A Study of the Ideology Behind 1960s French Revolutionary Radicalism

Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1975)

The late 1960s saw a wave of radical ferment and agitation erupt in America and France. In America, the Students for a Democratic Society and other groups campaigned against the Vietnam War and for a radical reform of American society, while Black civil rights activists like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X demanded the end of segregation and improved conditions for Black Americans. This radical agitation was marked by race riots and left-wing terrorism by groups like the Weathermen. I think that most people on this side of the Atlantic are probably more familiar with the American situation than the French through the close ties between Britain and America in the Special Relationship. But France also experienced a wave a radical unrest beginning with the occupation of the Sorbonne by radical students in 1968. These then established contacts with ordinary workers, who struck in sympathy, and there was a wave of wildcat strikes. By the end of the decade and the early 1970s, sections of the radical left were turning to kidnapping and terrorism. Although the French revolutionary activism of these years may be less-well known, it has nevertheless impressed itself on British memory and culture. The left-wing French director, Jean-Paul Godard, produced a film about the agitation and unrest around Jagger and the Stones preparing to record ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. The Sex Pistol’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, spuriously claimed to have been a member of the Situationists, one of the radical groups involved in the unrest. And the ideas of ideologues like Guy Debord have found a readership and supporters among the British left. Way back in the 1980s there was a volume of revolutionary texts from 1968 published, I think, by the Socialist Workers Party. And the radical unrest and its turn to terrorism is covered by Guardian columnist Francis Wheen in his book on ‘70s paranoia.

Gombin was an academic attached to the Centre de la Recherche Scientifique. His book isn’t a history of the revolutionary movement of the late 60s in France, but an examination of its ideology. He calls this ‘Leftism’ and contrasts it with ‘extremism’, which is how he terms radical Marxism. This is the extreme left-wing Marxism, often Trotskyite, which approaches or has some of the ideas and attitudes of the Leftists, but does not go as far as them by rejecting Marxism. And ‘leftism’ itself could be described instead as post-Marxism. Gombin explains that Marxism came late to France, and as a result the gap of a quarter of century or so until French intellectuals and activists caught up with the radical experiments and revision of Marxism carried out by the German, Hungarian and other eastern European Communists and radical socialists in the council and communist revolutions of 1919 and the early 1920s. The revelations of the horrors of Stalin’s brutal dictatorship in the USSR, the gulags and the purges, came as a shock to left-wing intellectuals in France and elsewhere. The Communist party had uncritical accepted the lie that the former Soviet Union was a workers’ paradise. In response to these revelations, some Marxist intellectuals like Sartre condemned the purges and gulags, but otherwise remained faithful to the Communist party. Others went further and joined the Trotskyites. But a few others were moved to use Marx’s critical methods to examine Marxism itself, and rejected many of its central doctrines.

The revolutionary movement was led by a number of different groups, such as Socialism ou Barbarie, Rouge et Noire, the Situationists and radical trade unions like the CFDT, which had originally been set up a social Catholic organisation separate from the socialist trade unions. There seems to have been no overarching ideology, and indeed the radicals explicitly rejected any ideology that sought to dictate the course of the revolution. Nevertheless, there were a set of key ideas and attitudes shared by these groups. This rejected all hierarchies, those of modern, capitalist society, the trade union leadership and the patriarchal family, as well as the education and university system. They adopted wholeheartedly Marx’s slogan that the emancipation of the working class should be done by the working class, while also creating new ideas responding to the new welfare state and affluent society.

The viewed Marxism and trade unionism as a response to the conditions of the 19^th century, when the working class had to concentrate on winning concessions from the capitalists and authorities in order to survive. However, the establishment of the welfare state had removed the threat of death and deprivation, and so the workers could now move on to the task of reforming society itself. The expanded Marx’s doctrine of alienation so that it didn’t just cover capitalism’s alienation of the worker from the goods he produced, and the latter’s fetishization, but also the alienation created by the affluent society. People’s real needs and desires were suppressed, and false needs created instead. Work should be playful, but instead the worker suffered boredom.

They also considered that there was a fundamental similarity between the capitalist west and the Soviet bloc, which resulted in them calling the USSR’s brand of state socialism ‘State capitalism’ in contrast to the ideal socialism in which society would be run by the workers. Communist rule in Russia had not liberated the workers, but instead created a new governing class. Unlike western capitalism, the Communist bureaucracy did not own the properties and industries they directed, but otherwise held the same power and privilege that in the west was held by the capitalist elites and industrialists. Changes in capitalism had also resulted in a cleavage between those who owned the companies, and those who directed and managed them. As a result, the struggle in the west was between workers and directors, not workers and owners. Soviet Communism was dubbed state capitalism as it was held the bureaucratic socialism of the USSR resembled that of western capitalism, the difference being that in the Soviet bloc all industries were owned by the state rather than private capitalists. One ideologue, Burnham, considered that Fascism and Communism were both examples of ‘state collectivism’, with the difference between the two being that private industry was retained under Fascism. Burnham was a vicious anti-Semite, and had previously urged the workers to unite with the Fascists against the Jews.

The radicals also rejected critical Marxist doctrines like dialectal materialism and its claim to have produced a science of capitalist development. In his later writings, Marx had believed that he had uncovered the sociological laws that would lead capitalism inevitably to give way to socialism. The Leftists rejected this because it was removed the voluntarist element from revolutionary activity. Instead of revolutionaries deliberately setting out to overturn capitalism and usher in the new socialist society, this attitude instead that all they needed to do was wait for it all to happen on its own. In their view, this attitude was closer to the evolutionary socialism of Bernstein than the Marxism of 1848. They rejected Lenin’s doctrine of a centralised party of active revolutionaries, because the workers on their own could only attain trade union consciousness. This, according to the Leftists, had resulted in a bureaucratic class that ruled over the workers, and was certainly not the vanguard of the working class as it was declared to be by Lenin. They did, however, believe in some kind of central party or organisation, but this would only be to guide and suggest possible ideas and actions, not to dictate a revolutionary programme. And all revolutionary ideas and policies should be subjected to the rigorous test of whether they worked in practice. If they did, they were true. If not, they were ‘ideology’, used in the same sense of Marx’s ‘false consciousness’. The revolutionary could only be carried out by the conscious will of the workers, as they became aware of their mission to reform society, independent of any ideas of social progress or objective historical conditions. There was therefore a radical subjective aspect to their conception of revolutionary activism in opposition to Marx’s ideas of historical progress according to object material conditions. Some of them also challenged Marxism-Leninism’s materialism, in which consciousness arose from matter and was merely matter reflecting itself. This got them attacked as ‘Idealists’ by the Communists.

They rejected the patriarchal family as an institution which brought up and trained the worker to accept hierarchical authority and his position in society as a worker, as well as the sexual repression that resulted from the prohibition of extra- and premarital sex. In fact, the student revolt that sparked the ferment started with a question about this by a student at the Sorbonne to a visiting government minister, who come to open the university’s swimming pool. The student also queried him about the university’s rules against male students entering the women’s halls. Well, as the poet once said, sexual intercourse was invented in 1963.

As for the institutions that should be used by the workers to govern politically and manage industry, there seems to have been a difference of ideas. Some, like the Dutch astronomer and Marxist Pannekoek, argued for worker’s councils like the German Raterevolution of 1919. Others refused to speculate, except to state that they should be created by the workers in response to the conditions of the time and the situations they were faced with. Regarding the conduct of the strikes, these were carried out through workers’ meetings on the shop floor, who would then elect a strike committee that would then take their grievances and demands to management. Some observers felt that this harked back to France’s native socialist and revolutionary traditions that predated Marx. The shop floor meetings were, in their view, related to that of the sections during the French Revolution.

Apart from these political and industrial ideas and aspirations, there were also a set of revolutionary ideas about the proper reform of the arts. These looked back to the attacks on official art by the Dadaists and Surrealists, but felt that they had failed in their mission to create an anti-art. They therefore looked forward to a new, revolutionary society in which everyone would be an artist or a poet.

Well, the revolutionary agitation passed with the sixties and first years of the 1970s. Wheen seems to suggest that it ended when one group was about to bomb a millionaire’s yacht but finally drew back. Nevertheless, the terrorism carried on over this side of La Manche with the IRA in Northern Ireland and in Britain by the Angry Brigade, an anarchist group. In France the anarchists, syndicalists and Anarcho-Syndicalists were largely excluded from the revolutionary movement. Some of this was due to the antagonism between anarchists and Marxists and to the isolation of the anarchist groups themselves. By 1968 these had declined in membership and largely confined themselves to keeping the flame alive and commemorating great anarchist revolutionaries of the past, such as the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno.

The revolutionary movement of 1968 is now over fifty years in the past, overtaken in Britain and America by Reagan and Thatcherism. These two started a political counterrevolution aimed at preventing such a situation ever happening again. The right-wing, if not reactionary philosopher, Roger Scruton, said in an interview in the Spectator that he had been a socialist. But he was in France during the revolutionary movement, and was horrified by their ‘anti-civilizational rage’. The ideologues of the period still have an influence in the radical left. People are still reading and gaining inspiration from Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, for example. I think they also exerted an influence on the anti-capitalist movement of the ‘90s and noughties. Their protests had a deliberate carnivalesque aspect, with costumed marches, puppets and so on, which seems to have drawn on the ideas of the Situationists and other revolutionaries.

