Britain can be tolerant without being naive. It can defend religious freedom without indulging political extremism. It can welcome diversity while insisting on common civic norms.
We might all agree that certain bad speech needs to be stopped, but without precise wording innocent speech is caught too.
Looking ahead, Conservative policymakers should be seeking a detailed breakdown of the recent surge in VAWG, getting a better idea of exactly who the perpetrators are.
Unfortunately, the Voltairean ethos once enshrined in our universities appears to be set to suffer further degradation as a result of the decision of Bridget Phillipson to repeal the Higher Education Act.
In the UK, protests condemning acts of alleged blasphemy are escalating at an alarming rate.
Society is under no democratic obligation to allow well-organised minorities to launch deliberate attacks on everyone’s right to go about their business, in order to change policy via undemocratic means.
It might help if the new definition made a clearer distinction between extremism of belief and extremism of action. But it would be better still if it didn’t try to define extremism at all.
Rishi Sunak described George Galloway’s victory in Rochdale as “beyond alarming” in a speech outside Number 10.
The Prime Minister says he fears the UK’s democracy is being “undermined”
The confidence to walk the streets safely, the right to interface directly with our elected representatives, the ability to speak our minds freely – these fruits of peaceable British toleration are being eroded by an extremist tendency that has grown unchecked for far too long.
Whether you see the glass as still half-empty, rather than half-full, the question we all face is the same one. If we are starting from here, now, can we imagine again a sense of the future that we do want to share?
But if such a programme extends beyond stemming the flow of cash (or at least attempting to do so), it is once again going to come back to law and enforcement. And that is thorny ground.
Politicians urge zero tolerance – but there’s a gap between law and enforcement. If the Met can arrest 155 anti-lockdown protestors, why can’t it do the same to pro-Hamas ringleaders?
The shock loss of five supposedly safe Labour seats to Gaza independents in the 2024 general election sent shockwaves through the party and heightened demands for the government to formally adopt an official definition of Islamophobia.