Nick Cohen: Writing from London

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 Islam is not a rational reaction to Western provocation, but a totalitarian ideology with a life of its own.

‘How we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy,’ Butt recalled in an outburst that stuck in my mind. ‘By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the “Blair’s bombs” line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamist theology.’

Too many people are still in denial about the motives of a cult of death and the British state ought to have been pleased that Butt was trying to shake them out of it. For he did not simply leave the al-Qaeda training camps on the Pakistan-Afghanistan borders and write a few articles when he came home, but transformed himself into a tireless opponent of extremism. He has encouraged about a dozen others to quit al-Qaeda, a higher success rate than the intelligence services can claim, and gone into prisons to convince hardcore jihadis to change sides. He urged Tony McNulty, the Counterterrorism Minister, to think about establishing units to fight the effects of brainwashing and took the argument against radicalism into mosques and meeting halls.

Butt succeeds where politicians and police officers fail. He can talk young men out of going down the conveyer belt that ends with them slaughtering themselves and those unlucky enough to be close to them because he has felt what they are feeling and knows from hard-won experience the weak points in the arguments that may seduce them.

Needless to add, he has been stabbed by his (and our) sworn enemies and lives with the knowledge that there are people out there who want him dead.

Butt works with Shiv Malik, the most interesting writer on terrorism around. The head of MI5 described Malik’s essay for Prospect on the making of the 7/7 bombers as ‘essential reading’ and copies were dispatched to the Pentagon. Malik was hoping to follow it up with Leaving al-Qaeda, the story of how Butt joined the terror networks after experiencing deprivation and racism in his youth and then repented and discovered a moral purpose to his life. In the pre-publicity, Butt explained: ‘Taking the life of an innocent civilian can be done in an instant, but building your worldview around the justification of murder takes years.’

Malik had high hopes that he would enable the public and officialdom to understand the jihadi worldview. Leaving al-Qaeda looked like being one of the most important books of 2008.

Until early on Wednesday morning, that is, when officers from the Greater Manchester Police arrived at Malik’s north London flat and demanded he give them the uncompleted manuscript, along with his research notes and contacts book.

Malik must go to Manchester Crown Court on Tuesday and ask the judge to order the police to back off. If the judge refuses, he must decide whether to go to prison. It may come to that. No serious journalist who has promised sources he will protect their anonymity can betray their trust and Malik tells me he has no intention of turning his contacts over to the police.

Perhaps the detectives have come after him because they suspect Butt was involved in a serious crime. If he was, his renunciation of jihadism would count for nothing and he would have to be prosecuted. But the order requiring Malik to betray his sources doesn’t mention specific bombings or assassinations. It is drafted in vague terms and looks like the itinerary for a fishing expedition.

If the police are merely trying to up their arrest rate, the case will reveal a disastrous ineptness operating on many levels.

The first, and the most telling for journalists, is that the raid on Malik’s flat continues the trend of respectable society jumping on researchers who investigate ultra-reactionaries. It began last year after Channel 4 secretly recorded extremist preachers. Without a shred of evidence, the West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service accused it of faking the documentary, leaving the programme makers with no option but to sue for libel.

There are enough dangers in covering radical Islam without the police and the CPS adding to them. Much more in this vein and most journalists will give up.

You may not care about the troubles of hacks, but you ought to care about the disarray in the criminal justice system the treatment of Butt and Malik reveals. On the one hand, the Home Office and MI5 applaud their efforts. On the other, the Greater Manchester Police threatens to send them to jail. Does either know what the other is doing?

The worst of it is the message the police are sending to radical Muslims. Cults work by cutting off their recruits from the outside world. Friends and relatives who might talk them round are shut out. Breaking free requires a psychological wrench. The jihadi must renounce everything he once believed and earn the hatred of comrades who formed his surrogate family. Friendless and probably broke, he must face a new life as a ‘traitor’.

