policy in the Islamic world needs to be helping to foster a third way that avoids the repression of basic human rights that both of these represent.

In the light of the current street protests across the Middle East it is understandable that well meaning western liberals will call for democracy to be the number one priority, even while acknowledging that in countries such as Egypt this could lead to the Muslim Brotherhood gaining power. However, such calls are profoundly misguided and likely to lead in the medium term to an even greater repression of basic human rights than those countries have witnessed in recent years.

Some may argue that with the current crises affecting the Middle East it is splitting hairs to argue that we should prioritise human rights over democracy in our foreign policy. However, whilst we do need to respond strongly to events as they happen on the ground, as both the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary are doing in response to the massacres currently happening in Libya, it is even more important that we develop a clear and coherent medium term strategy, both towards those countries currently experiencing instability and those that as yet are not.

To illustrate the importance of prioritising human rights over democracy in our foreign policy let me give two recent examples: The election of a Hamas government in Palestine in 2006 and constitutional changes in Turkey in 2010.

Hamas, the Palestinian offshoot of Egypt’s al-Ikhwan (The Muslim Brotherhood) shocked most Palestinians by winning the January 2006 elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council. The reason their victory was so unexpected was that they had quietly developed a medium term strategy to gain power. This involved Hamas members setting up local social care projects, some of them funded by western donors. Then, having gained local credibility from these projects, the Hamas members running them were put up as local electoral candidates under the name of ‘Change and Reform’, which was a front party for Hamas. The strategy was particularly clever as the Palestinian Legislative Council consists of both members elected by local constituencies and others elected by a second proportional vote. Hamas was thus able to win an overall majority of seats, something that shocked many ordinary Palestinians, simply because they got so many candidates elected in local constituency votes. The fact that the Hamas’ share of the vote in the second proportional vote was almost unchanged from elections 10 years earlier suggests that this strategy effectively duped many ordinary Palestinians into thinking that they could vote for a local Hamas MP without there being any danger that Hamas would win overall power. It hardly needs to be said that similar events could now easily happen in Egypt, where Hamas has been gaining significant ground since the 2005 elections.

Turkey has been seen by many as an exemplar of how an overwhelmingly Muslim country can be integrated into the modern free world, including potential membership of the EU. However, recent events there also illustrate the danger of western foreign policy prioritising democracy over constitutional guarantees of human rights. The current president Recap Erdogan, who is an avowed Islamist instituted a referendum last September to amend 26 articles of Turkey’s constitution. These constitutional changes. which had previously been rejected by the Turkish parliament, gave himself more powers and lessened the role of the military and judiciary, who had been the constitutional guardians of Turkey’s secular state. Both the US government and the EU applauded the move as a step towards greater ‘democracy’. However, what the constitutional changes actually did in practice was to allow a Turkish government to turn the country into an Islamic state with the enforcement of shari'a, which would inevitably seriously limit basic human rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion and equal treatment for all by the law.

Whilst there are many considerations that inevitably must affect foreign policy I would suggest that British foreign policy towards Islamic countries should include the following elements:

Medium to long term aims, prioritised over short term gains. Too much western foreign policy in the Islamic world has been focused on short term gains whether strategic (such as the Bush administration turning a blind eye to the Pakistani ISI’s support for Islamists training for jihad in Kashmir, provided that the Musharraf government handed over al-Qaeda terrorists to the Americans) or commercial (such as the apparent prioritisation of potential trade deals with countries such as Libya and more recently North Sudan over

Focused on developing a functioning civil society. One of the most dangerous aspects of the suppression of civil society by western leaning autocratic governments is that it has left the mosque as the only area of public meeting and protest. This has enabled Islamist groups to use the cover of the mosque to become the primary focus of opposition to autocratic governments. However, a functioning civil society allows alternatives to Islamism to develop and flourish. This is a point that must be forcibly made to western leaning autocratic governments that are rightly afraid of growing Islamist movements in their own countries.

Focused on the promotion of basic human rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion (which includes freedom to speak about one’s faith with others rather than simply ‘freedom of worship’ as recent foreign policy statements by Hiliary Clinton and others appear to have downgraded it to), academic freedom and fair and equal treatment for all by the law.

Prioritises the promotion of these basic human rights over the promotion of ‘democracy’. Liberalisation can ultimately deliver democracy, but we have yet to see democracy deliver liberalisation in an Islamic country. One should not forget that universal suffrage in Britain was preceded by more than a century of liberalising reforms.

Recognises that the medium term trend in most Islamic countries is towards greater Islamisation, rather than towards greater liberalisation. As such it must be realistic about the strategies being adopted by Islamist groups. Some of these, as in the examples from Palestine and Turkey given above, may appear to run parallel to the aspirations of a free democratic society, but they are seen by Islamists simply as vehicles towards achieving power themselves. Seeking to prevent the spread of shari'a enforcement throughout the world should be a key part of our foreign policy, not merely because of its repression of human rights, but also because it is in our national interest to do all we can to stop the spread of Islamism of which the enforcement of shari'a on the willing and unwilling alike is one of the ultimate goals.

In essence, this approach is seeking to develop a third way between, on the one hand autocracy, which whilst in many cases western leaning, has repressed basic freedoms for its peoples; and on the other hand Islamism, which gains much of its popular support by its opposition to autocratic rulers, but itself ultimately aims at a form of government which is at least equally repressive of basic human rights. It is about the Conservative principle of pushing for gradual reform, in order to avoid the danger of violent revolution. One should not forget that the 1979 Iranian revolution started with very moderate people voicing legitimate grievances, it was many of those same people who later suffered when radical Islamists were able to seize control.

Lord Salisbury arguably one of Britain’s greatest foreign secretaries and prime ministers summed up a Conservative approach to foreign policy when he said ‘Our first duty is towards the people of this country, to maintain their interests and their rights; our second is to all humanity.’ In an increasingly globalised world stopping the spread of Islamism abroad is fundamental to both Britain’s own interests and our duty to humanity.

*****************************************************************************************************************

Five years ago the Conservative Party began a phase of consciously trying to change its image to reach out to a wider section of the electorate. It was important not just electorally, but also as a reaffirmation of what Conservatism has since the days of Disreali stood for. Yet I believe that there is another further and more crucial step that we must take to modernise the image of the party in terms of inclusiveness and being in politics for the good of everyone in Britain.

When I talk to teenagers about politics one of the most common reactions I hear about the Conservative Party is summed up a 15 year old girl who said to me:

If we are honest, most of us in our hearts know that the biggest image problem we have is the perception of many people that we are a party for the comfortably off, or at lest for those who aspire to be comfortably off. That is an image that we fundamentally have to change if we are to win the next election.

Now oddly enough it is the MPs' expenses issue that may give us the opportunity to do this.

The question that we need to raise in public debate is this. How many ordinary people could afford to become either an MP or a member of the House of Lords? If this answer is ‘not many’ then we have a problem with our democracy.

To become an MP not only do you have to give up a huge amount of time to as a candidate – something many of us are happy to do; you may also have to fund some of your own campaign; then during the actual election campaign pay your mortgage and support your family while you have unpaid leave from work. This may be no small issue if your spouse has given up their career to concentrate on the family while you are out campaigning. There were in fact a number of Conservative candidates reported to be facing serious financial hardship during the last election campaign. Others have spoken of it having taken several years to pay off their overdrafts after previous unsuccessful election campaigns. This in itself is an issue that we need to address.

Then if you do get elected you have to continue supporting your family without receiving any pay until parliament actually sits. Meanwhile, you will have vast amounts of casework piling up immediately. You will need to rent an office, employ staff etc. You will need to find money to stay in London, either the cost of a hotel or advance rent on a flat. In short, you are likely to run up several thousands of pounds of expenses paid for from your own bank account, which you will have to wait for IPSA to repay. Moreover, under the way IPSA currently operates this situation appears likely to continue – with newly elected MPs, some no doubt with already significant overdrafts from the election period, being owed hundreds if not thousands of pounds on a regular basis by IPSA.

Now if you are fortunate enough to be appointed to the Lords – and ‘fortune’ is probably the most apt word – the situation is even worse. Even though the Lords sit for similar lengths of time to the Commons, members of the House of Lords are not even paid at all, they can merely claim expenses, a situation which almost inevitably leads to a culture of maximising expenses. For which reasons one cannot help but suspect that there may well be a few more expenses scandals to come out of the Lords.

I suspect that more than half of us on the last parliamentary candidates list, if offered a seat in the Lords, would have to think very hard indeed about how we would support our families. This is a situation that is fundamentally unhealthy for the second chamber of parliament and needs urgent reform, whether or not it is accompanied by a wider reform of the Lords.

The MPs expenses scandal as with many problems in the public services, appears to be partly due to the culture in the organisation. This was not merely a culture among a sizeable minority of MPs. It was also within the fees office, which actively encouraged MPs to claim their full ‘expenses’ and when the expenses scandal broke appeared frustratingly reluctant to investigate some well supported complaints of expenses abuse, despite pressure from the Parliamentary Commissioner’s office. The problems that have emerged with IPSA also appear to be due to the management culture of the organisation that seems to focus more on ‘not letting anyone get away with it’ – than on what should be its primary function i.e. ensuring the smooth running of the nation’s parliament at a publicly accountable cost.

We have forgotten why parliamentary expenses were introduced in the first place. It was to ensure that in a democracy anyone regardless of wealth could afford to be elected as a member of parliament.

The problems are compounded by IPSA’s lack of public accountability for its own actions, something that stems from the oddity of its constitutional position. The British constitution that has evolved over the last 800 years rests of the relationships between 3 bodies – HM government, parliament and the judiciary. IPSA, uniquely does not actually fit into any of these because it is not a government department and, unlike the commons fees office, is independent of parliament. As such, it is a powerful public body that in practice is accountable to no one for its actions. This is a situation that parliament urgently needs to find a way of addressing.

Now given the very justified public anger at the expenses scandal, it is no easy matter for either parliament or the government to propose changes to the way IPSA, the body set up to replace the fees office, works. The old adage ‘legislate in haste and repent at leisure’ certainly seems to ring true.

However, an opportunity to solve this conundrum can be provided by the party leadership giving a concerted focus to presenting the party as an inclusive party of people of all income groups, who are working together for the national good. This needs to go much further than just reforming IPSA. However, as far as IPSA is concerned I would suggest that they be given not a prescription of what to do, but a set of principles to apply.

1. It should be possible for anyone to become an MP without needing to have any private savings or wealth to draw on. This is fundamental to the working of a modern democracy and IPSA needs to have that much more clearly in focus than they appear to do at the moment.

2. In a democracy MPs are elected to pass carefully considered legislation and to hold government ministers to account. It is therefore essential that the amount of administration they have to do in relation to claiming expenses essential to fulfilling that task be kept to a minimum. Stories of MPs sitting up until midnight completing administration required by IPSA would suggest that the current system may be undermining the ability of MPs to do what they were elected to do.

3. IPSA should focus on MPs being accountable to the public who elected them, rather than accountable to IPSA, which as a non governmental body is actually accountable to no one. That is how a democracy works.

4. The regime must be family friendly. It is entirely reasonable that those who as a result of sitting in parliament are routinely separated from their families during the week, should be provided with accommodation near Westminster that allows their spouses and school age children to stay with them in London during school holidays.

5. Members of the House of Lords who sit for similar lengths of time to MPs need to be treated in a comparable fashion. It is essential that any reform of the House of Lords includes members of the second chamber being paid a salary comparable to MPs. To expect people to work nearly full time without a salary is almost inevitably to invite misuse of expenses, as well as excluding all but those with independent private incomes from the second chamber.

Principles such as these could be worked out in a variety of ways. For example, MPs could be provided with a series of publicly owned flats all within a mile or so of parliament, in which they are not responsible for maintenance, utility and council tax bills etc. Such solutions could actually save money in the medium term; Staff employed by MPs could be paid directly by IPSA, thereby removing some of the administration load from MPs and the need for them to use their own overdraft facilities. However, it is important that IPSA be given the principles and allowed to come up with solutions itself.

It is essential that the public hear a clear message that this is being done to ensure that anyone, regardless of wealth, can become an MP. That is essential to a modern functioning democracy.

It must also be accompanied by a series of other measures designed to get across the message that the Conservative Party is there for everyone, regardless of wealth, income or social background. Quite how we do that would be an extremely useful discussion for us to have on Conservative Home. However, I would suggest at least one further specific measure in that respect that should be considered.

The message we need to get across to the public is that we want to make it possible for ordinary people, including those from the caring professions, charity workers, teachers, nurses etc to be able to become MPs. A very practical step to enable this to happen would be allowing parliamentary candidates who have taken unpaid leave from their employment between the nomination date and the day of the election to claim a tax free grant of around £2,000 provided they gain more than 5% of the vote i.e. retain their deposit. This could alleviate some very real hardship among parliamentary candidates and would be a relatively small part of the cost of holding an election. It would not only be the right thing to do in terms of widening participation in democracy, it would also send out a clear signal that the Conservative Party is the party of aspiration, where anyone regardless of wealth or social background can aspire to be an MP.

*****************************************************************************************************************

Stopping the spread of sharia is central to countering radicalisation

Martin Parsons begins a three-part series considering how to counter radical Islamism.

“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat” warned the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu reputed author of The Art of War.

Unless we understand the ultimate aims that Islamist terrorists are seeking to achieve, then every public policy aimed at countering them will be no more than tactics, with little hope of strategic success.

Fundamentally, the ultimate aim of Islamist terrorists is that Islamic law (sharia), which is the primary instrument of Islamic government, should be imposed across the entire world on Muslim and non Muslim alike.

However, even the most cursory look at the previous government’s policies for countering violent Islamism suggests that they lacked this basic understanding of Islamist aims. This ignorance, whether wilful or otherwise, not merely delayed effective advance against Islamism, but in some respects led to tactics that actually gave specific ground to Islamists in terms of achieving their long term aims in Britain and overseas. In particular, the previous Labour government pursued a policy of partially appeasing non violent Islamist groups in the misguided belief that this would prevent radicalised Muslims moving onto violent Islamism.

In doing so they ignored the clear evidence that non-violent Islamist groups have the same ultimate long term aims as violent Islamists – the imposition of sharia in Britain and elsewhere. In broad terms it is not their strategic aims that differ, but merely their tactics. Non-violent Islamists have long recognised that Britain is unlikely to become an Islamic state overnight, so they have concentrated on pursuing a gradual Islamisation process.

This strategy has involved seeking to align British law gradually with sharia. They have done this by a combination of pushing test cases through the courts; by lobbying for specific changes to parliamentary law; by seeking various accommodations towards Islamic practices from public bodies; and by looking for legal loopholes such as the use of arbitration tribunals to create sharia courts deciding cases involving family law and even reputedly some criminal cases.

The ability of Islamists to push test cases through the courts was significantly aided by Labour’s formal introduction of the European system of human rights in the 1998 Human Rights Act. Although Britain had already signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, Labour’s Human Rights Act, which focused on the rights of individuals, enabled Islamists to push test cases through the courts much more easily. In contrast to this the historic British approach of protecting individuals by limiting the power of government that was enshrined in the Magna Carta (1215), the Habeas Corpus Act (1679) and the Bill of Rights (1689) allowed parliament rather than judges to decide what was and was not acceptable in Britain.

There is an urgent need to replace Labour’s Human Rights Act with one based on the historic British approach of limiting the power of government. Only then will we be able to stop Islamists seeking to obtain ‘sharia compliant concessions’ such as the ‘right’ to wear sharia-compliant school uniform. It will also of course enable the government to protect ordinary people’s right to security more effectively by enabling them to deport foreign extremists who have been plotting terror against us.

Equally, the ability of Islamists to lobby directly and sometimes successfully, for changes in parliamentary law was aided by Labour’s patronage of a range of Islamic organisations, many of which had significant Islamist influence in their leadership. Illustrative of this was Labour’s Incitement to Religious Hatred legislation which was widely seen by Islamic organisations as the Islamic blasphemy law they had campaigned for since the Rushdie affair. Blasphemy against Muhammad is in fact the most serious offence in sharia and carries a mandatory death penalty.

An even more overt example occurred when Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly met with some of these leaders immediately following the Heathrow terror plot arrests in Summer 2006. The ministers were asked for two things: Islamic festivals to become British public holidays and a partial implementation of sharia in Britain in respect of family law. Both of course had absolutely nothing to do with countering terrorist plots! However, the then Labour government responded by setting up a commission to investigate whether such requests should be acceded to.

Similarly, the previous Labour government made a whole range of accommodations to the Islamist agenda including allowing the hijab to be part of Metropolitan police uniform (hardly a comforting sight for Muslim women seeking the protection of the law from Islamist intimidation), to the legalising of sharia complaint finance. What is noteworthy about these is that they are both aspects of the Islamist agenda that many Muslim countries have resisted.

