Opposition To UK Government's PC Is Growing

Douglas Murray is director of Britain’s Centre for Social Cohesion think tank and co-author of Hate on the State: How British Libraries encourage Islamic Extremism and Victims of Intimidation: Freedom of Speech within Europe's Muslim Communities.

In a Daily Telegraph column today titled “Let’s not die for timid and misguided political correctness,” Murray says:

Last summer. the Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC), in conjunction with the polling company YouGov, released a survey of Muslim student opinion in the UK.

Forty per cent of Muslim students polled supported the introduction of sharia into British law for Muslims; a third supported the introduction of a worldwide caliphate instituted in accordance with sharia; and a third believed that killing in the name of their religion could be justified.

This is the sea in which Muslim students who go on to carry out acts of terror are able to swim.

But instead of engaging with the problem, Bill Rammell, the Minister for Higher Education, attacked the poll for finding out these things and declared that the problem of radicalism on campus was in fact "serious, but not widespread".

It is just one example of a government that cannot make the moral distinction between firefighter and fire.

Murray ends with this:

The Government knows that three quarters of all terror plots being investigated in Britain originate in Pakistan. With such a colossal Pakistani community in the UK it is unsurprisingly tough working out who poses a problem and who is part of the non-extremist mainstream. They could make a start by working out who is actually here.

In February, it transpired that the Foreign Office is spending £400,000 on television adverts to be aired in Pakistan, explaining that Britain is not "anti-Islamic".

Even by the standards of this Government, that strikes one as ignoble as well as ineffectual. This country should look like a less attractive proposition than it currently does, not a more attractive one.

As it is, any aspiring jihadi would not only currently find it easy to come to Britain, they would find in our universities the ideal place to take cover and, indeed, inspiration. It is why you are more likely to become a terrorist in this country if you have been to university.

There are many messages that we should be giving out. But one in particular should go straight away to our political class: political correctness may be something that they are willing to fight for, but it is not something that most of us are willing to die for.

Murray’s entire column’s here.

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

My comments:

I can’t recall ever reading a better description of the moral neutering at the heart of political correctness than Murray’s callout of the UK government as one which now can’t distinguish “between firefighter and fire.”

What about you?

Murray’s closing paragraph calls attention to a growing major divide between the British people and PM Gordon Brown's Labour government.

A phrase I constantly hear now in Britain from people across the political and economic spectrums is: “Labour’s lost the country.”

When I ask why that is, reasons related to PC-type policies are typically among the first cited.