.... The central problem around which the government is grappling is what you do with people who are not violent themselves, and not necessarily advocating violence, but who are obviously trying to fundamentally change your society by preaching hatred and division. Now my own answer to this is two-fold.
A robust civil society would treat such people with the discourtesy that it reserves for any other group of people who are exceptionally hateful. At the very least you don’t give them a helping hand. So if I have a community hall and the BNP want to borrow it for a meeting then I say ‘no’. And if some Islamist group asks to use it for a meeting I also say ‘no’. There is no right for them to borrow my hall, I don’t like them and they will have to hold their meetings elsewhere.
That is how civil society would normally work to help address the problem government is grappling with. But of course civil societal pushback against the Islamists in Britain in recent years has been massively hampered by left-wingers who are confused and think that opposing Islamic extremism is ‘racist’ but also by an ignorance across the political spectrum about what Islamic extremism’s goals and methods actually are.
So bolstering civil society is a very important part of solving this problem – as the government acknowledges in this strategy – and success cannot really occur without it. [The Spectator] Read more