It is by no means uncommon for female police officers in Muslim majority countries to wear Western-style uniforms without the option of the hijab that Britain has introduced. Equally, the only countries in the entire Islamic world to have sought a general Islamicisation of their banking systems are Iran, Sudan and Pakistan. Even in Saudi Arabia in 2005 70% of banks were not sharia-based. Yet, under the last Labour government Britain progressively legalised sharia finance. It is noteworthy that at the same time Muslim countries such as Oman have resolutely refused to license any form of sharia finance whatsoever because they recognise it as part of the Islamist agenda to bring increasing areas of the economy and society under Islamist influence and control.

I have previously outlined Labour’s record of appeasement of the agenda ‘non-violent’ islamists in Britain, but let me here draw attention to just three key areas of government policy – Education, Economics and Family Law:

1. Education. The Labour government asked a leading member of the Islamic Foundation, the UK’s largest overtly Islamist group to write, on his own, a government-sponsored report on the teaching of Islam in Britain’s universities. Amongst the reports most unacceptable recommendations was that non-Muslims should be banned from teaching the main Islamic subjects in British universities! Yet when the report was published in June 2006 the Prime Minister Tony Blair publicly welcomed it. The previous government also allowed the same organisation, which draws its primary inspiration from the leading twentieth century Pakistani Islamist Sayyid Mawdudi, to set up a higher education institute in Leicester that awards undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in a range of Islamist subjects including Islamic Economics, Islamic Banking and Finance, Islamic Education and Sharia. This academic institution was set up by Khurshid Ahmad, one of the key followers of Mawdudi and has been central to the promotion of the Islamist vision of sharia finance in Britain.

2. Finance and Economics: Within a few months of Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister the Treasury announced a consultation on introducing Islamic sukkuk bonds that are compliant with sharia, something that potentially makes a whole section of government debt subject to the judgement of sharia lawyers, as well as being almost impossible to subject to normal financial scrutiny regulations as it is not based on interest. In Islamic countries sharia finance has in fact been shown to be extremely vulnerable to fraud and large scale money laundering.

3. Family Law: In February 2008 the Department for Work and Pensions announced that where there was a ‘valid’ polygamous marriage it would pay extra benefits. It was somewhat strange for the government to claim that a polygamous marriage could be 'valid' - as bigamy has for many years been a criminal offence in Britain. It is however, legal under sharia for a man to have up to four wives.

In the eyes of Islamists what each of these did was to take a further step in aligning British law with sharia. The introduction of sharia to Britain is, at least in broad terms, the long term strategic aim of both non-violent and violent Islamists. It is simply their tactics to achieve this that differ.

Tomorrow I will examine how sharia forms a touchstone for identifying radicalisation.

Sharia is the touchstone for recognising and combatting radical Islam

Martn Parsons writes the second in a three-part series considering how to counter radical Islamism. Read Part I.

Yesterday I outlined how the previous Labour government’s approach to countering Islamism failed to recognise that the violent and non-violent Islamist groups had, at least in broad terms, the same long-term strategic aims – the introduction of sharia to Britain and elsewhere in the world. The previous government’s partial appeasement of the agenda of non-violent Islamist groups actually led to ground being surrendered towards the alignment of certain aspects of British law with sharia.

Today I want to address another related issue which the previous government entirely failed to get to grips with – how to identify radicalisation among British Muslims. In particular. I want to suggest that each individual Muslim's attitude to sharia is the touchstone for identifying radicalisation.

One of the major problems any government faces in identifying and combating radicalisation is separating ordinary British Muslims from radicals. The thorny issue here is that ordinary British Muslims, who are deeply peace-loving, have a primarily devotional faith. However, they are largely unaware that the Islamic theological schools (madrassas) that train imans follow a theological curriculum that has remained largely unchanged for 400 years and has very similar teaching to radical Islamism concerning the imposition of Islamic law and government on non-Muslims.

This is not simply the Saudi (Hanbali school of Islamic law) curriculum identified in a recent BBC Panorama programme. It also includes the Hanafi school of Islamic law, whose Dars-i-Nizami curriculum is used by most Sunni madrassas in the Indian subcontinent and those with subcontinent links in the UK. This contains a major textbook on sharia known as the Hedaya.

However, the widespread ignorance of the contents of this among many ordinary British Muslims, who follow a traditional, primarily devotional form of Islam, means that there is actually a spectrum of belief among British Muslims. The essential problem for the government is to find a way of defining a specific point that very clearly delineates the start of radicalisation and that can be used as a touchstone to assesses when British Muslims and Islamic organisations have crossed it.

Sharia provides that point. It is both wholly incompatible with a number of important historic British values and its implementation on Muslim and non-Muslim alike is central to the ultimate aims of both violent and non-violent Islamists. As such, it can be used not only to identify radicalisation, but also to draw a line in the sand in respect of British values that wavering young Muslims can be challenged not to cross.

Let me just summarise some of the main ways in which sharia is incompatible with historic British values:

Citizenship: Sharia stipulates that non-Muslims cannot be full citizens. Instead Christians and Jews have what is termed dhimmitude which is a second class status. They may not be part of the government or judiciary and are obliged to pay a special tax termed jizya. Hindus and atheists are not even granted this second class status. In some Islamic countries such as Mauritania and Saudi Arabia only Muslims can be citizens at all, while in countries such as the Maldives recent changes to the country’s constitution make it ambiguous whether those Maldivians who embrace a non-Islamic faith automatically lose their citizenship and become stateless.

Equal standing before the law: Non-Muslims are subject to Islamic law and punishments. However, the testimony of a non-Muslim is given only half the weight of a Muslim, similarly the testimony of a woman is also given only half the weight of a man. These provisions can result in serious miscarriages of justice and human rights abuses. For example, sharia requires four male witness to prove rape, and if a victim is unable to produce these she may be imprisoned for making a ‘false’ allegation.

Family law: Again sharia also grants women significantly lesser rights than men. It states that a daughter inherits only half as much as a son. It is also significantly harder for a woman to divorce her husband than for her husband to divorce her; At divorce the man automatically gains custody of children over seven or in case of younger children as soon as they are seven.

Commercial law: The ultimate jurisdiction in any issue relating to sharia finance is a sharia judge, an office which non-Muslims are barred from holding. Where large sums are involved, as for example in the sukkuk Islamic bonds that Gordon Brown sought to introduce, the country then becomes economically vulnerable to Islamist pressure.

Freedom of speech: This of course includes the freedom to criticise beliefs and values held by others. Under sharia any criticism of Muhammad carries a mandatory death penalty.

Freedom of religion: The death penalty also applies to any Muslim man embracing a non-Islamic religion. Illustrative of this being a major touchstone of radicalisation in Britain is the fact that a 2007 study by Policy Exchange found that 36% of British Muslims aged 16-34 agreed with this tenet of sharia.

The research conducted by Policy Exchange illustrates why recognising the need to combat sharia needs to become the centrepiece of counter-extremism policy. Previous estimates of the number of British Muslims who had been radicalised generally suggested between 13% and 15%. However, Policy Exchange’s research suggests that more than a third of Muslims aged under 35 have now been radicalised.

Tomorrow I will suggest specific steps that the Government can take to counter sharia-based radicalisation.

****************************************************************************************************************

The new Government needs to take urgent steps to counter sharia-based radicalisation

Martin Parsons concludes his three-part series considering how to counter radical Islamism. Part II was yesterday.

In the previous two articles (here and here) I have outlined how attitudes to sharia are the most important touchstone in defining radicalisation. Sharia is the boundary line that defines most clearly the difference between on the one hand, ordinary British Muslims who follow a traditional, devotional form of their faith and who contribute much to our British way of life and on the other hand, extremists who pose a serious threat to our historic British values and the freedoms they give us.

In 2007 research conducted by Policy Exchange revealed that 37% of British Muslims aged 16-24 said they would prefer to live under sharia than under British law, while a similar number of Muslims under 35 said they agreed with the sharia stipulation that anyone who converted from Islam to another faith should be executed.

These findings not only clearly illustrate that attitudes to sharia are a key touchstone in defining radicalisation among British Muslims, they also point to a demographic time bomb in this respect. Previous estimates of the number of British Muslims who had been radicalised generally suggested between 13% and 15%. However, Policy Exchange’s research suggests that more than a third of Muslims aged under 35 have been radicalised. It is therefore essential that the new Government takes action both to undo the appeasement of the sharia agenda that took place under the previous Labour government and to challenge young British Muslims that advocacy of sharia is a line that must not be crossed.

To counter the growing sharia based radicalisation I would recommend that the government considers at least the following steps:

1. Set up a commission to examine what needs to be done to reverse the steps towards accommodation of sharia that the previous government made. These include a whole range of ‘sharia complaint’ financial products, which, as has been outlined elsewhere are not only seen by Islamists as a major way of gaining influence and control over economic affairs, but are also almost impossible to regulate. However, the scope of the commission needs to go well beyond financial affairs to include education, the police and such public bodies as the Food Standards Agency. For example, serious questions need to be asked about the Food Standards Agency's role in promoting halal food (halal literally means 'sharia-compliant'), which is now being served unlabelled in many non-Muslim food outlets, including even the Houses of Parliament.

2. As an immediate step the Government should halt all progress by the Treasury towards the issue of sukkuk (sharia) government bonds and suspend the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 Order 2010 which has effectively allowed commercial sukkuk bonds to start being used in Britain this year.

3. Immediately restrict the use of arbitration tribunals to purely commercial issues to prevent them being used as backdoor sharia courts to enforce sharia judgements on issues such as family law and other non-commercial areas.

4. Replace Labour’s 1998 Human Rights Act with an alternative act based on the British, rather than European system of human rights (i.e. limiting the power of government over individuals, rather than giving specific 'rights' to individuals), so that Islamists cannot use it to push test cases through the courts that seek to increase the islamisation process.

5. A firm but gentle challenge needs to be made to ordinary British Muslims that sharia is the touchstone, the line towards radicalisation that must not be crossed. This is necessary both because the previous Labour government failed to send out a clear signal to Muslims about where they were drawing the line between radicals and ordinary Muslims and because many Muslims have somewhat romantic notions about sharia, but little real knowledge of what it actually involves.

6. Counter-radicalisation programmes should highlight the differences between sharia and key aspects of historic British law and values, such as one law for all regardless of religion or gender etc; freedom to practise and propagate religion, including the freedom to convert to another faith; freedom of speech etc. Unfortunately, the previous government was unable to do this because, as I observed two and half years ago, the Labour government themselves were undermining at least 50% of key historic British values.

7. In determining whether faith-based schools should receive registration from the Department for Education, the known attitudes of key sponsors and board members to sharia should be a key factor. This will enable some of the schools that are likely to promote extremism to be identified. It will also avoid the sort of 'one size catches all' approach to faith-based schools that led the previous Labour government to apply anti-extremism measures to Anglican and Catholic state schools, as if they were creating the same sort of problems that certain Islamic schools were.

8. End all forms of government support and engagement with organisations that either support sharia themselves or have key leaders who advocate its adoption in Britain or abroad. Islamist extremists need to be treated in exactly the same way as other extremists such as white racist groups.

*************************************************************************************************************

Since the Rushdie affair more than 20 years ago, British Islamists have been campaigning to ban all criticism of Islam. This move has not been simply an emotional response to a deeply felt insult to their beliefs, but has been part of a wider agenda to introduce sharia into Britain. Their strategy to do this has been to increasingly align British law with sharia, either by a) pushing test cases through the courts; b) pushing for changes in parliamentary law; and c) lobbying for changes in the practices of public bodies such as the police.

Under sharia insulting the prophet is the most serious offence and carries a compulsory death sentence in countries such as Pakistan. An only slightly less serious offence is insulting or desecrating the Qur’an, which in Pakistan carries a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

Unfortunately Northumbria Police have just fallen hook, line and sinker for the ‘lets align British law with sharia’ strategy by arresting six members of the English Defence League for burning copies of the Qur’an in a pub car park on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The arrests followed the burning of what are believed to have been two Korans in Gateshead on September 11.

A police spokesman is also reported to have specifically stated that the men were not arrested for watching or distributing the YouTube video of their actions, but on suspicion of burning the Qur’an.

Let me say straight away that that this was both a foolish and an unnecessarily provocative act. The proposed Qur’an burning in the USA caused rioting over several days in Afghanistan, which resulted in several people receiving serious injuries. However, we are moving into very dangerous territory if the British police start to think that it is a criminal offence to burn a copy the Qur’an – or the Torah or the New Testament, however offensive those acts may be to the rest of us.

The actions of Northumbria Police have in fact played straight into the hands of the Islamists, who want to see any insult to the Qur’an made illegal in Britain precisely because it is one of the most serious offences in sharia.

Perversely, the overreaction of the police has also given a significant propaganda coup to racist groups. The police mustrealise that not only should they not be ‘making up the law’ themselves on issues such as this, but that both Islamist and racist groups need the oxygen of publicity to survive – and that, unfortunately, is exactly what the police have just given to both groups.

However, what these misguided actions by the police do clearly demonstrate is that there is an urgent need for a root and branch review of how the police deal with incidents related to Islamism and protests – including those by racist groups – against it. Community relations will not be improved by the sort of naivety Northumbria Police have displayed in dealing with this incident, or the ensuing publicity they have given to racist groups.

*****************************************************************************************************************

Wisdom on Foreign Affairs

Douglas Hurd Choose Your Weapons: The British Foreign Secretary 200 Years of Argument, Success and Failure (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010) 414pp.

For anyone who wants a summary of what works and doesn’t work in foreign affairs,

former Conservative Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd’s new book is a pretty good place to start. Lord Hurd begins by contrasting nineteenth century rivals Castlereagh and Canning whose disagreements became so intense that they fought a duel. Canning’s foreign policy was idealistic, unilateral, liberal and interventionist, while Castlereagh’s was based on diplomacy and the building of alliances and embryonic institutions. This contrast is played out in each of the 12 Foreign Secretaries and associated prime ministers he selects.

However, the genius of this book is that it is not merely an academic history book, but includes Lord Hurd’s reflections on these events based on his own experience as both a diplomat and later as Foreign Secretary. These pearls of wisdom include his observation that foreign policy is often based on a series of inherited myths, such as the ‘importance’ of Suez when Britain no longer had an Indian empire it needed a short sea route to; he also observes that there is often a potentially difficult relationship between Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, as the Prime Minister naturally wants to take the lead in meetings with foreign leaders. On this, Lord Hurd wisely comments that ‘The Prime Minister is first among equals but should treat his Foreign Secretary as a colleague’ listening to his advice rather than relying too much on his own judgement. He observes that ‘A Prime Minister, as Eden found in 1956 and Blair over Iraq in 2003, can always find advisers to praise his wisdom’. However, the British constitutional machine, properly used provides an antidote in the form of solid mechanisms of fact-finding, analysis and recommendations. Nonetheless, he also avers that sometimes nations will construct their foreign relations not simply on the basis of logic and reason, but also on the basis of feelings and sentiment;

Some of Lord Hurd’s most interesting comments relate to dealing with states that don’t play by the same rules that we do. Whilst he observes that there is a link between oppression inside a country and the likely course of its foreign policy, he also acknowledges that it is sometimes the duty of a Foreign Secretary to deal courteously with villains and that some acts of wickedness will go unchecked and some wicked men go unpunished. This is so, he contends, because ‘sometimes attempting what is right would cause more suffering than already exists. In that case, doing what is right would in fact be wrong.’

There are academics who write books and there are people who write from experience, however, this highly readable book does both. Lord Hurd has done us a great service with this book.

****************************************************************************************************************

Did we alienate Christian voters in the election?

In 1997 the Conservative Party lost its majority in a landslide to Labour, a situation which, despite the colossal unpopularity of the last Labour government, we have not yet managed to reverse.

‘Millions of people who share our values and our principles felt they could not support the Conservative Party with their votes. We need to reconnect with those people, to persuade them that we share their hopes and their concerns for the future of our country.’

Among those ‘millions’ who felt disillusioned with us in 1997 were many active Christians, people who were socially conservative. They not only intuitively believed in that thing called ‘society’, but were some of the most active participants in it, not just in nice middle class areas, but in the difficult inner city areas, where they continue to make a major contribution to repairing Britain’s broken society.

During the last decade of the Thatcher/Major governments many Christians felt (wrongly) that Conservatives were uncaring, some even began publicly to question whether it was possible to be a Christian and a Conservative. Tony Blair openly played on this during the 1997 election campaign attempting to identify Labour with moral and Christian values and quite wrongly implied that Labour was the only party that Christians could vote for.

The end result was that millions of people including what was almost certainly at least hundreds of thousands of committed Christians who had previously voted Conservative switched to voting Labour.

Why many Christians started to look to the Conservative Party again - but many didn't vote for us in the end

It was a long uphill struggle after that, but huge amounts of work were put in by countless people to winning back understanding of what the Conservative Party stood for amongst Christians. The listening to Britain’s churches programme was begun, the Conservative Christian Fellowship (CCF) begun in 1990 by Tim Montogomerie and David Burrowes MP undertook an immense amount of work. The Centre for Social Justice was set up by Iain Duncan Smith. CCF in particular, though by no means alone, has made immense strides in gaining understanding and even support for the Conservative Party among black Christians, people who have more typically traditionally voted Labour, but had become increasingly concerned by Labour’s legislative agenda that was seen as an attack on basic Christian freedoms in Britain. There is a widespread perception among practising Christians that there is increasing intolerance against them and a very real, and not wholly unfounded fear that Christians are being increasingly excluded from public life.

