HASSAN BUTT is a member of a group you are going to be hearing a lot more from: Muslims who come out of jihadism and find an almost patriotic belief in the best values of Britain. They cajole and they warn. They help steer British Muslims away from violence while teaching wider society that radical [...]
Entries from March 2008
March 21, 2008
The Anorak’s Guide to how to win an election
For the past few months my comrades have been urging me to vote for evil. I must forget about Ken Livingstone’s decision to ignore London’s liberal Muslims and ally with the far Right, they say, and banish his Jew-baiting from my mind.
The condemnation of his own Labour government’s modest proposals to tax Indian tycoons and [...]
March 21, 2008
The prejudice that still shames the nation
As the Clintons play the race card against Barack Obama, the young senator from Illinois has many outraged supporters rallying to his cause, but not Britain’s most prominent opponent of racism.
Trevor Phillips is wary for good reasons. He suspects Obama is ‘helping to postpone the arrival of a post-racial America’ by offering white Americans a [...]
March 9, 2008
Austerity and Greenery
Go back a generation to a Britain that had never heard of Tony Blair or Bill Gates, that still kept a packet of candles in case the miners turned off the lights and what would strike you was the respect for the past. In their small way, the British were ‘green,’ although few used the [...]
March 2, 2008
The awful squeal of fundamentalism
Authoritarians seeking to extend repression have always drawn innocents into manufactured crises. None was more innocent than Jacques Barrot, who, in 2005, helped trigger a wave of death when he entered France’s annual pig squealing contest at the Pyrenean village of Trie-sur-Baïse.
Barrot didn’t win: that honour went to Yohann and Olivier Roussel for delivering an [...]