I strongly believe, however, that the leftist rejection of the family has had a profoundly negative effect on western society. The Tory right loathes Roy Jenkins because of the socially liberal legislation he introduced in the late 60s Labour government. This decriminalised homosexuality and made divorce easier. Jenkins was certainly not as socially radical as the revolutionaries across the channel. In 1982 he, Shirley Williams and David Owen left the Labour party to form the SDP on the grounds that the party under Michael Foot was now too left wing. Still, the Daily Heil once denounced him as the man who had ruined Britain. Jenkins probably had completely different motives for his legislation than the Revolutionaries. In Britain the movement for the legalisation of homosexuality had started, or at least had the support, of Winston Churchill. Churchill had been worried about the danger of gay ministers, civil servants and others establishment figures being blackmailed by the Soviets because of their sexuality. As for divorce, I think this came from the humane desire to stop people being trapped in unhappy, loveless marriages, especially to brutal, violent partners. John Mortimer in his one-man show in the ‘90s recalled that before Jenkins’ reforms, the only cause for divorce was adultery. There was one man, who was so desperate to divorce his wife, that he came home in different hats so that people would think she was being unfaithful.

Unfortunately, there were radical activists, hostile to the institution of marriage and the traditional family. I can remember a pair who turned up on an edition of the lunchtime magazine programme Pebble Mill in the 1970s to present their views, much to the disgust of many of the programmes’ viewers. The result has been a rise in fatherless families. I am very much aware than many unmarried mothers have done an excellent job of raising their children, but the general picture is grim. Children from fatherless homes perform less well at school and get poorer, lower-paid jobs. They are more likely to turn to crime, do drugs and engage in promiscuous sex. Many Black activists are particularly concerned about this and the way these issues are especially acute in their community.

As for workers’ control, I would love a degree of it introduced into industry, but not to the exclusion of parliamentary democracy. And while the radicals have a point in that trade unions hierarchies have frequently acted to stifle revolutionary activism by the workers, trade unionism as a whole was tarnished by the wildcat strikes that broke out against the wishes of the union leadership. It’s resulted in the caricature of union activism presented by the Tories in which Britain was held hostage to the union barons and its economy and industry weakened by their strikes. We desperately need a revival of trade union power to protect workers, especially with Sunak and the rest of them preparing to scrap the EU legislation protecting workers’ rights.

And with an ever-growing number of people in Britain relying on food banks to stave off starvation, because the Tories have wrecked the welfare state, we’ve gone back to the early conditions of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when trade unionism and other forms of working class activism are very much a matter of survival.

On the plus side, I think the revolutionary movement has left a tradition of radical working class activism, which is no longer confined to either left or right. French working people seem much less willing to put up with government dictates than Brits, as shown in the Yellow Vest protests and the marches and riots against Macron raising the official retirement age. This has been admired by many Brits, including YouTube commenters and people on talk show phone-ins. We really need some of that spirit over this side of the Channel.

There is no doubt, from the position of democratic socialism, that the radicals went too far. Nevertheless, the continue to inspire members of the radical left with rather more moderate aims now protesting against predatory, exploitative capitalism, the exploitation of the environment, and racism, although this is not an issue that the book considers. Nevertheless, it was there, at least in the views and campaigns of post-structuralist Marxist activists.

New Scientist Announce Film Made by AI Art Programme – A Threat To Human Creativity?

I’ll admit I do enjoy looking at some of the videos on YouTube of art created by various AI programmes. Mostly there of the type ‘what if Star Wars, or another popular film or TV series was in the style of H.R. Giger or some other artist?’ It is fascinating to see what these machines produce. But I am also uncomfortable with the implications. The programmes produce fascinating, complex works of art without human agency, although they are based on the works of existing artists. Some have accused them of plagiarism, and there’s also the threat of unemployment to real, working human artists. I am also disquieted by the implications that artistic creativity may not be limited to humanity but can be produced by machines.

A few days ago, New Scientist announced that a film had been produced using these art programmes. It was about an AI trying to help the last survivor of humanity. I can remember that films of this sort were predicted nearly four decades ago in a late night TV series about the possibilities of computing presented or starring Jonathan Powell. One of its predictions was films produced without human actors. I don’t know if this new film has no real actors in it, or whether it still needs humans to produce the characters’ voices. But with the rise of deep fake movies, where it is nearly impossible to tell a computer-generated image from reality, it does seem to me that we are very near that particularly prediction about future movies. The Science Fiction film The Congress also suggested the same possibility a few years ago. This was a loose adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress, about an academic who finds himself transported into a decaying future, whose reality is disguised from the population by hallucinogenic drugs. The film, however, changes it so that the decaying society is a product of the mass use of a drug that produces a consensual hallucinatory world. The heroine is a real Hollywood actress, playing a version of herself, who signs away her image so that a series of movies are made starring her by computers, but which she isn’t actually in herself. The deep fakes are a sign that the technology is there to make this a possibility as well.

So while the film interests me, I am worried about what it implies for human art and the film industry, and whether they will be a casualty of the rise of such technology.

From Bristol With Love Tear into Julie Burchill

This appeared for me on YouTube on Sunday. From Bristol With Love appears to be, or have been, a radical blog based in Bristol. It declared itself to be a place for local music, local news and new way of local thinking. So, a local website for local people, to paraphrase the terrifying couple running the local shop in The League of Gentlemen. They display the anarchist/syndicalist flag, suggesting that their political sympathies lay with those brands of radical left-wing politics. And in this snippet of audio, posted on Durston Fletcher’s channel on YouTube, the tear into Julie Burchill.

And it’s entirely deserved.

Burchill’s a journalist and novelist, who comes from Brislington, one of the suburbs in south Bristol. It’s a mixture of residential housing and light industry, mostly now the big stores like Wicke’s. Burchill started out as a rock journalist on the NME when she answered their advert for a ‘hip young gunslinger’ to join them. She was also briefly married to another journalist and novelist, Nick Parsons, who was one of the panel discussing the week’s cultural highlights with Mark Lawson on Newsnight Review and then The Late Review. After that, she moved on to the lamestream press, writing demented pieces for the Heil on Sunday and the Spectator. For some reasons she considers herself some kind of communist. Private Eye put her remark, about how she and her then-lover, Charlotte Raven, spent their evenings crying over the fate of the workers, in ‘Pseud’s Corner’. It might be right, but nothing she has said suggests she has any real sympathy with radical left politics. Quite the opposite, in fact. She used to rave about Margaret Thatcher, privatisation and GM foods. At one time the Heil was trying to promote itself with adverts showing her and another noxious right-wing waster, the late John Junor. This showed two pencils being sharpened, one Burchill’s, one Junor’s, and was supposed to show two hacks with opposing views coming together. Politically there was nothing to choose between them. They both worshipped Thatcher. The only difference was their hatred and scorn for those of the opposite sex. Burchill’s column dripped venom about men, while Junor, from what I remember, sneered at women.

One of Burchill’s screeds from this time was particularly bonkers. She wrote a long piece in Hitler’s fave British paper declaring that the idealistic young men and women who joined the International Brigades to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War were, get this! the equivalent of the bloodthirsty British tourists who went to Spain to enjoy the bullfighting. It’s nonsense, and grossly offensive nonsense. People like the Gloucestershire poet Laurie Lee and the mighty George Orwell, along with countless others, joined up because they saw the spectre of the Fascist jackboot stamping on Europe’s face and wanted to stop it. They risked, and lost, life and limb fighting a brutal, merciless dictator. Many of those fighting Franco came from the radical left – anarchists, communists and more moderate socialists, like POUM, whom Orwell joined. But the regime for which they were fighting was liberal and democratic. Spain still has not recovered from the tortures and mass executions even now, and the excavation of the mass graves of those butchered by the monster is hotly contested by the Spanish Far Right. It makes you wonder just who Burchill would have supported back then.

Back in the ’90s Burchill also wrote a few bonkbuster novels, which were duly reviewed and criticised by Private Eye. She also joined the Groucho Club and its denizens among the media club, and became something of a massive drug hog if reports can be believed. According to Private Eye, once again, she once boasted of having stuck so much of the marching powder up her nose to stun the Colombian army. Since then she seems to have married again, to a man, and now lives with her family in Brighton. But she still pops her head up now and then.

In this bit of audio, the two hosts talk about how their mother’s can’t stand her, how she left Bristol when she was thirty, and used to come down to the city for the Punk gigs. Where she claimed about the place being full of liberals and middle class Trotskyites. Well, yes, they were about in Bristol. You used to see the adverts for Socialist Worker posted up on one of the bridges coming into Temple Meads, and there was a bloke selling it outside the railway station. They might still be around now, although in recent decades Class War and Bristol Anarchist Federation seem to have become more high profile. But it would be a bit of stretch to say that Bristol was full of them. She also, apparently, sneered at how unsophisticated we plebs down here in the West Country were when it came to drugs. According to them, she was amazed that if you asked a girl in Bristol if you could borrow her mirror, she thought it was because you wanted to touch up your make up. As opposed to snort coke off it. Oh, the naivete. Depending on where you go, that may not be quite the case now, unfortunately. But clean living and avoiding an addictive drug that rots your nose are hardly things to sneer at.

One of them also tells a story he heard from a woman in a pub about Burchill frightening a rat to death. The woman was at some kind of party Burchill was holding. Burchill retreated into her kitchenette to snort coke off her mirror, only to find a rat dangerously near it. She chased the rat into a corner, the rat adopted an aggressive, fighting posture, Burchill did the same, and the rat dropped dead of a heart attack, scared to death by her.

If that story can be believed, Burchill’s too toxic even for vermin. And she’s still a disgrace to Bristol.

