In an exclusive extract from his new book The Fate of Abraham, award-winning MEE commentator Peter Oborne explains how Policy Exchange has helped to dismantle traditions of tolerance and multiculturalism in the UK, with Muslims its main target
In the wake of the calamity of the Iraq invasion of 2003, one might have supposed that the ideology which lay behind Tony Blair and George W Bush’s bloody misadventure would have been discredited. This has not happened. Neo-conservatism has continued to set the parameters for a great deal of policy discourse, and its supporters have continued to occupy many of the most prominent positions in British (and American) public life.
There are a number of reasons for this resilience. In the UK, Policy Exchange, a London-based think tank, is one organisation which kept the neo-conservative flame burning. Though its public profile is small, it has exerted prodigious influence in political circles. In conventional politics, Policy Exchange was at first associated in particular with ‘marketisation', an ugly word which describes how the disciplines of the private sector have been introduced into the education system and the wider civil service. The think tank’s most enduring achievement, however, has probably been the reshaping of government policy towards British Muslims.
The British government, police and intelligence services originally saw their job as enforcing the law rather than policing ideology or personal beliefs
To simplify a rather complicated story, the British government, police and intelligence services originally saw their job as enforcing the law rather than policing ideology or personal beliefs. Abu Hamza, the notorious one-eyed cleric who made no secret of his sympathies with al-Qaeda, provides a fascinating illustration of this approach. Hamza, who used his position as imam of the Finsbury Park mosque to preach violent jihad, was skilful at ensuring that his public pronouncements stayed just within the law. There was general amazement and surprise when his eviction was suddenly brought about not apparently by the British state, but by his own congregation, who locked the doors of the mosque against him. The Metropolitan Police were, however, involved in Abu Hamza’s downfall. Its policemen built up close relations with the mosque’s faithful and were unobtrusively stationed nearby on the day of the imam’s eviction in case of trouble. This sensitive operation was a model of old-fashioned intelligence work and community policing.
However, the Muslim congregation who threw out Abu Hamza themselves held views which many sections of British society would find offensive. The congregation included sympathisers with Hamas, the Palestinian resistance group. Probably without exception, they were hostile to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and were dismayed by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Many worshippers at the mosque held socially conservative views about homosexuality and women which, while by no means unknown among the Conservative Party membership, are no longer mainstream opinions in the modern UK. None of these views bothered the Metropolitan Police. They were happy to work with the Muslim community for the removal of a figure who they rightly saw as a menace.
This kind of ‘multicultural’ approach lay at the heart of what was then the British way. As long as they obeyed the law, immigrants were allowed to bring with them the traditions and customs of the countries they had left behind. This approach fitted in naturally with the national tradition of letting in dissidents and exiles from abroad, from the Huguenots expelled from France in the seventeenth century to the Jews who made their way to the UK as refugees from the Russian pogroms before the First World War, or later as refugees from National Socialism.
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