If Butt and Malik are prosecuted, how the jihadis will laugh at the stupidity of a country that can’t tell its allies from its enemies. ‘Look,’ they will say to their recruits, ‘look at what happens to Muslims who go over to their side. Are they thanked? Are they honoured? No, they’re prosecuted. All Muslims are the same to the British and there’s no point in trying to please them.’

There’s a severe danger that they will be right.

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 Russian oligarchs cannot be held against him. Nor should I mention his friendship with speculative developers whose grotesque high-rises will disfigure the London skyline well into the 21st century.

As for the public money that has disappeared into organisations run by friends of his cronies – come on, Nick, you’re a man of the world. There’s no need to get on your high horse. Just shrug your shoulders and remember that the only way to stop Boris Johnson is to vote for Livingstone – the “lesser evil”. For the past few months my comrades have been urging me to vote for evil.

But is it? The Standard’s poll this week showed Johnson 12 points ahead. As it stands, Livingstone can’t be re-elected because Johnson is almost home. If his popularity starts to fall, however, the candidate most likely to beat him is Brian Paddick.

This may seem an odd claim. The Lib-Dems are a distant third, and a vote for Paddick looks wasted. But everywhere I go I meet people caught in a Left-wing dilemma: we don’t want Johnson but we won’t be able to look at our faces in the mirror if we support Livingstone.

If enough of us were to swing behind Paddick, however, London’s perverse election system would be on our side. Here’s how. If no candidate gets 50 per cent of first preferences, then a run-off takes place. The second choices of voters for the eliminated minor parties are then counted and added to the leaders’ totals.

Obviously, hardly anyone who put Livingstone as their first choice will put Johnson as their second, and vice versa. But Paddick will be the second preference for most Labour and Tory supporters.

It will take nothing less than a mass defection of voters from Ken to the Lib-Dems in the first round – but if Paddick can get to the last round, he wins because a majority of second choice votes will come to him. But if Johnson is ahead and faces a final showdown with Livingstone, Johnson wins because the second preferences of Liberal-Democrat voters split evenly between Tories and Labour, as you would expect them to.

It’s a sign of how malicious and incompetent the Mayor’s campaign has been that he has smeared his rival as a “racist,” which Johnson isn’t, instead of a buffoon, which is how he often seems to many. Perhaps Johnson will give him a break he doesn’t deserve by making a spectacular blunder between now and polling day.

A lot can change, in other words. But as things stand, if you want a candidate who can reform the police, take a Leftish stand on social, environmental and economic issues and beat the Conservatives, then Paddick, not Livingstone, is your man.

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 deal: vote for me and I’ll stop you feeling guilty by keeping quiet about racism.

In the US, with its vast black prison population, it is easy to see how soaring words about a new generation building a new country can divert attention from a gross injustice. Less so in Britain, where bureaucrats across the public sector assure us that they are moving us towards Martin Luther King’s dream of a country where the colour of a man’s skin matters less than the content of his character.

Take Andrea Callender, BBC’s head of diversity. She is not only concerned with colour prejudice, but she also promises to tackle an apparently definitive list of bigotries about ‘age, gender, race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, marital status, sexual orientation and number of dependents’. Yet she does not mention the most glaring inequality in modern Britain, although she must encounter it every day.

In Whitehall, the Civil Service says it will tackle the under-representation of women and members of ethnic minorities among its upper ranks. If the radical mandarins are serious about eliminating inequality, shouldn’t they be more specific? Which women and which blacks and Asians do they want to recruit in the name of social justice? Rich or poor? State educated or private? They won’t say because the orthodoxy is that it’s right to discriminate in favour of an Indian steel magnate’s daughter at the expense of the son of a white single mother and feel proud of yourself while you do it.

Meanwhile, the NHS announces that its ambition isn’t merely to care for the sick. It wants ‘a fairer society in which everyone has the opportunity to fulfil their potential’. Again, its mission statement seems admirable, but again it does not mention the people who most need the opportunity to fulfil their potential.

I could go on. The pseudo-egalitarian style dominates every public institution. Human-resources managers make good money out of a career in leftism as long as they never talk about the old left’s central concern: class.