Some may feel that is perhaps overstating the case, I would simply ask any Conservative parliamentary candidate what questions they were asked in election hustings. I can virtually guarantee that almost all of them faced at least one if not several questions on this subject during their election campaign. As to whether the perception Christians have is well grounded I would simply ask you to reflect carefully and sensitively on the examples below, which represent just a small sample of the sort of discrimination and exclusion from public life that Christians have faced as a result of legislation passed by the Labour government.

I will start with an example of someone personally known to me. This is one that has not been publicised by the media, and for that reason is all the more significant, as representative of a much larger body of people who don’t make a loud noise, hold marches and shout ‘discrimination’, but simply quietly withdraw from public life leaving society in general and their local community in particular so much the poorer. I knew Greg from the time I was a teenager, he was the sort of person who would do anything for anyone. A family man with two children, he lived on a large council estate and was a district nurse. When he became a magistrate, people said ‘that’s exactly the sort of person we need as a magistrate – someone who really understands ordinary people’s lives’. A couple of years ago I heard that Greg had quietly stepped down . The reason was that his lifestyle values were incompatible with him being on the adoption panel. It’s the sort of example you expect to hear from Stonewall about discrimination against gay people, but Greg wasn’t gay, he was a committed Christian and under legislation brought in by Labour he was required to act against his conscience by placing children for adoption with gay couples. He didn’t make a loud complaint about it, he didn’t mount a legal challenge against the decision (although one Christian magistrate did and was told that the new legislation required him to act against his conscience, Greg simply stepped down quietly – as did almost certainly many hundreds like him.

The magistrates bench hasn’t been the only area of public life that Christians have been increasingly excluded from as a result of the last Labour government’s ‘equality’ legislation. Lillian Ladelle was a registrar, who as a result of the particular way the Labour government not only framed equality laws but required civil servants to carry them out – lost her job. As a committed Christian she could not in all conscience carry out a civil partnership ceremony, which participants regarded as gay marriage. She tried to swap shifts to avoid carrying out civil partnership ceremonies but was ordered to do them. She was forced out of the one job that she was trained for, a job that before Labour brought in this legislation she had not the slightest moral qualms at all about carrying out. She lost her case for unfair dismissal on the grounds that the new legislation required her to carry out civil partnership ceremonies. She was by no means the only Christian working as a registrar to be put in this position. The real tragedy of the story is that when the Labour government passed this legislation it was told that it would directly lead to people like Lillian being either forced to either act against their moral conscience or lose their jobs. The Labour government refused to make any special provisions and insisted that Christian civil servants like Lillian would either have to act against their conscience or lose their jobs.

It is not simply Christian magistrates and registrars, there have been cases involving other public sector employees including a Christian couple providing foster care to primary school age children who are no longer deemed ‘suitable’ as a direct result of the last Labour government’s euphemistically termed ‘equality’ legislation.

Yet it was not simply in the public sector that Christians began to excluded from public life. One of the most disturbing trends under New Labour that led to increasing pressure on Christians and churches was a change in the Social Liberalism that Tony Blair espoused from being a sort of benign enthusiasm to a harsher, much more dictatorial and intolerant approach. This sought to enforce socially liberal attitudes not only on those directly employed in the public sector, but increasingly on anyone even vaguely connected with it and ultimately even down to the level of the individual, despite the very evident erosion of historic British values such as freedom of religion and freedom of speech that this necessarily entailed.

Legislation enacted by the last Labour government required independent Roman Catholic adoption agencies to act against their beliefs by placing children for adoption with gay couples. It was not that gay couples could not adopt children from other adoption agencies, they could, as such many commentators observed that there was no need for this legislation. Indeed, the social cost was very high as RC adoption agencies successfully placed some of the most hard to adopt children and the legislation directly led to the closure of a number of these adoption agencies. The legislation was simply an attempt to force any organisation, however remotely connected with the public sector, to adopt practices based on an agenda of social liberalism.

Now just for a minute imagine yourself to be a committed Christian. You have just seen the Labour government pass a law that required Catholic adoption agencies to act in a way that is completely contrary to the teaching of the Bible and the historic teaching of the Christian faith for the last 2,000 years. If this has now happened to a Christian organisation, what will happen next…will this sort of legislation be enforced not only on Christian organisations but also the church itself…?

In fact, the Labour government got very close to actually doing just that but were rebuffed as a result of amendments put down in the Lords by Conservative peers:

Firstly, Labour’s recent Equality bill contained a clause that had it not been amended by 3 Conservative peers, acting with the support of the Conservative whips would have removed the right of churches to appoint people who adhere to the teachings of the Christian faith. The proposed ‘anti discrimination’ legislation was the equivalent for the church and Christian organisations of legally requiring the Conservative Party not to discriminate against someone with socialist views when selecting parliamentary candidates, only it was not pragmatic political beliefs that were at stake, but deeply held religious beliefs about morality. It amounted to a degree of government interference in the church that would seriously have compromised freedom of religion in Britain. Significantly Conservative peers voted unanimously for the amendment, but almost all Labour and Lib-Dem peers voted against it.

Secondly, Labour’s 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act was so framed that it could have led to the prosecution of any Christian preachers who made a statement that a gay person might be offended at, It was only an amendment successfully proposed by former Conservative Home Secretary Lord Waddington that prevented this. The amendment was important as a number of Christians, including OAPs, Christian ministers and a bishop have been subjected to ‘intimidating’ police questioning and even arrest as a result of complaints made by gay rights activists who disagreed with their beliefs, despite it being evident from the outset that no actual ‘crime’ had been committed. However, even before the amended bill had received the royal assent, the Labour government tried to repeal the Waddington ‘free speech amendment’ by using the 2009 Coroners and Criminal Justice bill, which ironically it sought to push through the Commons only hours after Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith had gone on the Today programme to defend freedom of speech for Islamic extremists…This was despite the Waddington amendment having been described by former chief constable and chief inspector of constabulary Lord Dear as “essential” if police officers were to enforce the Government’s ‘homophobic hatred’ law with “good judgment and a light touch”.

Astonishingly for Christians, far from recognising the deep inroads that it was making to historic British values of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, the Labour bandwagon simply steamrollered ahead with a manifesto promise to reintroduce its attempt to repeal the Waddington amendment, an action which would have effectively criminalised any ethical criticism of gay sex acts. Labour somehow lost the plot that in a free society we defend people – not ideas. That means we should defend gay people from mistreatment, rather than using the criminal law to defend the belief of social liberalism that gay sex acts are morally ‘good’. If you do the latter you actually victimise another group of people – those who disagree with that belief.

This distinction between protecting people – which is the proper function of the criminal law – and protecting particular beliefs (in this case that gay sex acts are morally ‘good’) is absolutely central to what it means to be a free society. However, this is a distinction that Labour deliberately ignored. It is also a distinction that is absolutely central to the perception among a very large number of practising Christians that they are increasingly being subject to intolerance, discrimination, marginalisation and exclusion from public life. What Christians feel so concerned about is not at all the right of gay people to practise their own sexual ethics, it is a concerted attempt to ban Christians from stating and acting on the basis of their beliefs on sexual ethics and to exclude them from public life if they do so.

In this context it needs to be clearly stated that ‘disagreement’ and ‘intolerance’ are not the same thing. In fact the very concept of ‘tolerance’ implies disagreement – you only ‘tolerate’ someone when you disagree with them. Disagreement about an ethical issue – whether it is the morality of abortion, gay sex acts or anything else does not make either group ‘intolerant’. In fact, it is this ‘tolerance of disagreement’ that is fundamental to the functioning of a free democratic society, where we decide contentious issues by open debate. ‘Intolerance’ however, is when one party seeks to prevent people they disagree with from expressing or acting upon their opinions and beliefs or excludes them from public life if they hold such beliefs.

The growing exclusion of conservative Christians (principally, though not exclusively around 4 million or so Evangelicals and Catholics) from certain areas of the public services and public life is a very regressive step in terms of Britain’s proud history of tolerance and freedom of religion. It is sobering to compare the impact of the last Labour government’s ‘equality’ laws with the 1673 Tests Act, which excluded anyone who did not hold to a particular belief system (Anglicanism) from holding public office, such as being a magistrate. It was the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and the passing of the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act by Wellington’s Tory government that really created genuine religious freedom in Britain. Whilst the belief system one is now required to assent to is a secular liberal pluralist worldview, the comparison, even to some degree, with the situation faced by Non Conformists and Catholics before the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts is one that is, and should be, profoundly uncomfortable for any democratic politician.

A month before the general election the BBC broadcast a documentary entitled ‘Are Christians being persecuted in Britain?’. The issue it addressed was actually discrimination against Christians rather than persecution. But the fact that even the liberal minded BBC addressed this shows how important an issue it was in the months leading up to the general election.

As someone who has been privileged to work with the persecuted church overseas, I do not believe that ‘persecution’ is the correct word to describe such changes in the law. However, in many contexts overseas Christian minorities are not so much persecuted as subject to various degrees of discrimination. What is most disconcerting about the manner in which that last Labour government brought in new laws to our own country is that it clearly has created a degree of discrimination against Christians in certain parts of the public sector. It was also significantly responsible for a much more disturbing rise in intolerance towards Christians and historic Christian beliefs on issues such as sexual ethics, so that as Melancthon recently observed on Centre Right anyone who voices an orthodox Christian view of sexual ethics is likely to be treated as a social pariah and labelled quite wrongly ‘homophobic’.

Some academics have used the term 'Christianophobia' or 'Christophobia' to label this growing intolerance of Christian beliefs and incidents of discrimination against Christians. Personally, I dislike the term as it sounds far too politically correct, and in reality Christians are more victims of political correctness than one of its beneficiary groups. However, whether or not one gives it a name, it is undeniable that there has been not simply disagreement with, but a growing intolerance of Christian beliefs in Britain since Labour came to power in 1997.

Remember William Hague’s observation in 1998 that: ‘Millions of people who share our values and our principles felt they could not support the Conservative Party with their votes.’ – people who the Conservative Party needed to reconnect with and ‘persuade them that we share their hopes and their concerns for the future of our country’?

By early 2010 for a great many committed Christians, far from Labour being the only party that Christians could vote for as Tony Blair had tried to persuade people in 1997, Labour had by now become the anti Christian party. This was something that potentially could have had at least as big an impact on the 2010 election result as the move of disillusioned Christians towards Tony Blair’s New Labour had in creating the Labour landslide of 1997. Let me illustrate:

A couple of years ago a man who was head of RE in a Catholic school said to me ‘like most Catholics I’ve always voted Labour, but with what the government is doing I’m having to reconsider’. He was one of many that were for the first time considering voting for us, whose votes the Conservative Party should have won – but we didn’t. There are approximately 2.1 million practising Catholics like this man who attend church at least monthly and many more regularly. It was not just Catholic voters, although as a group that had largely tended to vote Labour in the past they could potentially have made a very significant difference in some of the marginal constituencies we needed to win to gain an overall majority.

It was also Evangelicals, of whom there are estimated to be 2 million regular churchgoers. Even just taking the actual membership figure for the Evangelical Alliance – of one million, that equates to more than 1500 people in each constituency. Unlike Catholics, Evangelicals have in the past largely divided their votes on a similar pattern to the rest of the country. However, something was changing in the two years or so leading up to the May 2010 general election that was causing a large number of practising Christians, both Catholic and Evangelical to seriously consider voting Conservative. It was a widespread perception that Christians were being systematically discriminated against by legislation that the Labour government was pushing through.

Three years ago I attended a meeting convened by the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics in Cambridge. Among those present were around 50 leaders of highly respectable and well known Christian organisations in the UK. The feeling was expressed that Britain was ‘no longer a free country’. It was not simply the Sexual Orientation Regulations that had just been passed. It was the fact that an increasing number of people who had made measured criticism of the gay rights agenda had been subjected to lengthy police investigations as a result of a complaint of ‘homophobia’ even though it was perfectly clear from the outset that no crime whatsoever had been committed. For example, in 2005 family values campaigner Lynette Burrowes who had voiced concerns on a radio talk show over whether two gay men adopting a girl would be in the best interests of the child, was subjected to several hours of ‘intimidating’ police questioning. The previous year Cambridge University Christian Union had been reported to the police after hosting an apologetic meeting where the Dean of Sydney Cathedral put forward a traditional Biblical view on homosexuality’. A number of other prominent Christians were subject to such police investigations. Essentially, the problem was that the Labour government’s police guidelines required the police to investigate not simply ‘crimes’ but any alleged ‘homophobic incident’. However well intentioned this may have been, it had the effect of empowering a small number of activists who did not believe in free speech to bully and intimidate into silence anyone who made statements they disagreed with. It was on this basis that an attempt was made by gay rights activists to have the Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow prosecuted for a sermon that he gave in church on the importance of marriage because it was critical of the Civil Partnerships Act.

It was these sort of incidents that led Christians, who were by now abandoning any support for Labour in droves, to ask the question ‘Will the Conservatives gives us equal rights with gay people?’

Although at the last census 71% of people identified themselves as Christians, and 7.6 million people attend church at least monthly – that’s 15% of the UK population, not all will have their voting pattern directly affected by religious issues. However, the issues I have outlined above were a particularly pressing issue for practising Catholics and Evangelicals – which at a very conservative estimate would be about a million evangelicals (which is the actual membership of the Evangelical Alliance – although they claim to represent a constituency of around two million) and around 2.1 million practising Catholics i.e. three million plus people. That is the equivalent at a conservative estimate of more than 4,500 voters per constituency, even two million concerned Christian voters is the equivalent of more than 3,000 voters per constituency. Now consider the fact that we lost 47 seats by less than 3,000 votes. Even, if we had only managed to secure the votes of only 2,000 of those 4,500 voters (less than 45%) we would still have managed to secure an overall Conservative majority with 327 seats.

One group that was particularly acutely concerned about the loss of Christian freedoms under Labour were black Christians and with 48% of black people regularly attending church, this was clearly going to be an important issue if the Conservative Party was to achieve one of its key electoral aims of winning over large numbers of black voters, an aim that it largely failed to achieve.

Firstly, although it was Conservative amendments in the Lords that had protected aspects of religious freedom, during the actual election campaign there was absolutely no encouragement to Christians that on the issues that concerned them – a future Conservative government would treat them fairly, or at the very least with a greater degree of fairness than Labour. What was perhaps surprising about this was that what Christians were asking for – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom for arbitrary arrest etc are actually fundamental Conservative principles.

Secondly, nationally the Conservative Party took Christians for granted. Our electoral strategy was to some extent at least focused on winning over socially liberal voters on the assumption that socially conservative voters would vote for us anyway. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey approximately 36% of voters hold socially conservative views with around a third of voters socially liberal and another third undecided.

The weakness of the strategy was that it ignored the fact that many people with socially conservative do not automatically vote Conservative. In fact taking 2001 and 2005 election results where the Conservatives gained 31% and 32% of the vote, it is clear that there were in excess of 4-5% of voters who had not voted for us in the previous two elections yet held socially conservative views.

In fact, the figure of 4-5% of socially conservative voters not yet voting for Conservative is almost certainly too low, as it assumes that no one with socially liberal views voted Conservative in 2001 or 2005 which clearly was not the case. If we assume that the minority of Conservative voters who are socially liberal is at least 10% – then only 28 or so of that 31% (2001) or 32%(2005) who voted for us were social conservatives. That means that in the 2001 and 2005 elections there must have been at least 8% of voters who were socially conservative but not actually voting Conservative. (It also follows that if more than 10% of Conservative voters in 2001/2005 were socially liberal then there must be proportionally more than 8% of people holding socially conservative views whose votes the Conservative Party still needed to win). Those 8%+ of votes were extremely important to us, to the extent that if the Conservatives had won only half of those votes, then we would have secured 40% of the national vote, which is the figure widely assumed we needed to gain an overall majority. Those as we saw earlier included many practising Christians.

So, the question must be asked as to whether we were so intent on winning the socially liberal vote, that we took for granted the socially conservative voters whose support we needed to win an overall majority? Did we assume that socially conservative voters would automatically vote for us, when in reality there were a significant number of such voters that the Conservative Party actively needed to win over?