Governor of California Discussing Paying Reparations for Slavery

Last week Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, proposed that the state should pay reparations for slavery. This would consist in a payment of $220,000 to Black Californians descended from slaves. Newsom had previous passed or proposed legislation for the payment of a monthly amount to homeless trans people for a fixed term of one year. This was because there was a disproportionate number of trans people living on the streets, and the payment was to allow them to begin to purchase or rent a home. Newsom’s proposal to pay reparations for slavery was discussed by the Lotus Eaters over here and there’s a video by Black Conservative Perspective in America criticising it. The Black Conservative was not impressed, calling it divisive and playing a clip of Black speakers before the California state legislature or whatever demanding more. One man wanted the payment to be in a fixed amount of gold for each enslaved ancestor. An angry man wearing the red fez and tie of the Nation of Islam ranted about how God had a particular hatred of America and if the money wasn’t paid, He’d destroy the country with an asteroid or something. The Black Conservative considered that these payments would be inflationary, that the money would go on cars and cocaine, and that it would never be enough. People would always come back asking for more.

These are legitimate criticisms. Simon Webb, of History Debunked, made a video attacking the reparations for slavery campaign a few months or so ago. He also thought that it would cause racial divisions rather than solve them, and illustrated it with this example. Say there were two people living next to each other, in identical houses and with the same amount of wealth, but one was Black and the other White. If the Black man received £40,000 simply as compensation for his ancestors being enslaved but not for anything he personally had done, it would cause the White man to become resentful. It might not be true everywhere and of every White person – some may well share the opinion that it’s right Blacks descended from slaves should receive reparations for the suffering of their ancestors. But many others may well become extremely resentful. It could easily result in insults, abuse and worse. When Bristol city council passed a motion a year ago calling for the payment of reparations, Deputy Mayor and head of Equalities Asher Craig received an enormous amount of abusive messages.

I’m also sure that the Black Conservative also has a point about some of the prospective recipients squandering the money. I don’t doubt that some Blacks would use the money wisely to improve conditions for themselves and their children. But I can also see others wasting the money on expensive luxuries, like top of the range cars. There have been a number of stories in the past about people who’ve won millions on the National Lottery and who’ve then spent it all with nothing to show for it so that they’re back as poor as before. This has been done by people regardless of race, White and Black alike. I am also afraid that if these sums were paid, the gangster element in the Black community would use it to expand their violence and drug dealing, as criminals of any colour would if suddenly given a massive cash boost. Perhaps some would use it to leave the gangs and crime behind and try and establish themselves as respectable, law-abiding citizens. You’d hope so. But I think rather more criminals would simply use it to finance more of their destructive lifestyle, which would cause further damage to the Black community. And I am also afraid that whatever was paid would never be enough, and that they would always come back for more.

Thomas Sowell in one of his books argued against slavery reparations. He felt that the people, who were victimised and responsible for it are now dead, and so beyond our ability to help or punish. He also argued that whatever profits America had made from slavery had vanished in the bloodbath of the American Civil War. Furthermore, the guilt for something as terrible as slavery could not be absolved simply by paying money. He also made the point that no society could survive a moral viewpoint in which it had to be constantly criticising itself and paying compensation for the acts of the past. I think these are excellent points.

When Bristol passed its motion calling for reparations, the practical measures made it seem more like a call for further affirmative action for the Black British community as a whole justified through the connection to slavery. The motion ruled out payments to individuals. Instead they should be paid to Black-led organisations which would work to improve conditions and create sustainable, prosperous Black communities. All Blacks were to benefit from this, not just those of Afro-Caribbean or slave origin. While it’s better than Newsom’s proposal in providing for their real, collective benefit of the Black community rather than just the compensation of individuals, there are real moral problems with this as well. By including all Black, it also makes the British state morally responsible for people we did not enslave and who may themselves be descendants of the very slavers who sold their human cargo to us. It also ignores the fact that other nations, like the Arabs and Indians, were also involved in the African slave trade and the fact that White Europeans, including Brits, were also the victims of enslavement in the Turkish conquest of the Balkans and the Barbary pirates. I sent email messages to Craig and Cleo Lake, the Green councillor who proposed the motion, but got no reply. This, in my opinion, shows their absolute contempt for those challenging the notion.

In the British context, it could be argued that any profits Britain acquired from the slave trade were spent on our efforts to stamp it out through the activities of the British West African squadron and its patrols as well as a wider campaign against slaving and slavery during the Empire. There is also the problem that some of the countries responsible for kidnapping slaves also want reparations paid to them, even though some of their chiefs became extremely rich from the trade’s profits. The Caribbean nations, or some of them, have also demanded reparations. Some of this has been to deflect attention from the failings of their own rulers, while I don’t doubt that the venal kleptocrats are looking at a source of further money they can steal and loot. There’s also a question of the amount paid. Britain paid £20 million in compensation to the slaveowners at abolition, something that has been bitterly resented by some Black activists, just as it was by some abolitionists at the time. This translates into billions in today’s money and we only stopped paying it off a few years ago. If we were to pay a commensurate amount today, I think it would bankrupt us. And I can’t see that being to anyone’s benefit in Britain.

So far I think Newsom is on his own on this issue, and it remains to be seen whether he goes ahead with it. But this could be one issue to watch, as it’s possible other states will take it up, as well as activists over here.

Brave New World Comes Closer as Company Launches Concept of Artificial Womb Facility

This is really chilling. Interesting Engineering, a YouTube channel devoted to news about cutting edge science and technology, put up a piece today about a company, EctoLife, launching the concept of a mass artificial womb facility, that could produce 30,000 births a year. The channel said that the use of the term ‘produce’ was deliberate, as the company also intends to have tools that would allow parents to customise their children.

For more information, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEuiOszNd6msGgqsD0f9YAQ/community?lb=Ugkxv37SPqDJAmrUqHasXxF3p0NVguxZewuj.

This is really chilling, as it seems some moron has read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and thought it was a good idea. Huxley’s SF classic is set in a community 200 years after the Fordist Revolution. The family has been abolished and children are born from hatcheries, genetically manipulated and conditioned for their predetermined roles in society. Sex is purely recreational, and parental terms like ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are considered obscenities and unspeakable insults if directed at people. Drugs are used recreationally, and it’s a hedonistic culture directed towards pleasure in which genuine cultural progress has ceased, and art, literature and so on aren’t valued. I think it’s been filmed at least twice. There was a miniseries in the 1980s/90s, if I remember correctly, and another TV version at the beginning of this century.

People have been predicting the development of artificial wombs for a long time. Way back around 1984/5 the Observer ran a piece about them and what they would mean for the people born from them. They were also included in one of the articles speculating about future scientific discoveries and how they would impact humans in a 1990s issue of Scientific American. This included a photo of goat embryos being grown in a lab.

There are any number of ethical issues about this. The most immediate is the divorce of human reproduction from biology. I can see how the development of such techniques could help those women, who want children but are physically unable to carry a child. But this also raises the spectre of the mass industrial production of humans, the withering away or abolition of the traditional family and its replacement by the company or the state, as well as the genetic engineering of humans to suit the wishes of the parents. This is really dark, dystopian stuff, and recalls some of the fears that were discussed with the development of test-tube children back in the 1970s.

On the other hand, I do wonder if this is actually a serious proposition. A number of companies have announced very ambitious scientific schemes in the past. Back in the 90s once again, one American company declared it was seriously interested in developing a space elevator. That’s a giant lift that would take capsules up into space so they could be launched using far less energy than on Earth. That’s an idea made famous by Arthur C. Clarke in his book The Fountains of Paradise. It also needs far tougher materials than are available at present. In order to withstand the immense weight and stresses, the elevator would need to be made of a material 80 times stronger than steel. There have been interesting developments in the creation of tough carbon fibres, but at the present level of technology the construction of such an edifice is impossible. There was a piece in one of the popular science mags, I think it may have been New Scientist, in which the author predicted that we’d see space elevators in perhaps two or three decades’ time, given recent progress. Well, perhaps. But I’m still sceptical, just as I’m sceptical about this ever becoming a reality. Note that they’re talking about ‘concept’ rather than reality. That says to me that this may well be just hype, and they’re actually a long way away from creating it.

Explaining Simon Webb: History, Race and the Manipulation of History

Several of the great commenters on this blog have questioned why I have put up so many pieces about Simon Webb. Gillyflowerblog in particular asked how anyone, who called himself a socialist, could follow Webb in some of his assertions. It’s a fair question, and deserves an answer. Webb is a Torygraph-reading man of the right. He is staunchly opposed to immigration and multiculturalism, which he regards as destroying traditional British culture. He believes that racial differences in IQ are real and based in genetics, citing scientific papers showing that Black people have more of the genetic markers for schizophrenia than Whites. I’ve no doubt that this is true, but schizophrenia is not intelligence. Furthermore, a greater biological inclination to schizophrenia does not necessarily rule out environmental factors. A mentally vulnerable person may remain psychologically well in the absence of emotional stresses that could drive them over the edge. If there are more Black people needing treatment for psychological problems, it may be because of the particular stresses faced by the Black community, such as poverty, greater unemployment, lower educational and career prospects, racism and the destruction of the Black family and the violent drug gangs operating in many Black communities.

Genetic Basis for Racial IQ Differences Questionable, If Not Disproven

He also believes, almost needless to say, in the bell-curve nonsense, in which Blacks are genetically less intelligent than White, who are genetically not as bright as Asians. In fact Thomas Sowell, who talks favourably about the book, has demolished some of its arguments. There’s no difference in average intelligence between Whites and Asians. The tests that showed it used out of date and biased IQ tests, which skewed the results. However, Asians peoples like the Chinese and Japanese do perform above the level of Whites with the same IQ score. As for Blacks, the average Black IQ is 85, but this is the same or actually better than many White groups when they started IQ testing. Jews, who are now judged one of the most intelligent sections of society, also had the same IQ level, as did various peoples from southern and south-eastern Europe. Their IQs have risen, and so the unspoken implication is that there is no reason why Black IQs shouldn’t. Individual Blacks may score extremely highly. One example is a nine year old Black girl, who had an IQ of 160-80 on one set of tests, and something very close or above 200 on another. Black children raised with White families, such as the mixed race children of German civilians and Black American troopers in the army of occupation after the First World War, had the same IQs as Whites. There are cultural and environmental factors behind the lagging Black IQ, it seems, rather than genes. Although even if there is genetic cause, Black educational performance can still be raised simply by improving teaching methods.