At first glance, the silence of progressive professionals is baffling. There is little conflict between class and race. You do not have to decide to concentrate on one to the exclusion of the other because most people from the ethnic minorities are from humble backgrounds.

But a moment’s thought about the racket of the British education system explains why the BBC, Civil Service and NHS have so little to say to the disadvantaged. Access to good schools is dependent on parents’ wealth – their ability to pay for private education or a house in a middle-class catchment area. Professional employers who declared that they believed in ‘positively encouraging inquiries from working-class applicants’ would have to spend money on training to overcome the effects of sink schools.

They feel embarrassed to say it, so frank conversations about the public sector are always in private. A contact who runs a government organisation – I can’t say which – tells me he once had to satisfy a few non-executive directors, trained by the trade union and housing association movements to ask awkward questions. Now he has middle-class board members of minority communities. They can’t make every meeting because they’re busy people. He won’t fire them because he’ll be accused of racism. In any case, he doesn’t want to fire them because they make his life easier.

A contact at the BBC says that when the workers were the repository of radical liberal hopes in the Sixties, his predecessors encouraged working-class writers and directors. Now women and members of ethnic minorities have unparalleled opportunities, and that is a welcome advance, but the beneficiaries of the new order are always from the upper middle class. In the name of diversity, everyone is the same.

High cultural institutions that once dreamt of a proletarian uprising now treat the white working class as racists or squares. As Michael Collins, a rare modern example of a working-class intellectual, put it in The Likes of Us: ‘The vision of a multi-cultural Utopia needed its common enemy, and it was increasingly the tribe that played a major role in previous Utopian fantasies.’

The political gulf is as great. On crime, immigration, social security scrounging, Europe and green taxes, the working and liberal middle classes don’t talk to each other. In last week’s budget, Gordon Brown and his puppet Chancellor exacerbated the conflict by increasing taxation on workers earning between £5,200 and £18,500 to fund tax cuts for voters in swing seats. There was no fuss about Labour’s leadership betraying the people their party was founded to represent because the interests of the working class no longer feature in debate. In Disraeli’s time as in ours, there are: ‘Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.’

The emphasis on diversity can’t last because diversity is becoming more diverse. In Britain, ‘ethnic minority’ no longer means people descended from West Africans, Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, but also Hungarians, Poles, Bosnians, Albanians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ethiopians, Somalians, South Africans, Kurds, Iraqis, Peruvians… to name but a few. A public body that tried to represent every minority in Britain would be crushed by the bureaucratic effort.

While we wait for the inevitable collapse, perhaps we should ask New Labour, the BBC and the Civil Service when they expect the public to get a return on its money. When will the corporate-responsibility co-ordinators and diversity-awareness trainers be able to show some success in moving us to a post-racial, post-misogynist, post-ageist, post-homophobic society?

Because it is only when they pick up their laptops and leave the building that we can concentrate on the real question of how to move to a less class-ridden one.

Pyjama’s media here

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 word.

The fashionable guide to high society was Ann Barr and Peter York’s The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, an exercise in social anthropology cleverly disguised as light comedy. Their Sloanes combined patriotism and traditionalism, believed in the values of the old ruling class, loved the countryside and had no time for the avant-garde. Readers wishing to emulate their style furnished their homes with heirlooms and portraits, for this was a world in which Alan Clark’s sneer that Michael Heseltine had to ‘buy his own furniture’ still made sense. I doubt if one person in 100 understands it today.

Further down the ladder, the middle classes demonstrated their sophistication by watching The Jewel in the Crown or Brideshead Revisited, series as far from today’s critically applauded American thrillers as you can get. The Second World War still cast its shadow and Dad’s Army, ‘Allo ‘Allo! and Colditz were hugely popular. Alongside the historical dramas and comedies, antiques were everywhere, either as commodities or gifts families of all classes passed to their children.

At the time, intellectuals worried that the ‘heritage industry’ was reactionary and provided the cultural background to Margaret Thatcher’s long rule. The Observer’s Neal Ascherson wrote in 1987: ‘One of the marks of the feudal ancien régime was that the dead governed the living. A mark of a decrepit political system must surely be that a fictitious past of theme parks and costume drama governs the present.’