Thirdly, at a national level the Conservative Party came across as so keen to win the gay rights vote that we appeared to be endorsing some of the very things that Labour had done that had led many Christians to feel that they were not being given equal rights with gay people. Whilst there was a very strong movement away from voting Labour among many Christians the way a number of issues were handled meant that the Conservatives failed to seal the deal with many Christian voters and many of those voters dissipated to a wide range of parties or none rather than going to the Conservatives. In fact, on the doorstep during the election I several times came across practising Christians deeply concerned about this issue who were actually going to vote Lib-Dem rather than Conservative. They were without exception totally unaware that Labour’s so called ‘equality’ laws they were most concerned about were originally Lib-Dem policies that had been adopted by the Labour government and wholeheartedly supported by the Lib Dems on whipped votes.

a) The Party’s reaction to Chris Grayling’s comments that he personally felt whilst hotels should be required to offer rooms to anyone regardless, Christians offering bed and breakfast in their own homes should be allowed to specify house rules about who shares a double room. When these secretly recorded comments were broadcast there was a huge sense of relief among many Christians that at last someone was taking their concerns seriously and suggesting a compromise that at least tried to be fair to both Christians and gay people. However, when Chris Grayling was forced to retract these comments a huge sense of disillusionment set it. It led to a perception among some Christians that ‘the Conservatives are just like the Labour Party then’.

b) The deselection of a Conservative candidate by the Scottish Conservative Party during the actual election because of comments on his website that whilst he would treat gay people completely equally, he couldn’t personally endorse homosexual practices. Whilst it may not have been exactly politically astute to put his views on a website during the election campaign, the action of the Scottish Conservative Party in deselecting him because of it, was widely condemned as overly harsh, including by many on Conservative Home. Amongst Christians it created the impression that the Conservatives were just as intolerant of Christians as the Labour Party. Actually, this wasn’t the case as the Labour manifesto threatened to remove the ‘free speech clause’ introduced by Conservative peers, so that any criticism of homosexual acts would in effect become a criminal act. Nonetheless, the Scottish Party’s action created the impression that the Conservative Party was intolerant of Christians, to the extent that anyone holding orthodox Christian views on sexual ethics would be barred from becoming a Conservative parliamentary candidate. This was an extremely dangerous position for the Conservative Party to allow itself to be in during a general election campaign.

c) During the general election period a Christian street preacher was arbitrarily arrested. The preacher was asked by a PCSO about his views on homosexuality. The PCSO then told him that he was the force’s gay and lesbian liaison officer and found his views ‘offensive’ before arranging for uniformed officers to arrest him – even though it was perfectly clear that no actual crime had been committed. The YouTube video of his arrest is a profoundly disturbing commentary on politically correct policing under New Labour. At the time one Christian leader e-mailed me to say ‘I said a few months ago that it would only be a matter of time before Christians in Britain were arrested for simply reading from the Bible – now it’s happened’ Many, including even veteran gay rights activist Peter Tatchell spoke out against it. It was the sort of politically correct abuse of police powers that the British public normally looked to the Conservative Party to speak out on. However, Christians across Britain watched in disbelief as not one single political leader spoke out about the police action.

Frankly, we should never have allowed ourselves to get pushed into such a corner. The Conservative Party needs to be seen as tolerant and open at all levels including being parliamentary candidates to anyone in Britain, whether straight or gay, Christian, Muslim, Jew, atheist etc. who holds to basic Conservative principles.

a) Emphasise that we were the party of equality that would treat all people equally, whether gay or straight, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Humanist etc.

b) Set and publicise clear boundaries in how far we would go along with the agenda of gay rights organisations, boundaries that voters could clearly see did not compromise values such as freedom of speech. If you read David Cameron’s election interview with Gay News he actually did this – refusing to follow Labour’s lead in agreeing to ban all criticism of homosexual acts. However, as a party we failed to clearly set out that boundary line for the wider public to see. As a result we allowed the impression to be created that the Conservatives would show the same degree of intolerance towards Christians as Labour had done.

c) At least steer a middle course. Why did we not as an act of reassurance to Christians put up a gay shadow minister to say that whilst as a gay person they naturally disagreed with Christian views on homosexuality, it was fundamentally wrong in a free society to ban people from expressing such opinions?

Clearly there is a lot of fence mending that needs to be done before the next election. The Conservative Party needs to make very clear that it is in no sense intolerant of Christians or anyone else for that matter who holds to basic Conservative values. In particular, it needs to:

a) Adopt a policy that all who accept basic Conservative principles are welcome in the Conservative party at all levels regardless of religious belief or non belief specifically including Christians, Muslims, gay and straight etc.

b) Positively adopt a policy that the Conservative Party will not discriminate against anyone becoming a parliamentary candidate on the grounds of their religious beliefs provided that they accept basic Conservative principles – such as freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, economic liberalism etc.

c) Avoid Lib-Dem coalition partners dragging it into any further erosion of religious liberty in the UK.

d) The coalition government urgently needs to look at ways of addressing the exclusion of Christians from public life, such as registrars and magistrates on adoption panels, that began under the last Labour government. Interestingly, Labour leadership hopeful Andy Burnham has recently felt the need to apologise to Christians for the way they were marginalised under the last Labour government.

Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles has recently made a good start – and created a positive impression - by meeting Christian leaders and telling them that:

“The days of the state trying to suppress Christianity and other faiths are over.”

However, we clearly need to follow up words with actions if we are to reverse some of the damage that has been done. In May 2010 we failed to persuade more than 36% of the electorate to vote for us. As William Hague said in 1998:

Conservative Home Platform - published as a series of 5 articles 9th-13th August 2010

****************************************************************************************************************

Philip Hollobone and Roger Helmer are right about the burqa, but so is Damian Green and – this may surprise some who have read my previous articles on the Islamist threat – so is Caroline Spellman…!

‘Why don’t your women wear the burqa?’ asked the young talib on the bus between the Pakistan border and Jalalabad where the Taliban had just taken over in 1995.

Clearly this wasn’t an answer that fitted the Taliban rote learning of how to convert a non Muslim as the young Talib fell quiet and the rest of the bus full of Afghans quietly chuckled at someone finally getting one over on the Taliban!

In rural Afghan society the wife is regarded as the ‘property’ of her husband. She is also the public expression of her husband’s honour. So any hint of another man viewing a Pushtun man’s 'private property' would dishonour the man and could lead to divorce. While working as an aid worker in Afghanistan some years ago I learned of an incident in which another aid agency had most unwisely insisted on vaccinating everyone entering a Pushtun village. As they vaccinated an elderly burqa clad woman her husband turned to her and said ‘how can I look other village men in the eye now that other men have seen your upper arm, I divorce you I divorce you, I divorce you’ and he went one way and she went the other way. Shocking? The issue there was that the burqa was the outward form of oppressive values – that the women was her husband’s private property. In that situation the burqa was oppressive for women.

However, in other situations it is worn to protect women from the attentions of sexually predatory men. Let me explain. Even in moderate Islamic countries such as Pakistan women are expected to cover their heads with a chaddar or at the very least wear a duppatta (thin scarf) when out on the streets, because it is an outward symbol that she is a morally upright woman. In fact, a former lady colleague who had worked in Pakistan for over 30 years once told me that she had witnessed Pakistani prostitutes soliciting by removing their head coverings.

All the aid agencies that I worked for in both Pakistan and Afghanistan very wisely insisted that western women wore a head covering such as a chaddar (long shawl – not to be confused with the chaddari – which is a burqa covering the face). Many local men already had the impression that most western women were immoral, an impression largely gained by watching western films. So any western woman who did not cover her head in public would almost inevitably face repeated incidents of unwanted sexual attention such as local men attempting to place their hands on intimate parts of her body. In 2/3 cases of sexual assaults on western women in the aid agencies I worked for, there was an underlying issue of a western woman doing something such as letting her chaddar fall off her head – that would have no significance in Britain, but in that particular Islamic context sent out an unintended signal that she was sexually ‘available’. Local women of course knew exactly what such actions signaled, which is why they always covered their heads and some chose to wear a full face covering burqa when they were out on the streets. In that sense it was – to their minds – empowering them, it enabled them to walk on the street away from home without receiving inappropriate sexual attention from men. So don’t mock Caroline Spelman when she says that for some women she met in Afghanistan the burqa was ‘empowering’ – speaking to a woman they probably felt free to tell her more about their feelings than they would any man.

However, for other Afghans – such as the elderly village lady I described above, it is anything but empowering – it is clearly used by men as a means of domination and control of the women in their household.

One of the things one has to learn when operating cross culturally is the difference between ‘form’ – the outward appearance of things and ‘meaning’. The two example I have given above have exactly the same outward form – but very different, almost opposite meanings.

So how does this play out on the streets of Britain? Well it means that there is a deeply rooted emotional attachment among many British Muslims to the idea that a woman’s head covering is a symbol of moral uprightness. There is therefore a danger that any attempt to ban the burqa could be seen by many Muslim families who would never themselves condone the burqa, as being an attack on that whole outward expression of women’s morality that is central to family honour. We already have a serious problem with the radicalisation of a significant minority of Muslim young people being radicalised. However, if something was perceived to be an attack on Muslim morality and family honour, then there is at least a risk that it could lead to the radicalisation of a wider spectrum of the Muslim community.

That doesn’t mean I support women wearing the burqa in Britain. I happen to agree with Damian Green that it simply isn’t British to require the police to check up on what women are wearing! nor is it compatible with British values of what it means to live in a free society. As Ben Rogershas eloquently argued, one doesn’t combat Islamism by compromising our own values. Whilst it is true that Syria has recently banned the burqa in their attempt to combat militant Islamism, there is a major difference – Britain is a free democratic country. It is also questionable how effective such legislation is, as banning the burqa has sometimes fueled Islamic fundamentalism. For example, King Amanullah of Afghanistan (1919-1929) tried it nearly 100 years ago and was eventually forced to abdicate when his army deserted rather than put down the rebellion that ensued. So, there is a very real risk that actually banning e burqa could actually inflame radicalisation – the very thing we are trying to stop.

However, Philip Hollobone an Roger Helmer are bsolutely correct that there is a problem with the burqa in Britain – and in many Islamic countries. The problem is that Islamic dress for women and to a lesser though still significant extent for men, has become symbolic of Islamisation. A good illustration of this is the following pictures of the English faculty at Cairo University sent to me some time ago by Peter Goodwin, Deputy Chairman of South Leicestershire Conservative Association. The pressure to conform to an increasingly Islamic dress code for women is very evident in the more recent photographs.

In Britain, an earlier generation of British Muslims mainly from the sub continent typically wore shalwar kameze with women additionally wearing either a chaddar (shawl) or duppatta (thin scarf worn over the head or around the neck). However, now those who have been radicalised are likely to move on from these to what they consider to be ‘more Islamic’ dress, which in practice normally means Arabic dress such as the hijab (full head and neck covering with only front of face exposed), niqab (full face veil with just the eyes exposed) or burqa (strictly speaking an Afghan dress with the whole face covered with either thin material or a small grill to see through).

Once these start appearing in a Muslim community then there can be enormous social pressure exerted by Islamists on other Muslims to follow suit and in the Islamist’s words... ‘act like proper Muslims’. That is why it is extremely dangerous for schools and other public institutions to allow these more radical Islamic symbols. A few years ago I visited a school in a Muslim majority area of Leicester – every single girl wore a hijab – yet outside the school large numbers of Muslim women simply wore traditional shalwar kameze and either a chaddar or duppatta. It appeared that the school giving ‘permission’ to a few girls to wear the hijabhad led to social pressure on other parents to ensure their girls were dressed in what the Islamists would call ‘the proper Islamic manner.’ Similarly, when a teaching assistant in Dewsbury claimed the right to wear the full face covering niqab in class the then local Labour MP Shahid Malik, himself a Muslim commented that many of his constituents would definitely not send their children to a school that allowed its classroom assistants to be veiled. In doing so, he was speaking up for a large number of ordinary Muslim families who have been disempowered by repeated concessions made to more radical elements over such issues as Islamic dress in schools.

So, where Philip Hollobone and Roger Helmer are right is that we need to tackle the spread of the burqa. That means we need to say very clearly that it is outside the boundaries of acceptable dress code for people in the public services. We need to ensure that schools are given clear legal powers to set the parameters of what is acceptable uniform so that our schools do not inadvertently subject Muslims pupils to social pressure and intimidation to wear Islamist clothing. In these sorts of ways we can try to defuse the spread of radical Islam, whereas an outright ban on the burqa may actually spread sympathy for radicalisation.

It may well be that at some point in the future the security services may ask for the power to ban in a specific geographical area or type of location any full face covering that hides a person’s identity, including for example hoodie/scarf combinations, full balaclavas etc as well as the burqa. That would be a very different issue from a blanket ban on the burqa, but would still need to be handled with immense sensitivity.

However, right now I really don’t see banning the burqas the most important part of the fight against Islamism in the UK and as such isn’t worth risking the possibility of provoking a strong emotional backlash among ordinary Muslims. What is important though is that we review many of the concessions on ‘Islamic dress’ that the last Labour government allowed across the public sector such as allowing the hijab as optional uniform in the Metropolitan Police and make sure that we are not empowering radicals who want to islamicise British society, but instead are looking out for the interests of ordinary British Muslims who want to integrate with British society, but may still be very reasonably concerned to protect cultural symbols of female modesty such as wearing the chaddar (shawl) and duppatta and shalwar trousers none of which are in any sense incompatible with British values in the way that the burqa is.

******************************************************************************************************************

Sea defence budget cut: time to set out a medium term aspiration

Secretary for State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Caroline Spelman has just announced that this year spending to protect coastal areas against erosion and flooding will be £664 million. This represents a cut of approximately 17%, which is somewhat less than the average 25% cuts most departments are facing.

Nontheless, Caroline Spelman has a thankless task in having to administer spending cuts. However, as I have argued before, now would be a very good time to deregulate some aspects of sea defence, in particular creating a presumption in favour of local landowners and communities being allowed to defend their local coastline themselves.

Sea defence has always been seriously underfunded with the previous budget, which represented less than 0.1% of public spending, quite literally only being adequate to fund a few miles of new sea wall. In the medium term there is an extremely important need for much greater spending on sea defence due to a combination of a) many of the sea defences built by the Eden and Macmillan governments following the 1953 floods either reaching the end of their useful life or being in need of urgent repair; and b) sea level rise which has been averaging around 1.5mm a year since we began recording it around 150 years ago.

It should also be noted that in the South and East Anglia rises in relative sea level are actually much higher around 3-4mm or more a year due to the additional effects of isostatic readjustment (in non technical terms – during the last ice the North of England was pressed down by the weight of massive ice sheets, but now as land in the North of England slowly springs back, the South of England is experiencing a corresponding downwards tilt resulting in a much greater relative sea level rise there).

The implications of these sea level rises are firstly, coastal erosion will increase as more areas become exposed to wave attack; and secondly, some major flood defences will need significant upgrading, particularly as tidal surges are likely to increase in frequency and intensity. It should be remembered that the 1953 North Sea tidal surge killed 307 people and inundated large parts of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk up to 30 miles inland, causing massive damage to property, infrastructure and the economy. The flood defences that will need upgrading include both sea walls in coastal towns and very substantial flood defence structures such as those that protect the fens from flooding.

Whilst painful cuts in the short term are clearly necessary if the economy is not to be crippled with debt, it is really important that we plan now for the medium and long term. We cannot simply put off the issue of sea defence in the way that the previous Labour government did, any more than we can put off building new power stations if we are to keep the lights on. There are likely to be major economic consequences to not significantly increasing spending on sea defence, as was illustrated by a recent Lloyds report calling for a substantial increase in UK spending on flood defence by 2035 to avoid 'disaster'.

I am therefore suggesting that we set an aspirational target of the percentage of public spending on sea defence that is needed in the medium term. To set that figure we need to undertake a sea defence review, similar to the military defence review, which would set out what we actually need to do in terms of reasonable protection against coastal flooding and erosion and how much it will cost.

Unfortunately, the previous Labour government did not do this. They appear to have set the budget, then looked at what needed doing. There was no overall strategy, just an ad hoc approach to repairing some sea defences and abandoning others on grounds of cost. What is now needed is a sea defence review conducted every 5-10 years or so (the Netherlands review every five years), that sets out what we reasonably need to do to protect coastal communities and inland areas threatened by coastal flooding. Some of that data is already there. For example two years ago the Environment Agency concluded that £150 million was needed to defend a few miles of the North Suffolk/East Norfolk coast against flooding. However, it didn’t happen because there was no overall strategy, simply an ad hoc approach to spending a budget.

My best guess is that the aspirational target we need to set is going to be at least 0.5% of public spending – and may well be more. This is similar to the 0.7% target that we are committed to spending on overseas aid in the medium term. However, if we do not plan now to spend significantly more on sea defence in the near future, by which I mean by the end of this parliament, then we will be heaping up major problems for the longer term and leaving ourselves politically vulnerable in the event of a major coastal flooding event such as the 1953 North Sea tidal surge, which we came extraordinarily close to having a repeat of in November 2007.

******************************************************************************************************************

British forces are primarily in Afghanistan to prevent Afghanistan becoming a safe haven and training area from which attacks on the West can be launched by Islamist terrorists, including, but by no means restricted to, al Qaeda.

In broad terms, in order to achieve that aim, they must train and hand over control of the country to Afghan security forces. For Afghan security forces to be able to do that requires a stable independent Afghan government. 'Independent' meaning not seen to be merely a puppet government placed and held in power by western governments. For that to happen any Afghan government has to be able to raise sufficient tax revenue to fund is own administration, including at least the pay packets of its own military.

At the moment economically Afghanistan is a very long way from being in that position. Senior civil servants and judges have had to drive taxis on their days off just to meet basic living costs. Afghans are fantastic at developing small scale enterprises employing a handful of people, but the country lacks major industries. Consequently, the government has only minuscule amounts of tax revenue coming in.