Causes of Economic and Political Crises in African Countries after Independence

Webb has also published videos looking back to a year in the 60s when he claims everybody was talking about repatriation and discussing the decline of South Africa after the abolition of apartheid, and the collapse of Zimbabwe in starvation and dictatorship under Black majority rule. To be fair, this is part of a general trend in African nations after they gain independence. Sowell talks about this in Conquests and Cultures, showing that in all too many cases the economies of the newly independent colonies declines, sometimes catastrophically. This is because the indigenous Africans who take over don’t have the cultural capital and technical skill to run these countries. Sowell has also argued in various videos that the collapse of democracy in many of these nations and their descent into dictatorships is because they haven’t had time during the period of White rule to absorb properly the conqueror’s democratic institutions and traditions. This is probably true, but I’m not sure how much democracy there was in practice when these nations were under the rule of colonial governors. And Webb’s videos on South Africa and Zimbabwe look like nostalgia for White rule and the social order in these countries when Blacks were inferior and knew their place.

He appears also to be a small government Conservative, who says he wouldn’t vote for either Labour or the Conservatives, and laments their supposedly high-spending policies. He is sceptical of the rise of mental illness and the number of people claiming disability for it, presumably feeling, like so many of the right do, that these people should just pull themselves together. Until, of course, it happens to them or the people in their class. Then it’s different.

Webb and Black History

But Webb’s specific focus is on history and debunking what he considers to be historical falsehoods. These are, almost totally, those of Black history. But I do wonder if Webb wasn’t at one time an idealistic anti-racist. I think he’s said that at one time he may have had a Black girlfriend, and among his friends are a number of Black ladies, whom he’s helping home school their children. He’s put up pictures of himself surround by Black children, so I don’t believe he’s racist in his personal relationships. He’s also no anti-Semite, and has posted a number of videos attacking anti-Semitic conspiracy theories such as the lie that the Jews are responsible for mass non-White immigration in order to destroy the White race. One of his most recent videos examines the origins of anti-Semitism. He also defends Israel and its claim to Palestine. He is also not an opponent of Islam as a religion. Another video he posted has as its title the description of Christianity and Islam as two aspects of a single jewel. He states that when he was home schooling his daughter, he took her to various places of worship, including a mosque. All this drives the Nazis and anti-Semites who comment on his videos right up the wall as they call for him to join Patriotic Alternative. Or suggest that he must be Jewish himself, or promoting their propaganda.

As to whatever made him like he is now, I wonder if it was simply the pressure of living in one of the deprived, Black majority areas of London. He seems to know places like Haringey extremely well, talking about how murders were extremely common there at one time as well as the problems caused when one of the local police forces declared they weren’t going to arrest people for cannabis possession. This, he states, resulted in drug dealers running up to people’s cars and banging on the roofs to get attention. If this did happen, along with the other problems of crime and violence, then perhaps seeing the very worst aspects of parts of the Black community eroded all the youthful idealism and anti-racism.

He has published videos denying that some of the great African cultures should properly be regarded as civilisations, because they had no written language, philosophy or science. They are not monuments to Black achievement in his eyes, because very many of them were based on the culture of Arab colonists. And the various histories of Black inventions are riddled with lies and appropriate the scientific achievements of Whites.

Genuinely Great and Forgotten Figures of British Black History

He wasn’t always quite so focused on race. An early video simply discusses the reasons the British shelled their cities during the Second World War. Another video asks whether the Victorians really were all that racist, citing as an example an Indian rajah who became a Tory MP. This could easily be a legitimate part of the Black history activists wish to be taught in schools. Much of this is about rediscovering and reclaiming lost Black historical figures. The classic example is the nurse Mary Seacole, but others include the son of a British planter and a Caribbean slave, who had a glittering political career and ended up as the Lord Lieutenant of one of the Welsh counties. This gentleman was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 programme a few years ago, though I’m afraid I’ve since forgotten his name. But those interested might be able to find him by Googling.

The Great Civilisations of Black Africa

As for Black African civilisations, it’s true that many were culturally influenced from elsewhere. The ancient Sudanese, for example, took over much of ancient Egyptian culture, including the use of hieroglyphs. These people invaded the Land of the Nile several times to claim the throne as pharaohs, before eventually being overthrown in their turn and expelled. They built pyramid monuments for their dead, and were a literate culture. Unfortunately their language was not related to any that have survived today, and there is no Rosetta Stone giving their ancient texts in their language and those which are known, thus allowing the language to deciphered. Scholars are therefore in the frustrating situation of being able to read their inscriptions, but have no idea what they say. We’re faced with a similar situation regarding the ancient civilisation of Meroe, also in that part of Africa.

Many of the great civilisations of Africa were part of the Islamic world. These included Mali in West Africa, and the Swahili in what is now Tanzania. I think their written language was Arabic, in the same way that medieval European civilisations used Latin as the language of religion, government, philosophy, history and science. But that doesn’t detract from their achievements or the sophistication of these cultures. Medieval books from the library of Timbuktu’s madrassa shows that the scholars there were copying and studying scientific texts from the wider Muslim world. One Black historian presenting a programme on Black African civilisation showed such a book. This had a diagram, which she was told showed that Muslims in the region knew that the Earth went round the sun. That’s entirely possible. One of the ancient Greek scholars presented an alternative to the geocentric universe of Ptolemy, in which the Earth did revolve around the sun. But all the other planets still revolved around the Earth. In east Africa, the Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre languages in Ethiopia are based on the south Arabian language introduced by settlers from that part of Arabia. But even if that part of modern Ethiopian culture isn’t indigenous to the continent, it still doesn’t detract from the achievements of Ethiopian civilisation.

All Civilisations Advance by Borrowing from Each Other

Back again to Thomas Sowell, who states very clearly that cultures across the world borrow from each other. Europeans, for example, adopted gunpowder and paper from China and the numbers system, wrongly called Arabic, from India. Europe was able to rise because of its geography. The east-west nature of the Eurasian landmass meant that inventions in one part of it, such as China or the Middle East, could easily pass to other parts. Thus Europe was able to benefit by adopting and improving on inventions produced by other peoples. Africa lagged behind because it was cut off from the rest of the world by oceans on three sides and the Sahara desert on the north. There were few navigable rivers, so that trade and communication was difficult, unlike in western Europe, where there were many so trade, and hence industrialisation and economic development was easier, along with the passage of ideas and culture. Africa also suffered from highly variable rainfall, which can make agriculture and sailing on the navigable rivers difficult. In some places the soil is unsuited to agriculture, thus making it suitable only as pasturage for nomadic peoples, who are able to move on to better, more fertile land after it becomes exhausted. And the disease environment makes it unsuitable for pack and draught animals, unlike Europe. Goods therefore have to be carried by porters, which is much more expensive than horse or river transport. This also limits the value of goods that may be transported. Because these high costs, only very valuable goods could thus be transported across land. Which probably explains why Africa’s exports tended to be gold, ivory and slaves. Africa was held back, not by any lack of intelligence by its people, but simply because of the isolation created by its physical environment, just as nations and countries elsewhere were similarly aided or held back in their social and economic development by the same geographical factors, even if they were on other continents.

Also, some of the cultures that did not have a written literature could nevertheless be extremely sophisticated. I read somewhere that in one of the African city states, members of it aristocracy would engage in a ceremony in which they would perform a ritual dance accompanied by music. At various intervals they were expected to stop, and point to one of the city’s 17 shrines. If they didn’t point accurately, it would bring disgrace. But Webb is right in that Europeans took some time before they recognised some of the states as civilisations, not just from cultural prejudice but because of the differences between African and European ideas of civilisation. For example, several of the cities Europeans believed were the capitals of these kingdoms weren’t centres of government in the European sense. They were religious centres, which might be abandoned for most of the year.

Falsehoods and Mythmaking in Black History

But if some of his history is wrong or questionable, I think he has a point with others. There are problems with the accuracy of part of Black history writing. This can be seen at some of its most extreme in Afrocentric literature. This can range from claims that are controversial, but which can nevertheless be defended, to racist fabrications. At its heart, Afrocentrism holds that ancient Egypt was a Black civilisation and that it laid the basis for subsequent western culture. It’s a fair question whether the Egyptians were Black. They certainly depicted the men as reddish brown in colour and the women as yellow, in contrast to Europeans, who were painted pink. Herodotus describes them as Black. As for their influence on European culture, Basil Davidson in one his books states that he took the view because this is what the Greeks and Romans believed. On the other hand, the ancient Egyptians also show Caucasian heritage and the Greeks seem to have taken much of their mathematical and scientific knowledge from the ancient near east, and particularly Phrygia in what is now Turkey. However, some Afrocentrists have gone on to argue that ancient Egypt also conquered the rest of Black Africa, where they were responsible for all its peoples’ cultural achievements, and that the original peoples of Britain, China and just about everywhere else were also Black, based on long discredited 19th century White writers.

And there are severe questions about other Black history writing. Webb put up a video last week criticising the claim that the phrase ‘the real McCoy’ was based on a 19th century Black engineer, citing Brewer’s History of Phrase and Fable. I’ve come across the same assertion in a book Black Pioneers of Science and Invention. This also claimed that the refrigerator was also a Black invention and that open heart surgery was invented by a Black doctor over here during the Second World War. This man performed an emergency operation on a man injured during the Blitz. Webb denies that he invented the operation, but states that he was the first to perform it in Britain. Which is still a proud achievement. Not as spectacular as inventing it, but still very impressive.