But Martin Miller, who produced the first of the annual Miller’s Antiques Price Guide in 1969, told me that he saw the affection for the old beginning among hippies rather than Chicago School economists. The people he met disliked mass production and the terrible damage the modern movement in architecture had inflicted on the cities. They liked the local and the crafted.

The survival of thrift after the austerity of the war provides a less politicised explanation for the nostalgia boom. Today, if I see cardboard boxes filled with jam jars, screws and half-squeezed tubes of glue that ‘might come in useful one day’, I can almost guarantee that the owners are pensioners who were brought up to make what they had last.

Miller got out of the business and sold his guide for a good price. It was a smart move. For the greater Britain’s professed interest recycling and reusing is meant to have become, the faster interest in preserving antiques has declined.

About a mile away from The Observer’s London offices is Camden Passage. It was the home for 60 or so antique shops selling everything from expensive Art Deco jewellery to battered books. They are closing almost monthly. In their place come the stores and restaurants for the modern moneyed classes: gastropubs, delicatessens and a FrostFrench boutique. The dealers talk of a plot to force them out. But if their antiques were selling they wouldn’t be in trouble. They’re not making enough money because of a decisive global shift in favour of the modern style in the early Nineties.

At a nearby auction house, a dealer reminisced about the good old days when his friends packed off container-loads of antiques to America and Japan. Now, he said, the export business was dead.

Miller thought prices in the domestic market were at their lowest level for 20 years. High-quality goods still sold as investments, but buyers no more admired them than art speculators admire paintings. They were just another means of banking cash. Ordinary pieces were harder to shift. As TV dinners and restaurant eating grew, the price of dining tables has collapsed. Few now want the paraphernalia once associated with eating in middle-class and respectable working-class homes – cutlery canteens, sideboards, ‘mother’s best china’. As for furniture, customers were no more prepared to bid for wrecks and do them up than cook meat and two veg every night. They would sooner buy flat-packed furniture and ready-cooked meals.

Peter York said that if he were looking at today’s London rich, his old guide to the Victorian-revival of late Seventies England would be no help. Indeed, he would have to exclude the English as they barely figure in the top echelons of London society. Today’s high-class style is the taste of the global elite. He sees it in the £100m London flats the Candy brothers have hired Richard Rogers to build for Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes. Instead of oak and mahogany, they have bulletproof windows and ‘panic rooms’. There’s no place for the old in the homes of the new rich and the look is as clinical as a City office.

I can’t say that their preferences worry me overmuch. Nor do I blame a couple who choose to shop at Ikea rather than take a tatty wardrobe from their parents. But greens should be bothered that their apparent triumph hasn’t been matched by a switch in taste.

Politicians, broadcasters, teachers and every other voice in polite society agree that to be green is to be good. Gordon Brown supports newspaper campaigns of dubious environmental value against plastic bags and his ministers promise to stop buying bottled water. Antiques don’t leave a carbon footprint, but the same people who carry organic food in bags-for-life buy furniture from Scandinavian warehouses rather than restore old pieces and shop at FrostFrench if they can afford to rather than wear second-hand clothes.

A green sensibility is flourishing without a revival of the thrifty virtues that ought to accompany it. The incongruity makes me suspect that the movement is shallow. Today’s green policies may turn out to be luxuries the middle classes felt they could indulge in the final years of the long boom, but are ready to discard when the hard times come.

No one buys organic on the dole.

The new issue of Democratiya is online now. Essential reading, as always.

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 impressive impersonation of pigs mating. However, history remembers Barrot rather than the Roussels because an Associated Press photographer snapped him wearing a plastic snout standing at the microphone and put it on the news wires.

The next time it appeared, someone had doctored the picture and added the caption: ‘Here is the real image of Mohammed.’ Two radical imams, whom Denmark had foolishly welcomed as asylum seekers, included it in a dossier they were hawking round the dictatorships of the Middle East, on how Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten had insulted Muslims.