That is why the discovery of quite how vast Afghanistan’s potential mineral resources are is so incredibly important. Surveys by US geologists suggest the country may have one trillion dollars of mineral reserves. Afghanistan has always known it had significant mineral resources, the country has had a ministry of mines and industry for many years. It has long been known that it had reserves of copper and iron. The country has also been famous for its lapis lazuli, a deep cobalt blue stone, possibly even supplied to King Solomon, while other gemstones such as tourmaline and aquamarine are found in its Hindu Kush mountains. However, it now appears that it may have some of the world’s largest reserves of iron and copper and may rival Bolivia as the world’s largest supplier of lithium, as well as having gold and other rare metals. It is the vast extent of ore deposits such as these that gives just a glimmer of hope for Afghanistan’s long term economic future. A future that could potentially allow the Afghan government to in at least some measure become much more independent of the West than it currently is; a future that could allow the government to actually do something for its own people in terms of financing its own schools, hospitals and roads – as well as military.

It is this aspect that provides the real glimmer of hope. Ask Afghans in the provinces what they feel about the various governments they have had over the last 50 years and occasionally someone will say that the ‘Daud’ government was good. Daud was the king’s cousin who in 1973 overthrew the monarchy creating a republic with himself as the prime minister. What people remember him for is not his regicide, but the fact that he did things to improve life in the provinces – such as building roads where they had not existed before. In the long term it is the ability of an Afghan government both to be seen by its citizens as independent of foreign control – and that includes independent of both Pakistan and Iran as well as the West – and to be seen to be actually doing something that helps the lives of at least some of its ordinary people, it is these which will win hearts and minds and stand at least a credible chance of creating political stability in Afghanistan.

However, the road to this point will be no easy one. The Taliban will seek to hijack and control any significant profitable activity – just as they did with the poppy trade. Afghanistan will require significant foreign investment, however, the public face of mining operations needs to be very clearly Afghan. Equally, security for the mines must be provided by Afghan security forces, as any western military presence would give credibility to a well rehearsed Islamist claim that western powers ‘occupy’ Islamic countries to steal their wealth. Corruption, which is endemic in the whole region will be another huge issue. Nor should we forget that the Pashtuns of southern Afghanistan, where much of the gold reserves appear to be traditionally fight over three things – in Pushtu Zan, Zar and Zamin – women, gold and land.

Nonetheless, the discovery of these large reserves of minerals does create at least a glimmer of hope that economic, and ultimately political, stability can come to Afghanistan. That in itself will not defeat Islamist terrorists driven by an ideology that tells them they must ‘invite’ the world to submit to Islamic government and shariah and seek to impose these by means of violent jihad on all who decline their invitation. However, it can potentially create a situation where there is a stable, independent Afghan government, that understands it is in its own economic and political interests not to tolerate terrorists intent on exporting their own version of radical Islamism to other countries. It can potentially create a situation, which, as I have previously argued on Centre Right, would allow the West to encourage more liberal influences to be nurtured particularly in Kabul and other urban areas in the hope that such influences, not least in terms of western style schooling (in contrast to the alternative Islamic maktub and madrassa system which the Taliban emerged from), may slowly begin to permeate out to the rest of the country, something that is a realistic political aim in the medium term for British foreign policy towards Afghanistan.

*****************************************************************************************************************

The Big Society: Time to deregulate sea defence

Last week former Environment Secretary John Gummer observed that spending on sea defence is unfortunately vulnerable to public spending cuts.

Now, a strong case can be made for protecting sea defence from any spending cuts – it has for years been woefully underfunded. Despite being an island nation we spend less than 0.1% of all public spending on sea defence. Moreover, two of the 3 UK regions most vulnerable to coastal erosion (the South and East) receive the lowest amounts of all public spending per person. Eastern England which includes Mr Gummer’s former constituency of Suffolk Coastal receives the lowest amount of public spending anywhere in the UK (18% below average) despite having not only huge needs for sea defence, which Mr Gummer most ably championed, but also a percentage of elderly people well above the national average and a worse transport infrastructure than any other region (where else in England is two hours drive from the nearest motorway and an hour from the nearest dual carriageway?).

John Gummer is right of course though. The interest alone on the debt run up by the previous government is currently £43 billion a year, which is more than 50 times the total UK budget for sea defence. In such circumstances even the minuscule amounts we currently spend on sea defence are clearly vulnerable.

Yet, if we must have cuts to sea defence and I am certainly not advocating that we do, then herein lies an opportunity. Put simply, it is an opportunity to allow local people to undertake small scale works to defend the coast themselves. In short it is an opportunity to create the ‘Big Society’ that was a central themes of the Conservative manifesto.

However, there are currently two obstacles to this happening, the policies of Natural England and the Environment Agency.

Natural England has sought to prevent local people on for example, the North Suffolk coast from defending their property from the coastal erosion. Their basis for doing so is an argument that some cliffs should be allowed to naturally erode! Natural England’s aim here is not an attempt to protect the present state of the landscape. Rather, their argument is that allowing cliffs to erode may actually advance science as hitherto hidden fossils may come to light. Natural England’s value judgement that possible future scientific discoveries are more important than protecting people’s homes is perverse. By the same logic we should perhaps not undertake repairs to, say, damage caused to Westminster Bridge by river erosion as by collapsing it might reveal remains of the original Roman site. However, most fundamentally, this is a type of policy decision that should properly be taken by ministers, not by a quango.

The Environment Agency (EA) also currently presents a formidable obstacle to allowing local people to undertaking their own small scale sea defence schemes. The EA has permissive powers allowing it to undertake sea defence work, but has no statutory duty actually requiring it to do so. However, it can refuse permission for local people to undertake their own sea defence schemes, thereby preventing the type of ‘Big Society’ approach that was central to the Conservative manifesto. For example, on the North Suffolk coast close to where I live a local landowner has come up with an environmentally sensitive scheme to protect his land from coastal erosion. The family who are losing 16 acres of farmland a year to the sea are prepared to spend £200,000 of their own money on the scheme. However, the Environment Agency have refused them permission to defend their own land from the sea.

The underlying reason for this is that is that the Environment Agency works on the ‘assumption’ that certain areas of coastline must be allowed to erode in order to provide sediment for beaches further down the coast. It is on the basis of this assumption that they have refused permission to a number of property owners, such as the family I have referred to above, who want to defend or even maintain sea defences on their own land. This assumption was most unfortunately given a degree of legal recognition in the 2010 Flood and Water Management Act that was hurriedly passed just before the election was called. Section 38 of this gives a specific legal right for the Environment Agency to actually create flooding or coastal erosion. This is a badly thought out section of legislation that needs to be changed, not least because, the Environment Agency's assumption, that stretches of the coast must be allowed to erode, is contradicted by a body of scientific research going back more than 50 years. This research shows that the overwhelming majority of beach sediment actually comes, not from coastal erosion, but from the weathering and erosion of inland landscapes, with the resulting sediment being carried down rivers to the sea. In fact, even on the most rapidly eroding coasts no more than 5% of beach material comes from erosion of nearby cliffs. As one textbook on coastal geomorphology puts it:

"The most obvious answer to the question as to the source of coastal sediments would be - coastal erosion. Many early texts suggested that cliff erosion resulted in sediments which were moved along-shore to fill in bays and estuaries - thus smoothing the coastline. Such a simple direct mechanism is rarely encountered. In fact coastal erosion is responsible for an almost insignificant proportion of the total input of marine sediments. Inman (1960), for instance, suggested that even in the temperate zone where wave energy is highest, less than 5% of beach sediments directly result from cliff erosion. This is a conclusion supported by Valentin (1954) who shows that, despite rapid erosion of the Holderness coast in Eastern England, amounting to over 1.5m/year, less than 3% of the resultant material was contributed to adjacent beaches. Emery and Macmillan (1978) estimated that an average erosion rate of 5cm/year from the entire cliff coastline of the world - some 50,000km, would provide only 0.04 per cent of sediment contributed to oceans by rivers. In fact rivers supply over 90% of the total marine sediment input..." (J. Pethick 'An Introduction to Coastal Geomorphology' London:Edward Arnold,1984:68)

The shingle beaches that are a prominent feature of the Suffolk and Norfolk coastline provide a good illustration of this. The relatively small amounts of flint found in local cliffs are completely inadequate to create these large shingle beaches in which the predominant rock type is flint.

It is therefore clear that the whole basis on which the Environment Agency has objected to many sea defence schemes lacks adequate scientific validity. It is essential that the Environment Agency takes a good hard look at what the scientific literature actually says on the origins of coastal sediments and allows people to take reasonable steps to defend their stretch of coastline.

Some sea defence schemes will of course still need at least some regulation. For example, any scheme that interferes with the movement of sediment to another part of the coast – such as groynes that trap longshore drift (the zig zag movement of sand and shingle up and down the beach by breaking waves)

, or structures that interfere with offshore currents which also transport sediment.

However, there are many small scale schemes that do not fit into these categories. These include:

1. Maintenance of existing coastal flood defences such as mud banks, many of which, particularly in estuaries the Environment Agency are planning to abandon under ‘managed retreat’ policies.

2. Creation of new small scale hard engineering sea defences. Such as placing gabions (wire baskets filled with rocks) at the foot of eroding cliffs 3. Soft engineering schemes such as planting marram grass to encourage sand dune formation.

It is these sort of schemes that the government should be actively encouraging local people to undertake. This is the ‘Big Society’ we want to encourage – local communities seeking to help themselves, rather than simply relying on the government to do everything for them.

There will of course always be a need for the government to undertake larger scale sea defence works. Although, as I have argued before, this could almost certainly be done more efficiently and with greater local accountability if most sea defence funding was channelled through local councils, rather than through the Environment Agency. There is also a need to give the government a statutory duty to defend at least some areas of the coast such as major towns from erosion and flooding. However, at a time of public spending restraint, it is essential that we encourage local self help schemes.

To facilitate and encourage the ‘Big Society’ approach to sea defence the new government could:

1. Give landowners a right to maintain sea and river flood defences on their own land.

2. Create a presumption in favour of local people being allowed to undertake small scale sea defence schemes providing that they do not interfere with the movement of sediment to other parts of the coast and of course that they obtain planning permission from the local council in the normal way.

3. Examine ways in which tax relief can be granted to landowners and local communities involved in undertaking their own small scale sea defence schemes.

4. Revise existing shoreline management plans (SMPs) and estuarine strategies so that the existing four options (advance the line, hold the line, no active intervention and managed retreat) are clearly stated to refer only to the actions of central and local government and do not in themselves restrict the possibilities of action being taken either by coastal landowners or local communities living near the coastal and estuaries. This would give local communities the possibility of reversing deeply unpopular 'managed retreat' policies that have been effectively imposed on them by the Environment Agency.

5. Consider setting up a small scale academic research institute for coastal geomorphology along the lines of the British Geological Survey. This could probably be started with as few as half a dozen scientific staff. Its aim would be to undertake research and provide independent scientific advice to coastal communities and others on the type of small scale sea defence schemes that are effective.

Since at least Roman times communities living around the British coast have sought to defend their local area against the sea. In doing so they quite naturally created what we now call ‘the Big Society’. It is time to allow them to do so again!

******************************************************************************************************************

John Gummer is unfortunately correct in suggesting that spending on sea defence is vulnerable to public spending cuts. The interest alone on the debt run up by the previous government is currently £43 billion a year, which is approximately 50 times the total UK budget for sea defence. In such circumstances it is essential that local people are allowed to take reasonable steps to defend the coast themselves.

The biggest obstacle to this is that the Environment Agency works on the assumption that certain areas must be allowed to erode in order to provide sediment for beaches further down the coast. This unproven assumption is contradicted by a body of scientific research going back more than 50 years. This shows that the overwhelming majority of beach sediment actually comes from weathering and erosion of inland rocks and is then carried by rivers to the sea. Even on the most rapidly eroding coasts no more than 5% of beach material comes from erosion of nearby cliffs. Norfolk and Suffolk’s shingle beaches provide a good illustration of this. The relatively small amounts of flint found in local cliffs are completely inadequate to create our large shingle beaches which area predominantly flint.

It is therefore essential that the Environment Agency recognises this and works on the presumption that people should in principle be allowed to take reasonable steps to defend their stretch of coastline. This is something people in Suffolk and Norfolk have done for more than two thousand years.

*****************************************************************************************************************

Parliament MUST complete investigations against defeated MPs

The possibility of a hung parliament has raised a real possibility that MPs who are currently being investigated for serious abuses of parliamentary expenses – could have those investigations dropped if they lose their seats on May 6th.

This week I submitted a complaint against my constituency MP and Labour government minister Bob Blizzard (Waveney) to Andrew Walker, the Director General of Resource at the House of Commons. Mr Walker has for the last few months at the request of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards been investigating two previous complaints I made that Bob Blizzard had repeatedly used his £10,000 p.a.

Parliamentary Communications Allowance to publicise attacks on Conservative controlled Waveney District and Suffolk County Councils and even encouraged people to vote against them. Both of which are of course in clear breach of the most explicit prohibitions in the Commons rule book which repeatedly and categorically states that the Communications Allowance cannot be used for any form of party political campaigning.

The third complaint that I made this week was that Mr Blizzard , a government minister and whip responsible for ensuring that Labour MPs keep the parliamentary rules (!), appeared to be using his parliamentary expenses to employ a local Labour councillor as his ‘Constituency Political Secretary’. The use of parliamentary staffing allowances for any form of party political or non parliamentary work is most explicitly forbidden in the principles set out in the Green Book.

However, the response to my complaint from Mr Walker’s office was that whilst the complaint could be investigated after the election

"As you will be aware, there are currently no Members of Parliament and therefore I will not at this point be able to take your complaint further."

The implication is that the parliamentary authorities intend to drop any ongoing investigations against MPs who are not re-elected on May 6.

However, this would mean that it would then be quite possible for MPs such as Bob Blizzard, if they are defeated on May 6, to have all the expenses investigations against them dropped, but for them to then stand again a few months later in a second general election resulting from a hung parliament – as if they had a clean sheet, with local voters being none the wiser.

This general election has in many people’s eyes quite rightly been about cleaning up parliament. So, now would be a very good time for us to take the lead in insisting that investigations into MPs expenses must be completed – even if they are defeated on May 6. The real possibility of a hung parliament makes that absolutely essential.

*****************************************************************************************************************

Yesterday I revealed that two Labour Ministers had been (mis)using parliamentary expenses for Labour Party campaigning.

Now make that three Labour ministers caught doing so just hours after the Labour Party launched its election manifesto telling us all how quickly and decisively the present Labour government had acted to clean up the parliamentary expenses scandal. Although it is noteworthy that Gordon Brown himself broke the rules by launching Labour's manifesto at an NHS hospital.

Pensions minister, Anglea Eagle joins the sorry ranks of Transport minister Sadiq Khan and Labour whip/Deputy Minister for the East of England Bob Blizzard in having had been caught using parliamentary expenses for Labour Party campaigning.

Miss Eagle is reported to have used House of Commons stationary and prepaid envelopes to write unsolicited letters to voters in her Merseyside constituency on the very day Gordon Brown called the general election.

Parliamentary rules specifically forbid the use of House of Commons stationary for any unsolicited letters, as well as strictly forbidding their use for party political purposes or to help MPs gain re election. Yet Miss Eagle even sent a letter to the home of a former voter who had been dead for five years, something that has been reported to have caused significant distress to the man’s widow.

Not a very satisfactory start to an election that was supposed to be about cleaning up parliament...

****************************************************************************************************************

Two Labour ministers caught 'red handed' using parliamentary expenses for campaigning

As an aid worker one of the things you become acutely aware of is government corruption – such as government ministers diverting tax payers money for their own party political campaigning. But for it to happen in 21^st century Britain should be profoundly shocking to all of us.

"We acted swiftly to clean up politics …And we will take further measures to restore trust in our politics. We face a deep crisis of trust in politics following the parliamentary expenses scandal. Faith in our political institutions was seriously eroded by the abuses of the expenses system. Only radical change can begin to renew our democracy."

The tragedy is that even before the print was dry on this section of Labour’s manifesto, at least two Labour government ministers had been caught ‘red handed’ (mis)using parliamentary expenses for party political campaigning.

Transport minister, Sadiq Khan is reported to have sent out hundreds of unsolicited letters to voters in his marginal Tooting, South London constituency days before parliament was dissolved for the general election. The letters on House of Commons stationary and sent using parliamentary prepaid envelopes detail his achievements as their MP and told voters how to contact him during the general election.

The House of Commons rule book ‘The Communications Allowance and the use of House stationary’ repeatedly states that such parliamentary stationary must not be used ‘for the benefit of a political party or supporting the return of any person to public office’ However, Mr Khan has previous form for misusing expenses having earlier this year had to apologise and repay £2,500 for breaking these very same rules.