Mary Seacole – No Nurse, But Pioneering Black Female Entrepreneur

And then there’s the matter of Mary Seacole. For many Blacks, she was a pioneer of modern nursing equal to Florence Nightingale. To her detractors, she was a businesswoman who went to the Crimea to open a hotel for the British officers. She may have done a bit of nursing on the side, but that wasn’t the real purpose of her time there. Webb sides with the latter view, citing her autobiography. And again, I think he’s right. But that doesn’t mean that Seacole should be written off as a lost Black historical heroine. Even if she wasn’t a nurse, she’s still important as an entrepreneur. For Black Conservatives like Sowell, what Blacks need is not state handouts, but to develop the entrepreneurial skills to enable them to allow them to rise economically and socially, as other ethnic groups like the Jews, Chinese, and Japanese have also done. You don’t have to be a Conservative opponent of state aid and the welfare state to adopt such a view. The motion put before Bristol city council the other year by the Labour deputy mayor Asher Craig and Green party councillor Cleo Lake for the payment of reparations for slavery wanted such monies to be given to Black organisations to develop self-reliant and sustainable prosperous Black communities. Which entails encouraging and supporting Black entrepreneurs in those communities.

Invented and Exaggerated History A Response to Continued Racism and Exclusion

In many ways I’m not surprised that various Black writers have made exaggerated claims for Black civilisations and Black inventiveness. They aren’t alone in appropriating great figures from other ethnic groups. Mussolini, for example, claimed that Shakespeare was Italian. Well, some of the Bard’s plays, like Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet are set in Italy, but I think this may partly reflect the dominance of Italian renaissance culture. Some of the claims about historic Black communities in Britain, which present them as far larger and more numerous than they probably were, seem to me to be an attempt to assert their right to live in this country in the face of still being regarded as somehow foreign and not really belonging. I’ve met Black people, who do feel like that. They were ordinary people with White friends, and not angry radicals. And the promotion of Black cultures and civilisations as sophisticated and advanced seems to me to be partly a reaction to the previous generations of historians and academics, who dismissed them completely. It makes depressing reading going through the book Colour and Colour Prejudice by the last governor of Ghana and seeing one scholar after another make this assertion.

Black Commenters also Against Memorialisation of Violent Thugs as Victims

I also think Webb has a very serious point when he questions some of the assertions and memorialisation of Black persecution. For example, David Olasuga and Reni Edo Lodge were present at a ceremony a few years ago, where a memorial was laid at the docks in memory of Philip Wootton, who was a victim of lynching in the 1919 race riots. Except it seems from contemporary newspaper accounts that Wootton was a violent thug involved in fighting between a group of West Indian, Swedish and Russian sailors. During this a policeman was stabbed several times and there was an attempt to garrotte him. The West Indian gang shot several times at the police after fleeing back to their lodgings. Wootton attempted to escape out the backdoor, but was spotted and pursued by an angry mob towards the docks, where he slipped and fell in. This is very different from the victims of other lynchings, like young men who were killed for having a White girlfriend, or who spoke insolently to a White man.

For some Blacks, violent thugs like Wootton should definitely not be defended or promoted by the Black community. One of the Black American YouTubers got very angry and tearful about the BLM protests last week against the shooting of Tekle Sundberg. Sundberg had had some kind of episode and started shooting through his apartment wall, trying to kill a young mother and her two children. Fortunately the woman and kids were able to flee. The cops turned up and after a six hour stand-off, shot him dead. His adoptive White mother tearfully claimed that it was a racist shooting, as White perps would have had longer to comply. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter turned up and started a protest to the justifiable fury of Sundberg’s intended victim. The Black YouTuber commenting on this angrily denounced BLM for celebrating criminals like Sundberg. This, he believed, was why everyone else looked down on Blacks.

Checking Reni Edo Lodge about Medical Experimentation on Blacks

As for Reni Edo Lodge, Webb stated that in one of her books she claims that Blacks in Britain were experimented upon and denied medical treatment. This is a serious claim and deserves to be investigated. It did happen in America. I’ve seen YouTube posts about the horrendous experimentation on pregnant Black women by a particular 19th century surgeon. In the ’90s there was outrage when government files released under the Freedom of Information Act showed that the American state had been conducting nuclear experiments on the poor and people of colour with neither their knowledge or consent. In the same decade, the American conspiracy journal, Steamshovel Press, carried an article by one man, who stated that he found Black Americans more likely to believe that AIDS was a germ warfare experiment escaped from Fort Dettrick because of the Tuskegee experiment. This was a nasty medical experiment in which a group of Black sharecroppers were infected with syphilis and denied treatment in order to investigate the disease’s spread. In return their funerals were paid for and their families looked after.

I am not aware that any similar experiments were done over here, apart from the nuclear tests on British servicemen, which wasn’t, I believe, racial. If such experiments didn’t happen, then Lodge is writing fake history. Dangerous fake history – it’s addressed to an audience that already keenly feels that British Blacks have been victimised and persecuted, and such claims only exacerbate such feelings. As if the terrible conditions in many Black communities aren’t bad enough already without inventing even more abuse and discrimination. That’s why I wrote to Lodge’s agent last week requesting Lodge to state where she got these claims from. If she can support them with government documents or properly researched secondary literature, well and good. I’ll support her claims. But if she can’t, then she’s manufacturing false history and in doing so actually making race relations worse.

Conclusion

This is why I’m interested in some of Webb’s videos. History is important, which is why there is so much interest now in Black history. It’s an attempt to recover forgotten Black politicians, nobles, writers and inventors in order to provide role models for contemporary Blacks, in the hope that this will inspire them to do better at school, and in the outside world.

But this has to be good, truthful history, whoever writes it. Otherwise, even if it’s being written with the best of intentions, it’s just propaganda. And that’s wrong, whether done by Whites, Blacks or whoever.

Pro-Paedophile Group K13 Marches in Cologne 2022 Pride Parade

This is deeply worrying, and should never have been allowed to happen. But before I start, just in case people get the wrong impression, I want to make it very clear: I am not trying demonise gays or transpeople with this post. The only people I wish to demonise are the individuals, gay or straight, who wish to legalise child abuse.

The feminist writer and campaigner Genevieve Gluck has written a piece in the feminist magazine, Reduxx, about the inclusion of the pro-paedophile group Krumme 13, or K13, in the 2022 Cologne Pride march. Krumme is German for ‘Crooked’, so perhaps it’s the German colloquial equivalent of the English word ‘bent’ in the sense of gay. K13 is a nasty organisation that campaigns for the legalisation of paedophilia as a protected sexual identity, because banning it is ‘Fascistic’. No, banning paedophilia has zilch to do with Fascism and everything to do with common decency and protecting kids from evil predators. And if you want to talk about child abusers and Fascism, there are any number of them within Fascist organisations. One of the Mussolini’s squadristi, Starace, was a massive drug dealer and child abuser. And a year or so ago one of the British Nazis was packed off to the slammer for his vicious anti-Semitism and paedophilia. Gluck’s article talks about the way the groups subdivides into various categories the various forms of sexual attraction for underage children of different ages. She talks about the organisation’s leaders’ arguments for legalisation child abuse, how the majority of pro-paedophile organisations seem to be in the Netherlands – oh, if the Dutch could be just a little less tolerant in this regard! – the views of respectable sexologists condemning K-13’s leader. She also discusses the infamous Kentler experiment, in which I think the West Berlin social services handed orphaned kids over to child molesters for adoption in order to stop them growing up into Nazis. It seems to me that doing that to children would result in the absolute reverse: that the abused kids would develop a justifiably very bitter hatred of the left. And also extremely worrying is the support for the legalisation of paedophilia in the German Green Party. She also describes how there were moves to legalise it in Germany in the 1970s, which were only fought by the journos and activists of the feminist magazine, Emma.

See: https://reduxx.info/pro-pedophilia-activists-marched-for-equal-rights-at-2022-cologne-pride/

This is very much what the critics of the gay and trans movement are afraid of, and have been using in their propaganda against the left in general. The Lotus Eaters put up a piece about supposed support for legalising child abuse in the left, noting that one senior female member of the British Labour party was a member of the Council for Civil Liberties in the ’70s when it supported its legalisation. They also included in this the infamous German experiment, all presented as indicative of how the Left supported paedophilia as part of supporting the gay and trans movements.

Except that the mass of Labour supporters don’t. I can’t think of anyone in the Labour party who would support the legalisation of child abuse. And from what I gather, the gay rights movement was able to make such spectacular progress over here in the 1980s because they purged the paedophiles and made a clear distinction between themselves and paedophile groups like PIE, the Paedophile Information Exchange. And the article states clearly that the majority of paedophiles are heterosexual, but the gay child abusers are being used to spearhead the campaign for legalisation because their gayness already makes them a member of protected category that has suffered abuse and persecution.

Unfortunately, there are academics outside Germany who want to see it legalised. One of these, a lecturer in Queer Studies or something similar at an American university, was put on gardening leave and the subject of student protests after he advocated legalising it, speaking online with the leader of a pro-paedophile organisation. And then there’s the popular outrage at Drag Queen Story Hour and the way young children have been taken to gay clubs for sexually explicit drag performances, supposedly as part of promoting tolerance towards trans people.

The great commenters on this blog have pointed out that the vast majority of ordinary trans people just want to lead a normal, quiet life, free of abuse and vilification. I am sure they’re right. Just as I am sure the great majority of ordinary gay people are revolted by paedophilia and any campaign to legalise it.