After at least 100 deaths and the storming of Danish embassies in Syria and Iran, journalists pointed out that the newspaper hadn’t included a picture of M Barrot among the innocuous cartoons it had run to uphold the right to mock religion. The clerics then said an anonymous poison pen writer had sent the wounding picture to a Danish Muslim. It was, they added, an insult to their faith as great as Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s championing of the rights of Muslim women.

Too many people forgot too quickly that the violence of 2005 did not have as its ‘root cause’ the decision of a small Danish newspaper to satirise the godly. For three months after Jyllands-Posten published, there was no rage from the ‘Arab street’ or any other street. Only after lobbying from the imams and sly political calculation from the powerful did the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) unleash the protests by demanding that the UN impose sanctions on Denmark. Like the Reichstag fire and Sergei Kirov’s assassination, the cartoons controversy most suited those who affected to be most outraged.

The mayhem continues. Last month, Danish police arrested suspects allegedly planning to attack a cartoonist. Danish papers reprinted the cartoons as a gesture of solidarity. (As no British editor has had the nerve to run them, I should say nearly every issue of Private Eye has more ‘provocative’ jokes about Christianity.) The Sudanese government threatened to expel Danish aid workers in retaliation. Sudan is one of the largest recipients of aid from Denmark. If that stops, more will die.

In language filled with the optimism of the struggles against 20th-century totalitarianism, Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights states: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’

But faced with a conflict between high principle and a reactionary stunt, the UN Secretary General chose the side of the hysterics. A spokeswoman for Ban Ki-moon said that he thought that the new cartoon controversy showed that ‘freedom of expression should be exercised responsibly and in a way that respects all religious beliefs’.

All religious beliefs, that is. Even if they do not respect each other. Even if by the normal standards of intellectual life, they make no sense. Even if the behaviour of their followers does not inspire respect, but fear.

If the UN were to order us to ‘respect all political beliefs’, conservatives would say they weren’t prepared to respect communists, leftists would say they weren’t prepared to respect fascists and everyone else would burst out laughing. Yet the UN Human Rights Council is proposing in all seriousness to protect religion by doctoring its universal defence of freedom of expression.

The OIC is pushing it to approve a super-blasphemy law that would make it an offence to ‘defame’ any religion. Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society said attending the discussions was an Orwellian experience, with speakers using the language of liberalism to justify oppression. ‘Anyone seeking to draw attention to the capital offence of apostasy in Islamic countries will be lucky to be heard,’ he reported. ‘Anything deemed the slightest bit critical of Islam is immediately jumped upon.’

To the bafflement of outsiders, communist China and Cuba have joined the states of the Islamic conference. Both are officially atheist and China persecutes its Muslim minority. But what unites dictatorships is more important than what divides them and no one should be surprised that communist elites will use any weapon available to assault principles which threaten their power.

Sitting in Britain, it is easy to feel superior. We can dismiss the UN as a club without rules that negates its own standards by granting membership to countries that break every article in the declaration of human rights.

You need only look around to realise that complacency is unwarranted. Last week, Channel 4 launched a libel action against West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service, which had accused its film-makers of inventing all-too-real scenes of clerics preaching misogyny, anti-semitism and homophobia. They must have found accurate investigative reporting disrespectful. The government seeks to deny us the very language we need to describe religious terror and insists civil servants don’t call Islamic extremists Islamic extremists but ‘anti-Islamic extremists’.

He isn’t alone in succumbing to obfuscation and appeasement. The past five years have been among the most shameful in BBC history. It presents tiny groups of extreme right wingers as the authentic voice of Islam while shunning liberal-minded Muslims or asking hard questions of those who would oppress them.

Meanwhile, it is not only authoritarian states at the UN which want a universal blasphemy law. The Archbishop of Canterbury is as keen on criminalising criticism.

AP reported that Yohann and Olivier Roussel triumphed after unleashing a ‘cacophony of oinks and grunts’. Why go to Trie-sur-Baïse when you can hear them at home?