Similarly Labour whip and Deputy Minister for the East of England Bob Blizzard, MP for Waveney in Suffolk, is similarly currently under investigation by the parliamentary authorities relating to his use of MPs’ £10,000 per year Parliamentary Communications Allowance as a result of a complaint I made in June 2009. For two years following the introduction of the Communications Allowance in 2007 Mr Blizzard repeatedly used these tax payer funded parliamentary expenses for party political campaigning and attacks on political opponents. These included repeated party political campaigns against Conservative controlled Suffolk County Council and Waveney District Council, including encouraging constituents to vote against them in local elections.

The House of Commons rules governing the use of MPs’ parliamentary Communications Allowance very explicitly forbid its use for any form of party political campaigning or attacks on political opponents. This is in fact the main theme of these rules, and is explicitly repeated no less than 32 times in the 38 page rule book produced by the parliamentary authorities. Mr Blizzard was himself present in the Commons when these rules governing MPs use of the Parliamentary Communications Allowance were debated in 2007 and so cannot reasonably claim to be ignorant of them. However, like his fellow Labour Minister Sadiq Khan, Mr Blizzard also has previous form having recently been ordered by the Legg Enquiry to repay nearly £4,000 of over claimed second homes allowances.

The present Labour government is at least partly responsible for creating the culture that led to these two ministers misusing parliamentary expenses for party political campaigning. It was this Labour government that in 2007 brought in a £10,000 per year MPs’ Communications Allowance which many Labour MPs were reported as talking about as ‘save our seats’ fund. This was despite a commitment in Labour’s 2005 manifesto that “campaigning activity must always be funded by parties from their own resources” (p.111). The actual rules governing the use of the Communications Allowance do in fact forbid its use for party political campaigning. However, by introducing it the government help create a culture of MPs using taxpayer funded parliamentary expenses to promote themselves. To this extent at least the present Labour government must take responsibility for the misuse of parliamentary expenses for party political campaigning that these two of their own ministers have been caught doing.

This particular form of parliamentary expenses abuse is potentially one of the most serious yet. For government ministers such as Sadiq Khan and Bob Blizzard to divert tax payers’ money for their own party political and re-election campaigns is the sort of thing that happens in corrupt third world countries – it should be as far removed from British democracy as it is possible to be.

*****************************************************************************************************************

Security minister Lord West has announced that he is concerned that al-Qaeda terrorists could launch a radiological dirty bomb on London.

This announcement is not in itself new. As I observed on Centre Right last November, one of the major justifications for our current military engagement in Afghanistan is that there is clear evidence that the Taliban have already obtained nuclear materials and hence have the potential to create a radiological ‘dirty bomb’.

However, Lord West went further by highlighting the possibility of a radiological or Mumbai style attack launched either against London or another UK port from speedboats. He observed that hundreds of thousands of small boats arrived in Britain unchecked every year and that the agencies responsible for guarding the coastline did not know “with any clarity what is going on around our coasts”.

What is needed in the face of such threats is a paradigm change in the way we approach counter terrorism. Lord West’s comments illustrate the failure of our present approach. He is rightly concerned that the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) simply do not know about every small vessel entering British waters or heading for UK ports. However, as I revealed on Conservative Home recently, the MCA are at present considering closing one of only two main coastguard cordination centres on the East Coast of England...

The basic problem is that the government's approach to counter terrorism relies far to heavily on, to put it simply, ‘leaving it to the security services’. What is needed is a paradigm shift so that all government departments assess the impact of their activities on counter terrorism.

To illustrate the point, yesterday the Maritime and Coastguard Agency concluded a consultation on draft regulations concerning oil tankers in UK territorial waters. The consultation documents stated that the draft regulations had been checked against 12 interdepartmental impact tests ranging from carbon assessment to gender equality, race equality, human rights and rural proofing etc.….but counter terrorism wasn’t on the list…despite there having been specific threats against British oil tankers in European waters.

A fundamental principle of security planning is to make oneself less than of a target, or at least a more difficult target, than others. That is why every government department should at the very least be required to undertake a counter terrorism impact assessment for each of its activities. This is the sort of paradigm shift that a future Conservative government needs to make to combat the terrorist threat we face.

The fact that, as Lord West observed, small boats can enter British waters and sail up the Thames or head for any other port without the Maritime and Coastguard Agency knowing about them highlights the urgency of this issue.

****************************************************************************************************************

According to a well placed source within the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) discussions are currently taking place with a view to closing one of only two Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres (MRCC) on the East coast between the Thames and the Scottish border. The plans currently being discussed are apparently to either close the main coastguard station at Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk/Suffolk border or to relocate it 70 miles inland to Cambridge by 2013.

In response to a freedom of information request I submitted in January the head of organisational development at the MCA admitted that as far as Great Yarmouth MRCC was concerned “future provision will be the subject of full consultation with all relevant stakeholders” and that this future consultation process would take place before June 2013. Further confirmation of this closure plan has come from the government’s announcement that it plans to close the HMRC office in Great Yarmouth which shares the same offices as the Coastguard Maritime Rescue and Coordination Centre. Local Conservative candidate Brandon Lewis who has already been campaigning against the closure of the HMRC office with the loss of 125 local jobs commented:

"This would be a devastating blow for Great Yarmouth. More government agency jobs would be moved away from an area that desperately needs secure jobs in addition to those in the traditional tourist sector. Another link with the town’s proud maritime heritage that goes back centuries would be lost for good.”

When this news becomes known there are also likely to many people with very real concerns about the impact this will have on safety at sea. No matter how sophisticated satellite and electronic communications equipment is, there is simply no substitute for local coastguard officers with local knowledge of the coast and personal relationships with the local volunteer lifeboat and search and rescue crews they have to call upon.

It was in this very area that in 1978 one of the worst environmental disasters on the UK coast happened when the Greek oil tanker Eleni V was hit in fog by a bulk ore carrier, sending 5,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil into the sea. Oil from the resulting slick which is still buried under the sands of the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts, had a devastating effect on the local tourist industry and cost local councils a small fortune to clean up. Today there are vastly more ships in the area than then. As I outlined on Conservative Home recently, these include 30-40 oil tankers, by far the largest concentration of tankers anywhere in UK waters, which are now anchored off the North Suffolk coast.

Peter Aldous, Conservative Candidate for Waveney, which includes this part of the Suffolk coast and the nearby port of Lowestoft commented on the proposed coastguard closure plan:

“A move or closure should be fought against; it would compromise safety and security and jobs would be lost at a time we don’t want any more bad news on the jobs front.”

The government’s plan to either close this main Coastguard rescue centre or relocate it inland to Cambridge is consistent with the government’s agenda of replacing local services with regional ones in East Anglia. This has not only included a two year attempt to replace local district councils in Norfolk and Suffolk with large unitary authorities, it has also directly impacted emergency services on which many people in Norfolk and Suffolk depend for their lives. So far this has included the removal of key hospital services such as emergency heart treatment from local hospitals to what are perceived to be regional centres such as Papworth in Cambridgeshire, a move which an outstanding campaign led by Ipswich Conservative candidate Ben Gummer has demonstrated will almost certainly cost lives. Similarly, if Labour win the general election local fire and rescue services in Norfolk and Suffolk will lose their own local control rooms where staff have detailed local knowledge. These will be replaced in 2011 by a new ‘central’ control centre in Cambridge for fire services from as far afield as Luton and Peterborugh. Not unnaturally, this has raised fears of fire crews being sent to the wrong locations, particularly as many villages even in the same area of Norfolk or Suffolk have similar names. The Conservative Green paper on localism has pledged to reverse Labour’s regional agenda, including scrapping the regional control centres for the fire service. That is a commitment that now clearly needs to be extended to the main coastguard rescue centres that those who live near, work or visit the sea depend on.

People’s safety must not be sacrificed to the present Labour government’s agenda of replacing local services with regional ones. Many people who live on, or visit the East Anglian coast will very rightly fear that closing the main coastguard rescue centre, one of only two between the Thames and the Scottish border is cutting corners with safety at sea. A party political agenda must never be put above people's safety.

*********************************************************************************************************************

Terrorism risk posed by tankers off the East Anglian coast

Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and more specifically since the London 7/7 attacks in 2005, the UK has been slowly coming to terms with being a major terrorist target. However, whilst ‘climate change’ is a theme being taken up across virtually all government departments, the same is not yet true of counter terrorism. Yet the threat of terrorism potentially affects almost every sphere of government. Major international sporting events now have specific terrorist threats against them. For example, the Hockey World Cup and Commonwealth Games both due to take place in India in March and October respectively have both received very specific threats from an affiliate of al-Qaeda. In short, we cannot assume that anything will be immune from the threat of Islamist terrorism. It is therefore somewhat odd to say the least that the government have not made preventing terrorism a cross departmental responsibility in the way that they have made tackling 'climate change'.

One illustration of the present government’s lack of joined up thinking on preventing terrorism is the large number of oil tankers that for the last year have been anchoring off the East Anglian coast as a result of a series of government decisions or more recently lack of decisions about them.

This fleet of tankers numbering 30-40 at any given time and including some of the world’s largest supertankers has in the last 12 months become one of the highest concentrations of oil tankers in the western world (research by the Daily Mail last year showed that even UK oil ports normally have only 4-6 tankers anchored offshore - see map).

The issue only came to light last summer when Suffolk Coastal MP John Gummer asked the government why so many tankers were anchoring off the North Suffolk coast in his constituency. It subsequently transpired that the government had, without any local consultation, secretly made an agreement with oil companies that this would be the one place in UK waters where ship to ship oil transfers would be allowed offshore. This has led to it becoming the international location for tankers from across the world to transfer Russian oil to supertankers that are too large to enter the Baltic. In response, Mr Gummer very rightly raised serious concerns - the Suffolk coast happens to be an area of outstanding natural beauty (AONB) as well as being home to internationally important nature sites and is heavily dependent on tourism, all of which were potentially threatened by any oil spillage. There has followed a series of government ministers saying that they were moving ‘quickly’ to ban the practice. These included Transport Secretary Lord Adonis, who 'hoped' it might be banned before Christmas 2009 and Deputy Minister for the East of England Bob Blizzard MP, off whose Waveney constituency some of the tankers are anchored. Mr Blizzard recently announced that legislation would be laid before parliament ‘as early as May’, which for anyone with the slightest knowledge of the electoral process means ‘not in the lifetime of this parliament’. This week the government finally started a six week ‘consultation’ on banning these offshore oil transfers…before it drafts a statutory order which on current timescales is unlikely to come into force until 1st October…

However, as well as the environmental concerns that John Gummer has so rightly highlighted, there is also a significant security issue raised by having the largest concentration of tankers in the western world anchored just off our shores.

Since 9/11 al-Qaeda and its ideological associates have made very specific threats against the oil industry. This is partly because Islamists tend to regard western use of Middle Eastern oil reserves as a particular grievance. For example, Bin Laden’s ‘Message to the Americans’ of 6th October 2002 stated:

“You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.”

However, more importantly the economic impact of the 9/11 attacks led a number of Islamists to focus part of their strategy on causing maximum economic damage to the West. Bin Laden in particular realised that oil has an immense potential as a weapon of economic warfare. In a December 2004 speech he urged his followers to engage in suicide attacks against oil targets:

“Mujahidin be patient and think of the hereafter, for this path in life requires sacrifices, maybe with your life…Remember too that the biggest reason for our enemies’ control over our lands is to steal our oil, so give everything you can to stop the greatest theft of oil in history from the current and future generations in collusion with the agents and the foreigners, oil,…which is the basis of all industry, has gone down in price many times. After it was going for $40 a barrel two decades ago, in the last decade it went for as little as $9, while its price today should be at least $100 at the very least. So keep on struggling, do not make it easy for them, and focus your operations on it…”

Whilst oil installations particularly in Saudi Arabia and Yemen have been a focus of Islamist attacks, the ships which carry 60% of the world’s oil supply have also been specifically targeted. A number of planned terrorist attacks on tankers have been thwarted by US and other forces. However, in October 2002 the French supertanker Limburg carrying almost 400,000 barrels of oil was attacked off the coast of Aden (Yemen) by a suicide boat, similar to the one that had attacked the USS Cole in Aden almost exactly two years earlier.

Significantly there have also been specific threats against British tankers close to European waters. In June 2002 the Moroccan government arrested a group of al-Qaeda operatives suspected of plotting attacks on US and British tankers in the Straits of Gibraltar.

The intention of such attacks is not primarily physical damage, but economic impact. A few months before the planned attacks on British and US tankers off Gibraltar an online jihadist article appeared about the advantages of bombing tankers which stated:

"it is well known that the American economy will not be able to endure whatsoever the rise in oil prices."

A fundamental principle of security planning is to make oneself less of a target, or at least a more difficult target to hit, than others. Terrorists always look for weak spots. Allowing the greatest concentration of oil tankers in the western world, including some of the world's largest supertankers, to anchor off our coast doesn’t quite seem to qualify as making us less of a target…

Astonishingly, it is our own government that has actually caused this concentration of tankers from around the world off the Suffolk coast by specifically designating this as the one place in the UK where offshore ship to ship oil transfers would be allowed. Both this and the government’s continued dragging of its heels over when it will finally ban this practice does not simply indicate a degree of incompetence. Perhaps more significantly, it also indicates the government’s real state of thinking about preventing terrorism. Whilst tackling climate change is now a cross departmental responsibility, it would appear that the same degree of priority has yet be given to preventing terrorism.

What this situation illustrates is that the UK needs a government with a whole new paradigm in the way it thinks about preventing terrorism.

*****************************************************************************************************************

The EADT is absolutely right to highlight the potential risk to areas of the Suffolk coast where defences are not maintained, such as the Slaughden area immediately south of Aldeburgh. Here only a thin strip of beach separates the sea from the Alde/Ore estuary. However, should the sea be allowed to breach through then it is likely that the entire estuary would enter the sea at that point. In that case approximately 8 miles of the estuary to the south of this, including the Orford river frontage, would silt up and eventually become salt marsh. This is exactly what happened in the late thirteenth century when the Blyth estuary broke through between Walberswick and Southwold. This directly led the collapse of the port of Dunwich where the Blyth had previously entered the sea and created what are now the Dingle marshes.

Needless to say, if this happened to the Alde/Ore estuary today it would similarly have enormous economic and environmental consequences for both Orford and Aldeburgh. People are therefore absolutely right to be concerned about the lack of guaranteed protection for this area beyond the immediate present in the new shoreline management plan.

However, in practice, it is the Environment Agency rather than local councils that have by far the greatest influence on shoreline management plans. It is the Environment Agency that decides where the overwhelming majority of spending on sea defence goes. It is therefore particularly unfortunate that the Environment Agency has a serious conflict of interest in this respect. Under UK law it has no specific legal duty to do anything to defend people’s homes and livelihoods from coastal erosion or flooding. However, under EU law when wildlife habitats are lost to erosion it is required to create new habitats, such as by allowing land to flood in order to create salt marsh.

This conflict of interest poses a potential threat to many areas of the Suffolk coast, including the Aldeburgh-Slaughden area. However, this threat will become significantly greater if the present government succeeds in pushing its new Floods bill through parliament before the general election. Clause 38 of this bill gives a new power to the Environment Agency to actually create both flooding and coastal erosion to previously protected areas if it considers this to be ‘in the interests of nature conservation’. The bill gives no right of appeal against this for anyone affected by it. This clause is a piece of legislation that is ill thought out, unnecessary and poses a very real threat to large areas of the Suffolk coastline. I would urge readers to write the Environment Secretary, Hiliary Benn MP (30 - 34 Albert Embankment, London, SE1 7TL) to express their grave concern about it.

East Anglian Daily Times 8th Feb 2010

******************************************************************************************************************

Afghanistan needs a strong government, one that will prevent groups such as al-Qaeda using the country as a base from which to plan and launch terrorist attacks and preferably one that is prepared to slowly and gradually liberalise the country.

Few would disagree with that. Yet the reality is that the West, particularly Britain and the USA have repeatedly undermined the standing of President Kazai in the eyes of his own people. This week’s London conference on Afghanistan organised by Gordon Brown is just one such example of this.

Yet Hamid Karzai is a unique man on the Afghan political scene. Head of the important popalzai clan of the Pushtuns from which the Afghan royal family traditionally came, he is also Cambridge educated. He bridges the huge gap not merely between the Pushtun tribes and the Farsi speakers of the North and West of Afghanistan, but is also a man who understands the Western world. Even more significantly, in 2001 he was almost unique among Afghan political leaders in not having blood on his hands. Whilst other mujahaddin leaders had overseen atrocities committed against rival groups during the Soviet occupation, Karzai had been in the West mounting a diplomatic mission to bolster support for the Afghan resistance.

Yet President Karzai has been undermined by both the British and US governments:

1. The withdrawal of necessary military and intelligence support far too soon after the Taliban were ‘ousted’ from Kabul in 2001. This was due to the false assumption by the US and UK governments that the Taliban were ‘finished’, when in reality they were regrouping and re-establishing their hold on significant parts of rural Afghanistan. As a result huge amounts of western military and intelligence resources planned for Afghanistan were hurriedly ‘reallocated’ to Iraq following its occupation in 2003. These included 75% of all the predator drones that were so important in the fight against the Taliban, and the CIA's postponement of an $80 million plan to set up a new Afghanistan intelligence service. The British government was no less at fault with Defence Secretary John Reid publicly stating that he hoped the British troops he was sending to Helmand in 2006 would leave the country ‘without a single shot being fired’. So, the most immediate answer to the question Tony Blair this week posed to the Iraq Inquiry, about what the world would be like today if we hadn’t invaded Iraq – is that Afghanistan might now be a safer place.