But it does seem that there is a tiny minority of people who are trying to use the hard-won tolerance and acceptance given to gay and trans people to promote their vile sexual inclinations. We have to vigilant here, whether we’re gay, straight, trans or whatever, to guard against these people and they way they’re attempts to legalise paedophilia are being used by the right to smear the left as a whole.

The Asian Religious Groups Who Defended Sarah Champion’s Remarks about the Grooming Gangs

Sarah Champion was the Labour MP for Rochdale, who was forced to resign from the front bench after writing a piece in the Scum stating that the grooming gangs were made up of Pakistani men. Which they largely have been, though not exclusively. Champion was, however, defended by Sara Rowbotham, the council whistleblower who exposed the gangs and there was a letter in the Times by members of the Sikh, Hindu and British Pakistani communities defending her and applauding a female Muslim councillor, who also worked to bring these scumbags to justice. I found this report from the Huffington Post UK by Owen Bennett from the 5th September 2017. It begins

‘Religious Groups Defend Sarah Champion For Claim UK Has A ‘Problem’ With Pakistani Rapists

‘Victims are being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.’

A number of Sikh, Hindu and British Parkistani groups have come to the defence of a Labour MP who claimed “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.”

In a letter to The Times today, representatives of the groups – including Lord Singh of Wimbledon – praised Sarah Champion for taking a “courageous stand” in highlighting “a clear trend in criminality.”

The letter also accused the Labour leadership of having a “weak response” to the issue of grooming gangs.

Champion was sacked from Labour’s Shadow Cabinet after making the comments in an article for The Sun, but in an interview last weekend she defended her words, saying the “floppy left” in her party were too scared of being accused of racism to tackle child sexual exploitation carried out by grooming gangs.

In a letter today, representatives of groups including the Network of Sikh Organisations, the British Pakistani Christian Association and Hindu Council UK, said: “We commend Sarah Champion and the Muslim councillor Amina Lone for speaking up on a clear trend in criminality: the conviction of men of largely Pakistani Muslim heritage in sexual grooming cases.

“Despite being sacked from the shadow cabinet, Champion continues to make a courageous stand.”

The letter argues that it’s not just “white girls who fall victim” to grooming gangs, but youngsters from their respective communities.

“The common denominator is that victims almost always tend to be non-Muslim girls,” the letter reads , adding: “We are dismayed by the Labour leadership’s weak response.

“We are not willing to see the betrayal of victims, who are being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.

“It’s not racist or Islamophobic to raise a matter of significant public concern. Smearing those speaking an inconvenient truth is unacceptable.”’

For more information, see https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/sarah-champion-grooming-gangs_uk_59ae77c2e4b0dfaafcf255ef

This does indicate that there’s a religious component to the grooming gangs predations. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten either that whatever Tommy Robinson, Britain First or whoever else says, these men were definitely not practicing Muslims. Not when they were into drugs and alcohol, which are definitely forbidden to Muslims, and their crimes have nothing to do with Muslim sex slavery. They were just evil men, preying on the vulnerable, as rapists and child abusers among all races and religions do.

And despite the Tories’ divide and rule strategy, it was Labour MPs who stood up for these girls and who had the backing of a wide section of the Asian community.

A Liberal Muslim’s Journey through Islamic Britain and the Dangers of Muslim Separatism

Ed Hussain, Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain (London: Bloomsbury 2021)

Ed Hussain is a journalist and the author of two previous books on Islam, the House of Islam, which came out in 2018, and The Islamist of 2007. He’s also written for a series of newspapers and magazines, including the Spectator, the Telegraph, the Times, the New York Times and the Guardian. He’s also appeared on the Beeb and CNN. He’s an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and has been a member of various think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations. The House of Islam is an introduction to Islamic history and culture from Mohammed onwards. According to the blurb, it argues that Islam isn’t necessarily a threat to the West but a peaceful ally. The Islamist was his account of his time in Hizb ut-Tahrir, a militant Islamic organisation dedicated to restoring the caliphate. This was quoted in Private Eye, where a passage in the book revealed that the various leaders Tony Blair appealed to as part of his campaign against militant, extremist Islam weren’t the moderates they claimed to be, but the exact type of people Blair was trying to combat. Among the Mosques continues this examination and critical scrutiny of caliphism, the term he uses to describe the militant to set up the caliphate. This is an absolute Islamic state, governed by a caliph, a theocratic ruler, who is advised by a shura, or council. This, however, would not be like parliament as only the caliph would have the power to promulgate legislation. Hussain is alarmed at how far this anti-democratic ideology has penetrated British Islam. To find out, he travelled to mosques across Britain – Dewsbury, Manchester, Blackburn, Bradford, Birmingham and London in England, Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland, the Welsh capital Cardiff, and Belfast in Northern Ireland. Once there, he goes to the local mosques unannounced, observes the worshippers, and talks to them, the imams and other local people. And he’s alarmed by what he sees.

Caliphism Present in Mosques of Different Sects

The mosques he attends belong to a variety of Islamic organisations and denominations. Dewsbury is the centre of the Deobandi movement, a Muslim denomination set up in Pakistan in opposition to British imperialism. Debandis worship is austere, rejecting music, dance and art. The Barelwi mosque he attends in Manchester, on the hand, is far more joyful. The Barelwis are based on an Indian Sufi preacher, who attempted to spread Islam through music and dance. Still other mosques are Salafi, following the fundamentalist brand of Islam that seeks to revive the Islam of the salaf, the Prophet’s companions, and rejects anything after the first three generations of Muslims as bid’a, innovations. But across these mosques, with a few exceptions, there is a common strand of caliphism. The Deobandi order are concerned with the moral reform and revival of Muslim life and observance, but not political activism, in order to hasten the emergence of the caliphate. Similar desires are found within the Tableegh-e Jama’at, another Muslim revivalist organisation founded in Pakistan. This is comparable to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Christianity, in that its method of dawa, Muslim evangelism, is to knock on lax Muslims’ doors and appealing to them become more religious. It’s a male-only organisation, whose members frequently go off on trips abroad. While the preaching in Manchester Central Mosque is about peace, love and tolerance as exemplified in the Prophet’s life, the Barelwis themselves can also be intolerant. Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin of Salman Taseer, the governor of the Punjab, was a member of the Barelwi Dawat-e-Islami. He murdered Taseer, whose bodyguard he was, because Taseer has dared to defend Pakistani Christians accused of blasphemy. Under strict Islamic law, they were gustakh-e Rasool, a pejorative term for ‘insulter of the Prophet’. The penalty for such blasphemy was wajib-e qatl, a mandatory death. Despite being tried and executed, Qadri is regarded by many of the Pakistani faithful as a martyr, and a massive mosque complex has grown up to commemorate him. In his meetings with various imams and ordinary Muslims, Hussain asks if they agree with the killing of blasphemers like Taseer, and the author Salman Rushdie, who had a fatwa and bounty placed on his life by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for his book, The Satanic Reverses. Some of them give evasive replies. One imam even defends it, claiming that Rushdie deserved death because he insulted love, as represented by Mohammed and Islam. A Muslim female friend dodges answering by telling him she’s have to ask her husband.

In the mosques’ libraries he finds books promoting the Caliphist ideology, denouncing democracy, immodest dress and behaviour in women, who are commanded to be available for their husband’s sexual pleasure, even when their bodies are running with pus. Some are explicitly Islamist, written by Sayyid Qutb and his brother, the founders of modern militant Islamism. These mosques can be extremely large, serving 500 and more worshippers, and Hussain is alarmed by the extremely conservative, if not reactionary attitudes in many of them. In many, women are strictly segregated and must wear proper Islamic dress – the chador, covering their hair and bodies. The men also follow the model of Mohammed himself in their clothing, wearing long beards and the thawb, the long Arab shirt. But Hussain makes the point that in Mohammed’s day, there was no distinctive Muslim dress: the Prophet wore what everyone in 7th century Arabia wore, including Jews, Christians and pagans. He has a look around various Muslim schools, and is alarmed by their demand for prepubescent girls to wear the hijab, which he views as sexualising them. Some of these, such as the Darul Ulooms, concentrate almost exclusively on religious education. He meets a group of former pupils who are angry at their former school’s indoctrination of them with ancient, but fabricated hadiths about the Prophet which sanction slavery, the inferior status of women, and the forced removal of Jews and Christians from the Arabian peninsula. They’re also bitter at the way these schools did not teach them secular subjects, like science, literature and art, and so prepare them for entering mainstream society. This criticism has also been levelled Muslim organisations who have attacked the Darul Uloom’s narrow focus on religion. The worshippers and students at these mosques and their schools reject the dunya, the secular world, and its fitna, temptations. One Spanish Muslim has immigrated to England to get away from the nudist beaches in his home country. And the Muslim sections of the towns he goes to definitely do not raise the Pride flag for the LGBTQ community.

Hussain Worried by Exclusively Muslim Areas with No White Residents

Hussain is also alarmed at the way the Muslim districts in many of the towns he visits have become exclusively Muslim quarters. All the businesses are run by Muslims, and are geared to their needs and tastes, selling Muslim food, clothing, perfume and literature. Whites are absent, living in their own districts. When he does see them, quite often they’re simply passing through. In a pub outside Burnley he talks to a couple of White men, who tell him how their children have been bullied and beaten for being goras, the pejorative Asian term for Whites. Other Whites talk about how the local council is keen to build more mosques, but applications by White residents to put up flagpoles have been turned down because the council deems them racist. Hussain objects to these monocultures. Instead, he praises areas like the section of Edinburgh, where the Muslim community coexists with Whites and other ethnicities. There’s similar physical mixture of Muslim and non-Muslim in the Bute area of Cardiff, formerly Tiger Bay, which has historically been a multicultural cultural area. In the mosque, however, he finds yet again the ideology of cultural and religious separatism.