2. President Karzai’s authority among his own people is seriously undermined by the fact that ordinary Afghans do not perceive him to be in control of western military activity happening in his own country. This situation has been exacerbated by what is seen by some as an over reliance on air strikes against the Taliban in order to minimise coalition casualties on the ground. However, whatever the truth of this, the reality is that every time a coalition air strike mistakenly targets civilians President Karzai has to face some very uncomfortable questions from yet another tribal delegation as to why this is happening, further diminishing his authority.

3. The campaign against the ‘corruption’ of the Karzai government. The fever pitch this reached during last year’s presidential election massively undermined the authority of the Afghan president amongst his own people in a country where honour is the most devastating thing possible to lose. The reality is that Afghanistan has always had huge problems with corruption. When Afghan judges and senior civil servants drive taxis on their day off because their salary is only $50 a month – not enough for a week’s rent - then of course there will be corruption. The truth is that virtually every country in that region has huge problems with corruption, while electoral fraud is a similarly widespread problem across the region. Yet the castigating of President Karzai for corruption and electoral fraud, not merely by the western press, but also with demands from President Obama and Gordon Brown for second round elections, showed very clearly to ordinary afghan people that they had a president who was not fully in control of his own country.

4. This, to Afghan eyes, humiliating spectacle of their own president being forced to be subservient to the US and the British governments continued this week with the London conference on Afghanistan 'organised by Gordon Brown'. The latter phrase says it all, it should have been President Karzai organising it, after all it's his country, but it is doubtful if leaders such Gordon Brown would have turned up to such a summit. At this summit, billed by some international officials as the ‘save Gordon Brown show’, President Karzai made the case for Afghanistan needing foreign help for at least 15 more years. Meanwhile Gordon Brown simultaneously tried to get his pre election message across that at least 5 Afghan provinces ‘would’ be handed over to Afghan control this year, a target NATO commanders consider to be 'very demanding', but which Mr Brown believes will be helped by a revamped programme attempting to bribe the Taliban to defect. The latter, incidentally is likely to be dangerous and ineffective for the reasons I outlined when the original programme was proposed last year.

Somehow western leaders just do not seem to get it. They do not get it that until Afghanistan is seen by its own people to have a president who is king in his own house, who is not seen to be subservient to the USA and the UK, until then it will always be unstable and prone to Taliban resurgence and potentially at least a haven for terrorism.

Afghanistan will need western support, including military support for a significant period of time, but that support must be much more backroom and discrete. Afghan leadership should never be undermined in the way it has been this week in order to create favourable pre election press releases in the UK.

***************************************************************************************************************

Government has broken its promise on tankers

It is disappointing that the government has now backed out of the personal undertaking that Transport Secretary Lord Adonis gave to Suffolk Coastal MP John Gummer to ban offshore oil transfers ‘quickly’- potentially as early as Christmas.

The existence of foreign tankers from countries such as Libya transferring Russian oil to larger tankers off our coastline is entirely a situation of the government’s own making. A few years ago the present government voluntarily made an agreement with the tanker companies that “the preferred location” for such oil transfers would be the area between Southwold and Lowestoft. It is disturbing that the government entirely failed to consult local people before making this agreement with the tanker companies. So far no apology has been given for this. Indeed, the existence of this permission only came to light last summer when John Gummer MP raised concerns about the number of tankers anchoring off our coast.

Last week Waveney MP Bob Blizzard announced that the government expects to ban these offshore oil transfers ‘as early as May’. However, as an MP Mr Blizzard knows full well that electoral law requires the present parliament to be dissolved no later than the first half of May and a general election called. It therefore seems that despite previous assurances the present government have no intention of banning these offshore oil transfers. Many of us living on the coast simply do not understand why the government is not taking action now to protect our beautiful, but fragile coastline and the 4,000 or so tourism jobs that it directly supports. The present government created this problem, it is reasonable to expect them to sort it out while they are still in power. However, in the light of Mr Blizzard’s statement it would seem that our best hope of protecting these from a potential oil spill is to wait for an incoming Conservative government to take action.

*****************************************************************************************************************

Earlier this month Hilary Benn the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs lectured farmers on the need for them to produce more food in the UK, in order to combat climate change and feed a growing population. I am sure I was not the only one to be struck by the irony of that. Mr Benn is responsible for the Environment Agency whose ‘managed retreat’ policies propose abandoning to the sea thousands of acres of farmland that have for centuries been defended or even reclaimed from the sea.

Now, a think tank linked to the Royal Institute of British Architects has suggested applying the government’s ‘managed retreat’ policies even to UK cities, such as Hull and Portsmouth, as a possible response to rising sea levels. Their report suggested allowing parts of large urban areas on the UK coast to flood, while preserving their historic centres – so that they would become ‘like Venice’.

That so respected a body as the RIBA should suggest a partial abandonment of sea defences around cities shows quite how strongly the government’s deeply flawed 'managed retreat' option for sea defence has taken hold. The underlying reason for this is not that most of the areas currently under threat of 'managed retreat' are technically difficult to defend, although cost is certainly a factor in many instances. For an island nation it is shocking to think that we spend less than 0.1% of government spending on sea defence. However, the most fundamental reason is that neither the Environment Agency nor any other government body has any statutory duty to defend the British coast. Instead, the Environment Agency have what are termed permissive powers. In other words they are permitted to interfere in decisions about what sort of sea defences are allowed, but they do not actually have to do anything themselves.

A future Conservative government needs to approach this issue with much more joined up thinking than the present government. I have argued elsewhere on Centre Right that much of the sea defence funding that DEFRA channels through the Environment Agency would be better spent through local councils who are genuinely accountable to local people. However, regardless of who undertakes sea defence work, it is vital that the government creates a statutory duty to defend at least some parts of our coast. This should include not only urban areas, but also land that previous generations have reclaimed from the sea.

At the moment we are in the perverse situation where the government is seeking to impose a statutory duty on future governments to stem future climate change in order to combat, amongst other things, the increased flood risk from sea level rise. However, the government has not imposed on itself a statutory duty to defend the coast against flooding and erosion.

This is despite sea levels having been slowly rising since we began systematically recording them 150 years ago (see the above chart from the UK's Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory).

This should clearly be a priority for a new Conservative government to sort out.

***************************************************************************************************************

Islamists make up their own rules

This week seven Islamists refused to follow court procedure by standing up when the judge entered court. The seven were accused of shouting abuse at soldiers of the Royal Anglian Regiment during a home coming parade on the regiment's return from Iraq last March. The abuse included:

"British solders, murderers," "British solders, baby killers.," "British solders go to hell," British soldiers burn in hell," "Baby killers and rapists all of you" and "British solders, you will pay."

Appearing in court this week the seven refused to stand as the judge entered the court room, claiming that their religion only allowed them to stand up for Allah.

Now I have read the entire Qur’an, large parts of the vast number of Hadith, as well as Islamic commentaries and so forth and I have to confess that I have never come across that one. Nor, I suspect, have the vast majority of ordinary British Muslims, most of whom come from cultural backgrounds that place a far greater emphasis on honour and respect than is common elsewhere in Britain - and there is much in that respect that some of the less polite members of British society could learn from them!

Now, the reason why so few people have ever come across this claim is that one of the fundamental beliefs of Islamism is, to simplify things just slightly, that you can make up the rules yourself about what is and isn’t ‘Islamic’.

Classical Islam fixed the interpretations (ijtihad) of the Qur’an in medieval times and most Islamic theological schools are based on rote learning of those interpretations. However, Islamists, whether in Afghanistan or in the UK, claim the right to reopen the door of Qur’anic interpretation (ijtihad) and come up with their own interpretations. In theological terms this is the essence of Islamism.

Now to be fair, Islamic liberals have also reopened the door of interpretation (ijtihad), although they do so in order to make Islam compatible with western liberal values such as freedom of speech and religion. Islamists however, create their own interpretations of the Qur’an as a means of achieving their ultimate political goal. That goal is to impose Islamic government and law (sharia) on Muslim and non Muslim alike in all areas of the world that are not currently subject to it.

So, when these seven Islamists refused to stand and respect the judge, they were not basing their actions on some widely practised, deeply rooted Islamic belief. Rather, they were essentially creating new rules to suit their own agenda. That agenda appears to involve creating a legal precedent that Muslims do not have to stand for judges sitting in British courts, a legal system Islamists reject as ‘man made law’. Moreover, their now highly publicised claim that to do so is ‘unislamic’, will they hope, put pressure on other Muslims to follow suit, thereby furthering their agenda of Islamising British society.

Unfortunately by allowing these Islamists to avoid standing when she enters court the judge would appear to have given into that agenda hook, line and sinker.

Unless and until the government and judiciary realise that making up your own rules about what is and isn't 'Islamic' is a fundamental tenet of Islamism, they will continue to appease Islamists such as these.

*****************************************************************************************************************

This week government minister Hilary Benn lectured farmers on the need for them to produce more food. Mr Benn also happens to be the cabinet minister responsible for the Environment Agency, whose ‘managed retreat’ policies propose abandoning thousands of acres of Suffolk and Norfolk farmland to the sea. When the present Labour government were elected in 1997 they promised us ‘joined up government’. Sadly, it would seem that more than 12 years later we are still waiting for that to happen.

****************************************************************************************************************

Ian Sinclair (EDP, Dec 4) is correct in thinking that some of the Taliban weapons seized by the RAF Regiment are very old. As an aid worker in Afghanistan until a few years ago, I encountered Afghans even carrying muskets, weapons that presumably dated from at least the Second Anglo Afghan war (1878-80). However, we should not let that lull us into a false sense of security. The Taliban also have some very advanced weapons. One thing that seems to have been forgotten recently is that part of our original justification for sending soldiers to Afghanistan was the possibility that the Taliban were seeking to acquire chemical weapons and nuclear materials. They would then have the possibility of creating a radioactive ‘dirty bomb’ i.e. one that scattered radioactivity with conventional explosive. Unlike the ‘never found’ Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, there is considerable evidence that the Taliban have actually acquired these. In 2001, coalition forces found canisters of both uranium and cyanide at Kandahar airport, while Royal Anglian soldiers serving in Afghanistan were later targeted with Anthrax.

The present government have been very poor at explaining to the public why we are fighting in Afghanistan. However, there is the real possibility that chemical and nuclear material gathered by the Taliban could be used by other Islamist terrorists to mount an attack on the UK.

*****************************************************************************************************************

The government has questions to answer about flood defence

In 1947 the UK suffered devastating floods – caused by a combination of heavy snowfall and deep freeze, followed by warmer weather melting the snow at the same time as torrential rains slowly moved across the country. The ensuing floods left large parts of the UK paralysed for several weeks.

Two years ago an analysis was made of the likely impact if floods of a similar magnitude, however caused, were to occur today. In theory, there should have been a significantly reduced impact – as the Conservative governments of Eden and Macmillan invested heavily in flood defences following the 1947 floods and subsequent 1953 North Sea floods. However, the authors found great difficulty in assessing how different the impact of modern flooding would be compared to that of 1947. The reason for their difficulty was quite astonishing. The government does not keep a national record of where flood defences exist.

"No national database is available which contains the type, height, design level, and maintenance conditions of U.K. river flood defences even for main rivers."

(1947 UK Floods: 60 Year perspective p8)

If there is no national database of flood defences it also follows that the government has no national record of the state of repair of those flood defences. Although given the wholly inadequate levels of funding there are certainly some issues there, particularly in rural areas.

Most significantly however, it is clear that if the government has no national record of either where flood defences exist or their state of repair – then any claim by the government that they have a credible flood defence strategy is clearly nonsense.

What we have instead is a piecemeal approach to both river and coastal flooding. This has been primarily driven by the amount of money allocated by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, i.e. Gordon Brown for most of the last 12 years, rather than based on any coherent national strategy of what is actually needed to provide a reasonable level of protection.

The government is planning a new flooding bill to tidy up flooding legislation – one of the recommendations of Sir Michael Pitt's review of the 2007 floods. However, what is most urgently needed is for the government to have a strategy based on accurate local knowledge not only of which areas are likely to flood, but also of where existing flood defences are - and equally importantly where they are not - and their condition. Without this basic information the government cannot claim to have a credible national flood prevention strategy.

****************************************************************************************************************

Standing around our village war memorial on Sunday I was struck by how few WW2 veterans were now able to be there. With them is literally dying out a living memory of why we fought the second war, the Gestapo, what happened to the Jews and the gypsies and everyone else who didn’t fit in with Hitler’s radical ideology.

At the same time it also struck me that very few who read the western press have any real understanding of what life under the Taliban was really like before they were pushed form power by the western intervention after 9/11.

Life under the Taliban: I lived in Jalalabad, Afghanistan as an aid worker during the time that the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan. It was a brutal totalitarian dictatorship. People lived in daily fear of the religious police known as the ‘vice and virtue’ police. When they appeared people froze with fear, just as those living under Nazi rule must have frozen at appearance of the Gestapo. The traffic was stopped every day at the Islamic prayer times, at which point the Taliban who patrolled the streets with lengths of plastic hose pipe whipped anyone found not praying. Girls schools were closed, women were banned from being out on the streets without a male relative, which literally meant a death sentence for the thousands of widows whose husbands and sons had been killed in 20 years of fighting – they couldn’t even go out to beg. Those who tried to were savagely beaten up by the Taliban. Others suffered far worse fates. Captured soldiers from the various mujahaddin groups that the Taliban had seized power from were given a stark choice - either join the Taliban or walk through minefields as human mine clearers; There were reports of large scale ethnic cleansing, particularly of the Hazara population; while non Muslim Afghans – chiefly Hindu and Sikh shopkeepers in cities such as Kabul and Jalalabad, were forced to wear yellow cloth badges in public – not dissimilar to the star of David that the Nazis forced the Jews to wear. The few remaining Jews left in the country, remnants of an ancient community there, were imprisoned and tortured by the Taliban in an attempt to force them to convert to Islam. While any Afghan who dared to leave Islam suffered a more immediate fate. Just outside Jalalabad where I lived at the time, the Taliban searched a man’s house and found a Bible. He was immediately taken outside and hanged. He courageously maintained his Christian faith to the end. There were many stories of atrocities, but I can vouch for the truth of this one as a colleague carefully questioned several Afghans who had witnessed it to establish its truth.

That was not all that was going on under the Taliban in Afghanistan. In 1996 the Taliban had invited Osama bin Laden there to fulfil his dream of creating the world’s first truly Islamist state. Their ideology was both totaliterian and expansionist, even more so than that of Hitler’s Third Reich. Afghanistan as a truly Islamist state was to be the base from which jihad attacks would be launched as part of a Islamic holy war to impose Islamic government and sharia law on the rest of the world. This plan quickly began to be put into action. In February 1998 bin Laden now resident in Afghanistan issued a fatwa calling for a jihad to kill ‘the Americans and their allies – civilian and military’. In August that year al Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; then in September 2000 suicide bombers directed by al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in Aden; A year later came the 9/11 attacks on America. All these were planned from al Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan. In fact, after 9/11 US forces found a video in an al Qaeda house near Jalalabad in which Bin Laden boasted about the attack on the World Trade Centre that he was about to mount. This was but one of many major attacks on the West that Bin Laden and al Qaeda planned from the safe haven the Taliban gave them in Afghanistan. We are fighting in Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban and al Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups establishing a radical Islamist state there from which to launch jihad attacks on the rest of the world.

The specific threat to the UK: The success of the 9/11 attack enabled al Qaeda to undergo a major transformation. Instead of spending years planning a small number of terrorist spectaculars against the West, al Qaeda became an inspirational force, inspiring, training and ultimately franchising terrorist attacks. Young radical Muslims who now came to al Qaeda seeking bin Laden’s approval for their schemes. Al Qaeda changed form being a small organisation to being an inspiration for a movement that while global in reach, is still centred on bin Laden and the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region where the Taliban gave him sanctuary. It was to this region that Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammed Sidique Khan two of the 7/7 London bombers came.