The Treatment of Women

He is also very much concerned about the treatment of women, and especially their vulnerability before the sharia courts that have sprung up. A few years ago there were fears of a parallel system of justice emerging, but the courts deal with domestic issues, including divorce. They have been presented as informal systems of marriage reconciliation. This would all be fine if that was all they were. But the majority of the mosques Hussain visits solely perform nikah, Muslim weddings. Under British law, all weddings, except those in an Anglican church, must also be registered with the civil authorities. These mosques don’t. As a result, wives are left at the mercy of Islamic law. These give the husband, but not the wife, the power of divorce., and custody of the children if they do. Hussain meets a battered Muslim woman, whose controlling husband nearly killed her. The case was brought before the local sharia court. The woman had to give evidence from another room, and her husband was able to defeat her request for a divorce by citing another hadith maintaining that husbands could beat their wives.

London Shias and the Procession Commemorating the Deaths of Ali, Hassan and Hussain

Hussain’s a Sunni, and most of the mosques he attends are also of that orthodox branch of Islam. In London, he attends a Shia mosque, and is shocked and horrified by the self-inflicted violence performed during their commemoration of the Battle of Karbala. Shias believe that Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, was the true successor to Mohammed as the leader of the early Muslim community. He was passed over, and made a bid for the caliphate, along with his two sons, Hasan and Hussain, who were finally defeated by the Sunnis at the above battle. This is commemorated by Shias during the month of Moharram, when there are special services at the mosque and the jaloos, a commemorative procession. During the services and the processions, Shias express their grief over their founders’ martyrdom by beating their chests, matam, faces and whipping themselves. They also slash themselves with swords. All this appears to go on at the London mosque, to Hussain’s horror. He is particularly disturbed by young children beating their chests and faces in the worship the night before, and wonders how this isn’t child abuse.

Separatist Attitudes and Political Activism in Mosques

He is also concerned about the political separatism and activism he sees in some of the mosques. They don’t pray for the Queen, as Christians and Jews do, but there are prayers for the Muslim community throughout the world and funeral prayers for Morsi, the former Islamist president of Egypt. He finds mosques and Islamic charities working for Muslims abroad, and activists campaigning on behalf on Palestine, Kashmir and other embattled Muslim countries and regions, but not for wider British society. Some of the worshippers and Imams share his concern. One Muslim tells him that the problem isn’t the Syrian refugees. They are medical men and women, doctors, nurses and technicians. The problem is those asylum seekers from areas and countries which have experienced nothing but war and carnage. These immigrants have trouble adapting to peace in Britain. This leads to activism against the regimes in the countries they have fled. Afghan and Kurdish refugees are also mentioned as donning masks looking for fights. Some of the worshippers in the mosques Hussain attends had connections to ISIS. In London he recalls meeting a glum man at a mosque in 2016. The man had toured the Middle East and Muslim Britain asking for signatures in a petition against ISIS. The Middle Eastern countries had willingly given theirs. But an academic, a White convert who taught at British university, had refused. Why? He objected to the paragraph in the petition denouncing ISIS’ enslavement of Yazidi and other women. This was in the Quran, he said, and so he wouldn’t contradict it. This attitude from a British convert shocked the man, as usually objections to banning slavery come from Mauretania and Nigeria, where they are resented as western interference. And in another mosque in Bradford, he is told by the imam that he won’t allow the police to come in and talk about the grooming gangs. The gangs used drugs and alcohol, which are forbidden in Islam and so are not connected to the town’s mosques.

Islamophobia against Northern Irish Muslims

But Islam isn’t a monolith and many Muslims are far more liberal and engaged with modern western society. Going into an LGBTQ+ help centre, he’s met by a Muslim woman on the desk. This lady’s straight and married, but does not believes there’s any conflict between her faith and working for a gay organisation. And in reply to his question, she tells him that her family most certainly do know about it. He meets two female Muslim friends, who have given up wearing the hijab. One did so after travelling to Syria to study. This convinced her that it was a pre-Islamic custom, and she couldn’t find any support for it in the Quran. She also rejected it after she was told at university that it was feminist, when it wasn’t. In Belfast he visits a mosque, which, contrary to Islamic custom, is run by two women. The worship appears tolerant, with members of different Muslims sects coming peacefully together, and the values are modern. But this is an embattled community. There is considerable islamophobia in Northern Ireland, with Muslims sufferings abuse and sometimes physical assault. One Protestant preacher stirred up hate with a particularly islamophobic sermon. Many of the mosque’s congregation are converts, and they have been threatened at gun point for converting as they are seen as leaving their communities. Travelling through Protestant and Roman Catholic Belfast, Hussain notices the two communities’ support for different countries. On the Nationalist side of the peace walls are murals supporting India and Palestine. The Loyalists, on the other hand, support Israel. But back in London he encounters more, very modern liberal attitudes during a conversation with the two daughters of a Muslim women friends. They are very definitely feminists, who tell him that the problem with Islam, is, no offence, his sex. They then talk about how toxic masculinity has been a bad influence on British Islam.

Liberal Islam and the Support of the British Constitution

In his travels oop north, Hussain takes rides with Muslim taxi drivers, who are also upset at these all-Muslim communities. One driver laments how the riots of 2011 trashed White businesses, so the Whites left. In Scotland, another Muslim cabbie, a technician at the local uni, complains about Anas Sarwar, the first Muslim MP for Scotland. After he left parliament, Sarwar left to become governor of the Punjab in Pakistan. The cabbie objects to this. In his view, the man was serving just Muslims, not Scotland and all of its people. During ablutions at a mosque in Edinburgh, he meets a British army officer. The man is proud to serve with Her Majesty’s forces and the army has tried to recruit in the area. But despite their best efforts and wishes, Muslims don’t wish to join.

In London, on the other hand, he talks to a modern, liberal mullah, Imam Jalal. Jalal has studied all over the world, but came back to Britain because he was impressed with the British constitution’s enshrinement of personal liberty and free speech. He believes that the British constitution expresses the maqasid, the higher objectives Muslim scholars identified as the root of the sharia as far back al-Juwaini in the 11th century. Jalal also tells him about al-shart, a doctrine in one of the Muslim law schools that permits women to divorce their husbands. The marriage law should be reformed so that the nikah becomes legal, thus protecting Muslim wives with the force of British law. And yes, there would be an uproar if prayers for the Queen were introduced in the mosques, but it could be done. Both he and Hussain talk about how their father came to Britain in the late 50s and early 60s. They wore three-piece suits, despite the decline of the empire, were proud to be British. There was time in this country when Muslims were respected. In one factory, when a dispute broke out, the foreman would look for a Muslim because they had a reputation for honesty. The Muslim community in these years would have found the race riots and the terrorist bombings of 7/7 and the Ariana Grande concert simply unbelievable. Had someone told them that this would happen, they would have said he’d been watching too much science fiction.

Muslim Separatism and the Threat of White British Fascism

Hanging over this book is the spectre of demographic change. The Muslim population is expected to shoot up to 18 million later in the century and there is the real prospect of Britain becoming a Muslim majority country. In fact, as one of the great commenters here has pointed out, this won’t happen looking at the available data. If Scotland goes its own way, however, the proportion of Muslims in England will rise to 12 per cent, the same as France and Belgium. For Hussain, it’s not a question of how influential Islam will be in the future, but the type of Islam we will have. He is afraid of Muslim majority towns passing laws against everything the Muslim community considers forbidden. And as politicians, particularly Jeremy Corbyn and the Muslim politicos in the Labour party treat Muslims as a solid block, rather than individuals, he’s afraid that Muslim communalism and its sense of a separate identity will increase. This may also produce a corresponding response in the White, Christian-origin English and Brits. We could see the rise of nationalist, anti-Islam parties. At one point he foresees three possible futures. One is that the mosques will close the doors and Muslims will become a separate community. Another is mass deportations, including self-deportations. But there are also reasons to be optimistic. A new, British Islam is arising through all the ordinary Muslims finding ways to accommodate themselves within liberal, western society. They’re doing it quietly, unobtrusively in ordinary everyday matters, underneath all the loud shouting of the Islamists.

The Long Historical Connections between Britain and Islam

In his conclusion, Hussain points out that Islam and Britain have a long history together. Queen Elizabeth I, after her excommunication by the Pope, attempted to forge alliance with the Ottoman Sultan. She succeeded in getting a trading agreement with the Turkish empire. In the 17th century, the coffee shop was introduced to Britain by a Greek-Turk. And in the 8th century Offa, the Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia, used Muslim dirhams as the basis for his coinage. This had the Muslim creed in Arabic, with his head stamped in the middle of the coin. Warren Hastings, who began the British conquest of India, opened a madrassa, sitting on its governing board and setting up its syllabus. This is the same syllabus used in the narrowly religious Muslim schools, so he’s partly to blame for them. During the First World War 2.5 million Muslims from India willingly fought for Britain. Muslim countries also sheltered Jews from the horrors of Nazi persecution. He’s also impressed with the immense contribution Muslims gave to the rise of science, lamenting the superstition he sees in some Muslim communities. He really isn’t impressed by one book on sale in a Muslim bookshop by a modern author claiming to have refuted the theory that the Earth goes round the sun.