If we appease the Taliban andother Islamist terrorist groups by withdrawing from Afghanistan now, the consequences will be severe:
a) The Taliban will take over again in Afghanistan with all the harsh cruelty and brutality they had before.

b) Afghanistan will once again become a radical Islamist state – that not only al Qaeda, but also other radical Islamist groups would use it as a base to launch terrorist attacks on West – and those attacks would increase both in scale and in numbers. Britain would almost certainly be a particular target.

c) The threat of nuclear terrorism. There has long been evidence that nuclear material form the former Soviet Union has for some years been passing through Afghanistan. During the 2001 western military intervention in Afghanistan canisters of uranium were found at an al Qaeda base near Kandahar airport. Access to such materials would have given al Qaeda the capacity to use a dirty radioactive bomb (i.e. spreading radioactive contamination by means of a conventional explosive) against a western city. There is also evidence that both al Qaeda and the Taliban have access to materials necessary for using chemical and biological materials in terrorism, as was demonstrated by an attempt a few years ago to use Anthrax against Royal Anglian soldiers in Afghanistan.

d) The threat of a nuclear armed Islamist state in Pakistan.If Afghanistan falls to the Taliban again, then Taliban fighters and weapons will flow across the border to the Pakistani Taliban. This will make it much more difficult to prevent the Pakistani Taliban gaining control of the North West Frontier Province and ultimately even of Pakistan itself. The prospect of a nuclear armed Islamist state run by the Taliban would create the unpalatable possibilities of nuclear blackmail against other states or even nuclear war.

e) Withdrawal from Afghanistan would also give Islamist movements worldwide a massive propaganda boost.They would proclaim to the Islamic world that they had defeated the might of a superpower and now nothing would seem impossible to their jihadist followers. They would now announce that it was now a realistic possibility that radical Islam could be imposed on the rest of the world. It would give a massive boost to the recruitment of thousands more jihadists and lead to a huge increase in terrorist financing.

f) Political blackmail by non violent Islamist groups in the UK. These groups share the same ultimate goals as violent Islamists – the creation of Britain as an Islamic state with Islamic government and sharia imposed on both Muslim and non Muslim alike. They have simply adopted a different political strategy to achieve that end. Their strategy is to push test cases through the courts and lobby for changes in parliamentary law so that British law is increasingly aligned and 'compliant' with sharia. Their political strategy also involves a certain degree of political blackmail. They insist that unless their demands are appeased for more and more sharia compliant legislation, then it is ‘inevitable’ that more young British Muslims will go to train in Afghanistan and Pakistan and return to commit terrorist acts in the UK. A classic example of this sort of political blackmail occurred in August 2006 when the security services disrupted a plot to bomb planes flying from Heathrow to North America, a plot that had the potential to kill 5,000 people. When Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly and Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott met leaders of key Islamic organisations the next day, they were presented with a demand for implementation of sharia relating to family law in the UK. (And just in case anyone thinks this sounds benign, the sections of sharia dealing with family law give significantly lesser inheritance rights to women, give automatic custody of children to fathers, while any woman who leaves Islam for another faith can automatically be divorced, loseher children and even the right to see them). Once such concessions to Islamist ideology are given, the threat of terrorism doesn’t go away, there is just a new demand for more concessions. The only way to deal with such political blackmail is not to give into it, but to tackle the threat of terrorism on the ground. That includes tackling it with military action in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region, which has become an inspirational and training centre for Islamist attacks on the UK. If we withdraw from Afghanistan, it would not stop this at all, in fact it would most likely increase the influence of that area for radicalised British Muslims. That would leave as our only options either enduring ever more terrorist attacks or more and more appeasement of the demands of these Islamist groups for a step by step implementation of sharia in the UK. Right now we are at the stage where such groups are demanding the implementation of shariafor financial dealings (which the present government has already appeased) and for family law. However, if we did withdraw form Afghanistan then how long might it be before Islamist councillors in an area with a Muslim majority population demand a local implementation of sharia within their area…?

We cannot afford stop fighting than the Taliban any more than we could afford to stop fighting the Nazis while they remained undefeated in World War Two.

**************************************************************************************************************

This is a further volume in Dr Patrick Sookhdeo’s excellent series of books on Islamism specifically written to inform non specialists, particularly those involved in the development of political policy.

Reading this book I could not help but be reminded of the words of the Abdul A’la Mawdudi (1903-79), the leading Islamist writer in the Indian sub continent:

The truth is that Islam is a revolutionary ideology which seeks to alter the social order of the entire world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals...Islam wishes to do away with all states and governments which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam. The purpose of Islam is to set up a state on the basis of this ideology and programme…regardless of the rule of which nation is undermined in the process of the establishment of an ideological Islamic state. Islam requires the earth - not just a portion, but the entire planet. (Chapter 1 Jihad in Islam – translated by Khurshid Ahmed, published by UK Islamic Mission 1997).

As soon as the Ummah of Islam (i.e. Muslim community) seizes state power, it will outlaw all forms of business transacted on the basis of usury or interest; it will not permit gambling; it will curb all forms of business and financial dealings which contravene Islamic law. (Chapter 4 Jihad in Islam).

Patrick Sookhdeo’s book Understanding Shari’a Finance: The Muslim Challenge to Western Economics begins by quoting Timur Kuran, a Muslim scholar and Professor of Economics and Political Science at Duke University, who states that Shari’a finance is an ‘invented tradition’ that does not go back to Muhammad’s day. In this book Dr Sookhdeo demonstrates how shari’a finance has in fact been specifically developed in recent years by radical Islamists as means of bringing increasing areas of society, in both Muslim majority and Western countries, under Islamist control.

The basis of Shari’a finance is the Qur’an’s prohibition of what is in Arabic termed riba in Q2:275. Throughout Islamic history there has been debate as to whether riba means the charging of extortionate interest, or, as modern Islamists insist, amounts to a total ban on all forms of interest. Sookhdeo demonstrates that there is ample historical precedent going back to the Abbasid Caliphs (successors of Muhammad as leaders of the Sunni Muslim community) for it being regarded as legitimate to charge interest at up to 7% and within the later Ottoman empire up to 10% or even on occasions 15%. While even in the last 20 years both al-Azhar University in Egypt, the main centre of Sunni Islamic learning and successive Grand Muftis of Egypt have ruled that fixed rates of bank interest are lawful under shari’a.

Prior to the 1970s and 1980s Islamic banks operating on shari’a principles simply did not exist in most Muslim countries. In fact, only in Iran, Pakistan and Sudan has there been any general attempt to islamicise banking activities. Even in Saudi Arabia as recently as 2005 only 30% of bank assets were classified as shari’a compliant. Simlarly, Islamic banks were not created in Muslim majority countries such Jordan until 1978, in Turkey until 1983, Indonesia until 1992 and Syria until 2007. While Oman even now quite specifically refuses to license Islamic banking.

Patrick Sookhdeo traces the origins of ‘Islamic economics’ back to the radical Pakistani Islamist Abdul A’la Mawdudi who argued that Islam encompasses all areas of life including economics. Islamic economics was specifically created to be a vehicle to help establish Islamic law in society and state, until, in Mawdudi’s words ‘the Ummah of Islam seizes state power'. One of Mawdudi’s disciples, Khurshid Ahmed, an economist who was also a leader of Jam’at-i-Islami in Pakistan was sent to the UK to further this vision. It is he who has largely been responsible for the creation of the concept of shari’a finance in recent years. Ahmed stated that

‘Resurgent Islam represents a new approach – that is, to strive to reconstruct the economy and society in accordance with Islamic ideals and values’

‘It is a direct demand of the Ummah’s (i.e. Muslim community’s) position as khalifah (i.e. exercising political domination over non Muslims) that its dependence upon the non Muslim world in all essentials must be changed to a state of economic independence, self respect and gradual building up of strength and power' (Studies in Islamic Economics, 1982).

At first the creation of Islamic economics was a theoretical exercise, but the oil wealth generated in the 1970s allowed the creation of modern shari’a financial institutions beginning with the establishment of the Islamic Development Bank by the Oganisation of Islamic Conference in 1974, followed by a 1977 conference in Saudi Arabia which established shari’a economics as an academic discipline.

In addition to shari’a finance being essentially a creation of radical Islamists designed to foist their own agenda on others, Patrick Sookhdeo identifies a number of other dangers and vulnerabilities relating to sharia finance:

1. Shar’ia finance is based on creating alternatives to interest based financial products, these include various combinations of lease/purchase arrangements that are designed to fulfil the role of traditional mortgages and profit and loss accounts based on short term commercial investments and discretionary bonuses that are designed to be broadly analogous to deposit accounts. However, Sookhdeo observes that even Islamic countries have experienced extreme difficulty in regulating financial institutions that do not overtly use interest. In particular, the use of discretionary bonuses accompanied by large scale fund transfers makes them extremely vulnerable to both fraud and money laundering. This was illustrated by a large scale financial crises that hit Egypt in the 1980s due to massive corruption flourishing in self styled ‘Islamic companies’.

2. These arrangements also make shari’a finance particularly vulnerable to being used for terrorist financing. This was one of the reasons why, in the 12 month period following the 9/11 attacks, the US government found it necessary to blacklist 180 Islamic financial institutions and charities including some of the most ‘reputable’ Islamic banks such as the al Taqwa Islamic Bank and the Dallah el Baraka Group. Patrick Sookhdeo quotes Professor Mahmoud El Gamal, the US Treasury’s principal advisor on Islamic Economics, as stating that:

‘To the extent that shari’a arbitrage Islamic financial practice utilizes the same tools as criminal finance, the industry may be vulnerable to abuse…the current modus operandi of Shari’a arbitrage Islamic financing is too dangerous …the three stages of development of an Islamic financial product bear a striking resemblance to methods used by money launderers and terrorist financiers.’

3. The structure of Islamic financial institutions effectively places them outside of government control, as the board of directors are subject to direction by a council of international shari’a experts whose sole concern is obedience to the Qur’an and Hadith over and above any man made regulatory framework.

4. There are only a small number of international shari’a experts sitting on the shari’a panels of the UK financial institutions currently involved in providing Islamic financial products (Barclays, HSBC Amanah Finance, Institute of Islamic Banking and Insurance, Islamic Bank of Britain, West Bromwich Building Society and Yorkshire Building Society). However, a number of these shari’a experts sitting on the supervisory panels of multiple institutions have strong links to radical Islamic movements and organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Wahhabi-Salfism. Sookhdeo specifically identifies at least one such Islamist scholar who elsewhere has urged that Muslims should wage an aggressive military jihad against the West.

5. Islamic banks pay zakat, which is a 2.5% tithe on assets owned for more than year instituted by Muhammad to provide both for those in need and for jihad. Whilst the zakat system itself is used for many good, charitable purposes, the author cites a UN security Council report that zakat has enabled al-Qaeda to receive between US$300 and $500 million over a decade from wealthy businessmen and bankers representing about 20% of Saudi GNP through a web of charities and companies acting as fronts with the notable use of Islamic banks.

It should therefore be a matter of much concern that the present UK government has progressively legislated to allow the operation of shari’a finance in the UK. In 2003 the Bank of England changed the rules on stamp duty to recognise sharia’ compliant mortgages and stated that they no longer had any objections to the introduction of shari’a complaint financial products into the UK market; In 2005 the government passed legislation to facilitate the creation of Islamic financial transactions and retail banking services; In 2006 the Financial Services Authority examined the possibility of issuing a regulatory framework to support the issue of Islamic bonds in London, meanwhile Stephen Timms, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury claimed that the government was making good progress towards removing the legal and tax hurdles to the development of shari’a complaint financial products and Ed Balls, then Economic Secretary to the Treasury promised the government would remove any tax barriers that impede the issue of sukkuk Islamic bonds. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown who as Chancellor had overseen the whole process stated that he wanted to make London the natural home for global Islamic funds,

These changes in government policy directly led to the emergence of shari'a finance in the UK with the Islamic Bank of Britain being formed in 2004 and mainstream banks such as HSBC and Lloyds rushing to copy them.

However, the reality was that before the government took these steps there very little demand for shari’a complaint financial products from British Muslims. A 2004 study by Loughborough University found that 75% of British Muslims were indifferent to Shari’a finance. They found that only 5% of British Muslims said they would never use interest based financial products, while even amongst the 25% of British Muslims who showed some degree of interest in shari’a finance, the overwhelming majority were till then quite happy to use interest based finance.

By actively encouraging the development of shari’a finance in the UK, the government has subjected the vast majority of ordinary Muslims to a significant amount of community pressure from radicals to follow a specifically Islamist approach to finance, when previously they were quite happy with interest based traditional western finance.

1. 'Shari’a finance is a politically driven Islamist invention masked in religious idiom. It is clear that the Islamist movement have artificially generated the need and demand for shari’a finance.’

2. 'The support given by the government and financial sector to shari’a finance in Britain is aimed more at attracting investment from the huge pool of money in the oil rich Middle East than in satisfying local Muslim demand, which is being used simply as a pious cover.’

Reading this, the question one can only ask is ‘What will be the long term cost to Britain of the present Labour government’s flirtation with Islamist finance?’ Given Mawdudi's comments quoted at the start of this review, we ignore this at our peril.

******************************************************************************************************************

Encourage marriage: lessons from Pakistan

One of the greatest long term social challenges facing the next Conservative government will be gently to encourage people towards changes in culture and thinking that are more beneficial and less harmful to society as a whole. Encouraging marriage is a particular case in point.

Melancthon is absolutely right that the cost of wedding services puts some people off getting married.

The cost of weddings is actually a problem in many countries and a lot has to with social expectations and obligations. You are expected to have a certain standard of event and some people, often including distant relatives you haven’t seen for years, expect to be invited. Well, if you think weddings are expensive in white British society – spare a thought for our friends from Asian cultures – many of them are expected to invite literally hundreds of people to wedding receptions and the weddings often go on for three days or more, something that is financially crippling for many families. When I lived in Pakistan, some of my Pakistani friends told me that many years earlier the Pakistani government had for a number of years actually banned wedding receptions – all you could have was a cup of tea and piece of cake after the wedding. Sounds draconian, but according to my Pakistani friends it was incredibly popular – because it set people free from a whole series of social obligations which often led to many poor people particularly being in crippling debt.

No one would suggest that we follow exactly the same policy in England, but perhaps we can encourage people towards marriage both by means of economic nudges and by measures that lower the cost of weddings.

1. A marriage grant – say £500 per couple, not to pay for, but just to nudge people towards, the idea that getting married is a good thing.

2. Being able to offset the cost of a wedding reception against income tax – provided that the total cost of the reception before tax did not exceed say, £2000. That would have a similar effect to approach previously tried in Pakistan. i.e. it would reduce the cost of weddings by effectively pruning down some of the social obligations, such as having to invite large numbers, that raise the cost of weddings to amounts that are simply unaffordable for many people.

The first would cost approximately £57 million. The second would cost approximately £100 million (based on a marriage rate of approximately 230,000 per year). But given that:

Only 6% of married couples split up by the time their first child is 5 years old, compared to 52% of cohabiting couples splitting by the time their first child is five years; And children whose mum and dad split up are 75% more likely to give up on school and leave school with few or no qualifications, are approximately twice as likely to experience adverse outcomes on a whole range of measures including behaviour problems and engaging in crime, mental health problems, become sexually active at an earlier age, turning to drugs, smoking and heavy drinking….

Given the cost that just some of these impose on society, spending £157 million a year nudging people towards marriage – could well be an investment that will actually reduce public spending in the medium term.

********************************************************************************************************

Last week Waveney MP Bob Blizzard announced that next spring the government will introduce a new law banning ship to ship oil transfers off the Suffolk coast. It is welcome that Mr Blizzard has finally said something on this issue. However, as there are only 5 weeks between the start of spring and the very last date on which parliament must be dissolved for a general election, there is no realistic possibility of any law introduced then becoming law. It is therefore hard to see this government announcement as being anything other than what is commonly called ‘spin’.

These oil transfers have already been banned off the Dorset coast and the shipping minister could ban them here next week if he chose to do so.

Journal readers may be interested to know that in the meantime the equipment for containing any oil spill is kept by the government at 3 locations – Milford Haven in South Wales, Huddersfield in West Yorkshire and Perth in Scotland. As such, with tankers anchored only a few miles off Kessingland and Southwold, there is no realistic possibility of any oil spill being contained before it reached our beaches. I have written to the shipping minister twice raising this issue since August, but so far have not received any reply.

The majority of the North Suffolk coastline where these oil transfers take place is both a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) and an area of outstanding natural beauty (AONB). Those of us living on the coast are simply baffled as to why the government are allowing the transfer of Russian oil to tankers bound for other countries to threaten both our beautiful coastline and our local tourism business which brings more than £65 million to the local economy and supports one in eight local jobs.

********************************************************************************************************

Approximately half of the coastline of England and Wales is made of rocks that make the

(Conservative Party Conference October 2006 - featured on BBC News 24)

Human rights are more important than democracy in Islamic countries

*****************************************************************************************************************

Stopping the spread of sharia is central to countering radicalisation

Sharia is the touchstone for recognising and combatting radical Islam

The new Government needs to take urgent steps to counter sharia-based radicalisation

*****************************************************************************************************************

Wisdom on Foreign Affairs

****************************************************************************************************************

Did we alienate Christian voters in the election?

Summary:

Sea defence budget cut: time to set out a medium term aspiration

*****************************************************************************************************************

The Big Society: Time to deregulate sea defence

Parliament MUST complete investigations against defeated MPs

Two Labour ministers caught 'red handed' using parliamentary expenses for campaigning

Terrorism risk posed by tankers off the East Anglian coast

Government has broken its promise on tankers

Islamists make up their own rules

The government has questions to answer about flood defence

Encourage marriage: lessons from Pakistan