To Combat Separatism and Caliphism, Celebrate British Values of Freedom and the Rule of Law

But combatting the Muslims separatism is only one half of the solution. Muslims must have something positive in wider mainstream society that will attract them to join. For Hussain, this is patriotism. He quotes the late, right-wing philosopher Roger Scruton and the 14th century Muslim historian ibn Khaldun on patriotism and group solidarity as an inclusive force. He cites polls showing that 89 per cent of Brits are happy with their children marrying someone of a different ethnicity. And 94 per cent of Brits don’t believe British nationality is linked to whiteness. He maintains that Brits should stop apologising for the empire, as Britain hasn’t done anything worse than Russia or Turkey. He and Imam Jalal also point out that the Turkish empire also committed atrocities, but Muslims do not decry them. Rather, the case of a Turkish TV show celebrating the founder of the Turkish empire, have toured Britain and received a warm welcome at packed mosques. He points out that he and other Muslims are accepted as fellow Brits here. This is not so in other countries, like Nigeria and Turkey, where he could live for decades but wouldn’t not be accepted as a Nigerian or Turk. And we should maintain our country’s Christian, Protestant heritage because this is ultimately the source of the values that underlie British secular, liberal society.

He also identifies six key values which Britain should defend and celebrate. These are:

1. The Rule of Law. This is based on Henry II’s synthesis of Norman law and Anglo-Saxon common law, to produce the English common law tradition, including Magna Carta. This law covers everyone, as against the sharia courts, which are the thin end of an Islamist wedge.
2. Individual liberty. The law is the protector of individual liberty. Edward Coke, the 17th century jurist, coined the phrase ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’. He also said that ‘Magna Carta is such a fellow he will have no sovereign’ It was this tradition of liberty that the Protestant emigrants took with them when they founded America.
3. Gender equality – here he talks about a series of strong British women, including Boadicea, the suffragettes, Queen Elizabeth and, in Johnson’s opinion, Maggie Thatcher. He contrasts this with the Turkish and other Muslim empires, which have never had a female ruler.
4. Openness and tolerance – here he talks about how Britain has sheltered refugees and important political thinkers, who’ve defended political freedoms like the Austrians Wittgenstein and Karl Popper.
5. Uniqueness. Britain is unique. He describes how, when he was at the Council for Foreign Relations, he and his fellows saw the Arab Spring as like Britain and America. The revolutionaries were fighting for liberty and secularism. There was talk amongst the Americans of 1776. But the revolutionaries didn’t hold western liberal values.
6. Racial Parity. Britain is not the same nation that support racists like Enoch Powell. He points to the German roots of the royal family, and that Johnson is part Turkish while members of his cabinet also come from ethnic minorities. Britain is not like France and Germany, where Muslims are seen very much as outsiders.

Whatever your party political opinions, I believe that these really are fundamental British values worth preserving. Indeed, they’re vital to our free society. On the other hand, he also celebrates Adam Smith and his theories of free trade as a great British contribution, because it allowed ordinary people and not just the mercantilist elite to get wealthy. Er, no, it doesn’t. But in a book like this you can’t expect everything.

Criticisms of Hussain’s Book

Hussain’s book caused something of a storm on the internet when it was released. The peeps on Twitter were particularly upset by the claims of Muslims bullying and violence towards Whites. There was a series of posts saying that he’d got the location wrong, and that the area in question was posh White area. In fact the book makes it clear he’s talking about a Muslim enclave. What evidently upset people was the idea that Muslims could also be racist. But some Muslims are. Way back c. 1997 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote a report for the Committee for Racial Equality as it was then on anti-White Asian and Black hatred and violence. Racism can be found amongst people of all colours and religions, including Muslims.

People were also offended by his statement that in the future there could be mass deportations of Muslims. From the discussion about this on Twitter, you could be misled into thinking he was advocating it. But he doesn’t. He’s not Tommy Robinson or any other member of the far right. He’s horrified by this as a possibility, a terrible one he wishes to avoid. But these criticism also show he’s right about another issue: people don’t have a common language to talk about the issues and problems facing Britain and its Muslim communities. These need to be faced up to, despite the danger of accusations of racism and islamophobia. Tanjir Rashid, reviewing it for the Financial Times in July 2021, objected to the book on the grounds that Hussain’s methodology meant that he ignored other Muslim networks and had only spoken to out-of-touch mullahs. He pointed instead to an Ipsos-Mori poll showing that 88 per cent of Muslims strong identified with Britain, seven out of ten believed Islam and modern British society were compatible and only one per cent wanted separate, autonomous Muslim communities. It’s possible that if Hussain had also travelled to other towns where the Muslim population was smaller and more integrated with the non-Muslim population, he would have seen a very different Islam.

Intolerant Preaching Revealed by Channel 4 Documentary

On the other hand, the 2007 Channel 4 documentary, Undercover Mosque, found a venomous intolerance against Christians, Jews and gays being preached in a hundred mosques. A teacher was effectively chased out of his position at a school in Batley because he dared to show his pupils the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in a class on tolerance. He is still in hiding, fearing for his life. Hussain cites government statistics that 43,000 people are under police surveillance because political extremism, 90 per cent of whom are Muslims.

These are vital questions and issues, and do need to be tackled. When I studied Islam in the 90s, I came across demands in the Muslim literature I was reading for separate Muslim communities governed by Islamic law. This was accompanied by the complaint that if this wasn’t granted, then Britain wasn’t truly multicultural. More recently I saw the same plea in a book in one of Bristol’s secondhand and remaindered bookshops, which based its argument on the British colonisation of America, in which peoples from different nationalities were encouraged to settle in English territories, keeping their languages and law. It might be that the mullahs are preaching separatism, but that hardly anybody in the Muslim community is really listening or actually want the caliphate or a hard line separate Muslim religious identity.

Conclusion

I do believe, however, that it is an important discussion of these issues and that the sections of the book, in which liberal Muslims, including Hussain himself, refute the vicious intolerance preached by the militants, are potentially very helpful. Not only could they help modern Muslims worried by such intolerant preaching and attitudes, and help them to reject and refute them, but they also show that a modern, liberal, western Islam is very possible and emerging, in contradiction to Fascists and Islamophobes like Tommy Robinson.

Bradford Sufi Leader’s Refusal to Allow Police to Speak in Mosques about Grooming Gangs

I’m trying not to blog too much about Ed Hussain’s book, Among the Mosques, as I wish to write a review of the book as a whole when I finish reading it. But this is too important. The report on the Rotherham Pakistani grooming gangs was released last week and has been widely criticised. Although the report acknowledge the massive failure of the police and local authorities to deal with the massive abuse of White girls – there were 1,400 odd victims – no-one responsible has been punished or even named. The report’s and the authorities’ failure to do this has been widely reported and attacked on various right-wing media, such as GB News.

One of the errors the report identifies in the handling of the abuse was that neither the police nor the local authorities attempted to engage with the local community. I’m sure this is correct, but I’m not sure how cooperative the local Asian and Muslim community would have been even if they had. In his book Hussain describes a conversation he had with Imam Hasnain, the pir, or leader of a Sufi biraderi (brotherhood) that acts as a patronage network controlling a large number, if not the majority, of the mosques in Bradford. Hasnain and the other leaders of the brotherhood are so influential that they are courted by local politicians. On page 132, the pir tells Hussain that he won’t let the police come into the mosques to talk about the grooming gangs and their abuse.

”The police want to come into our mosques and speak to the congregations about not grooming white girls. It has been an issue in the past.’

‘And?’ I ask, probing his reticence.

‘I can’t let that happen.’

‘Why not?’ I ask, aghast. ‘Surely you’ve heard the facts about what happened in Rotherham, how Muslim men targeted non-Muslim White girls over decades?’

‘What have these men to do with Islam?’ he asks, with a defensive shrug and the characteristic twist of the hand of Asian elders.

‘There are two factors involved in those cases again and again: drugs and alcohol. Does Islam permit these two things? Of course not. Yes, they have Muslim names and Pakistani backgrounds, but our mosques are not responsible for their criminality. These issues will be with us for a long time in Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Keighley and other cities. But unless the police can prove it is now down to drugs and alcohol, we will not open the mosque doors to them.”

The same pir blames the British and our government for a variety of ills affecting Muslims, from the partition of India to the disappearance of the White community in Bradford. He denies that Whites are absent from the city and recites a list of postcodes to show where they allegedly still reside, despite Hussain telling him he hasn’t seen an White people. And he goes on to blame the massive Islamic presence on the town on the fact that the government sent a great number of Syrian refugees there. It’s all British double standards against Muslims, double standards that are creating Islamophobia. And he defends the demands for Salman Rushdie’s death because of the Satanic Verses.

Now Hasnain is right that the groomers used drugs and alcohol to seduce their victims, and they weren’t connected with the mosques. But the refusal to allow the police in to speak to the mosques’ congregations seems too facile and more than a little suspicious in itself. No-one has claimed that the mosques as organisations were responsible for the abuse. But one the natural places to reach out to particular communities is through their places of worship, regardless of the particular religion. Back in the 90s, for example, the police came to the local church in my part of south Bristol to talk about drugs and the immense harm they cause. This obviously doesn’t mean that the cops thought the local congregation was seething with drug freaks and dealers. It was just a good venue to address the local community. And the same would also be true of the cops talking about the grooming gangs in the mosques in Bradford.

And what comes across to me from Hasnain’s defensive attitude and blank refusal is that he’s motivated by the Asian honour and shame culture. My guess is that he feels that the grooming gangs are deeply shameful and that talking about them will also shame and dishonour the Muslim community in Bradford, and so there’s not just a refusal to accept that the mosques were responsible, which is perfectly right, but a refusal to allow the police to even talk about it in them. And in such a deeply religious community as Muslim Bradford appears to be, it seems to me that this effectively stops the police addressing the community on this issue.

And I wonder whether the cops and local authorities in Rotherham would have met with a similar blank refusal, had they tried to approach them about addressing them in their mosques and community centres about the gangs.