Society
Wishful Verbiage
This is the theme of a lovely New Statesman article by Armando Iannucci. It contains this short paragraph which neatly sums up the utter inanity of today’s current Conservative ‘government’ politics: Realpolitik is giving way to the new Feelpolitik, where doing stuff is replaced by just saying the stuff you would like to have done.... Read more
The housing rental market
Housing is one of life’s essentials but ‘our’ government in treating it like another market, seems to have somehow conveniently forgotten how essential the basic security of a roof over your head is… The dysfunctional purchasing of housing to live in which has everything to do with bank credit and little to do with providing... Read more
Trump appears to have been shown in court to be a liar…
The Lincoln Project is admittedly a Republican group that opposes Trump, but it does seem rather difficult to see where Trump goes from here. He has been shown to lie about his wealth – he originally suggested he had $400million in liquid assets – yet nobody will support his $500m surety… It rather goes to... Read more
Reform Parliamentary Candidate Who Shared Racist Content Resigns After Questions by Byline Times
Reform UK recently gained its first MP, former Conservative Deputy Chair Lee Anderson, who defected to the party after claiming that London Mayor Sadiq Khan had handed the city to "Islamists".
Byline Times can reveal that several Reform prospective parliamentary candidates (PPC) have shared content on their social media accounts that is racialised, denies the existence of climate change, or promotes conspiracy theories.
While investigating the party, Reform confirmed to Byline Times that North Bedfordshire PPC Nick Davies had resigned as a candidate "after we spoke to him about the content of his social media".
On 4 March, Davies shared a post which featured the text “evil doesn’t die. It reinvents itself” over pictures of Sadiq Khan and Adolf Hitler. Davies also shared posts in September and October calling immigrants an “invasion” and a “silent army housed in hotels”.
In a statement to this newspaper, the party said: "Reform UK makes a distinction between malice and eccentricity in its activists and its supporters. Malice we take very seriously, harmless opinion is not a problem in a party that believes wholeheartedly in freedom of speech, nor should it be in the wider society."
The recent tweets of Andrew Husband, the Reform PPC for North Durham, on X (formerly Twitter) include an account claiming that “mRNA shots are the most dangerous product ever forced upon the public” and former Conservative (now independent) MP Andrew Bridgen's claim that the COVID vaccine will be considered “the greatest crime against humanity”.
He has also retweeted a video clip of US President Joe Biden talking about building regulations in relation to wildfire resilience and claimed that he had been referencing the roofs of houses that survived wildfires as evidence of the use of “direct energy weapons” to cause wildfires in Texas and Brazil.
The ideology of the 'freedom movement’, the post-lockdown outgrowth of the anti-lockdown movement that posits that reductions in living standards are orchestrated by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as part of a 'Great Reset’, also appeared in material shared by several Reform candidates.
The WEF is the annual gathering of politicians and the corporate executive class at Davos, which became the subject of conspiracy theories during the pandemic.
Maggie Moriondo, the Reform PPC for Bedford, retweeted a post from Wide Awake Media, a conspiracy platform, which claimed that “globalists are using the man-made climate change" lie as a pretext to deliberately collapse the food supply, so people will have no choice but to eat insects and lab-grown "meat".
She also retweeted a post from the same account claiming that broadcaster Neil Oliver “eloquently summarises the global pushback against globalist tyranny”, in relation to a speech he made in which he claimed that there is a “coordinated global conspiracy seeking domination of the world by a handful of ideologues, hellbent on a return to feudalism”.
Dave Holland, the Reform PPC for Mid-Bedfordshire, wrote on his blog that Bill Gates and the WEF “want to reduce the population via the medium of vaccines”. The blog described the movement towards a dystopian future of lockdowns, spiralling inequality and restrictions on civil liberties, and attributed the driving force behind these outcomes to a coordinated effort between governments and corporations to create a “New World Order” overseen by the WEF.
The Reform Party's manifesto rejects "the influence of the World Economic Forum” and contains a pledge to hold a public enquiry into vaccine harms and excess deaths.
Several Reform PPCs were previously Conservative Party councillors or PPCs.
Dr Annie Kelly, a postdoctoral researcher on conspiracy theories and correspondent for the podcast QAnon Anonymous, told Byline Times that, although the Tory Party "has been quite good at message discipline and keeping this stuff under wraps for the time being... I can see a weakened Conservative Party, not in power, being much more malleable to forces like Reform.”
Dr Kelly said that conspiracy theories of the kind promoted by some Reform PPCs often take “legitimate issues” and “point people past who is responsible towards much more shadowy nefarious enemies who can never be defeated”.
She said that the ideology of the 'freedom movement’ has broadened out beyond COVID denial into a “general denialism”.
Another theme across the posts of several Reform PPCs was the denial of the existence of climate change.
Several Reform PPCs have regularly referred to “the climate hoax” and shared content denying a link between human industrial activity and carbon emissions, as well as attacking American climatologist Michael Mann and the 'hockey stick’ graph, which shows a rapid increase in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.
On 6 March, Maggie Moriondo posted on X that “we are being fed BS [bullshit] on the climate hoax. We will be force fed a diet of man-made meat whilst elites enjoy the real thing" and reposted a tweet attacking the hockey stick graph as 'junk science'".
Reform PPC for Stockton North, John McDermottroe, shared posts on his Facebook page referring to the “climate hoax” and calling people who believe in climate change as being part of “a cult”. He also wrote a post claiming that the Earth’s temperature began to rise before increases in CO2, which he argued debunks climate models.
Reform PPC for Derby, Tim Prosser, also shared videos denying climate science including by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
The Intercontinental Panel on Climate Change calls for a 48% reduction in emissions by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050, a target that some scientists such as the Climate Change Advisory Group, say is “too little too late”. The Reform Party denies that climate change can be averted by reducing emissions and argues that net zero is “damaging our livelihoods and economy”.
Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, told Byline Times that “the material on the Reform UK website is demonstrably false and it’s not just the result of incompetence, it’s disinformation, it’s deliberate misinformation about climate impacts”.
He added that since the Uxbridge by-election, “British media, particularly the Telegraph, Mail and Sun titles and to some extent The Times, have all started championing misinformation about climate policy".
"They largely haven’t gone down the route of promoting outright denial of the physics of climate change, but behind their claims is an implicit denial of the risks of climate change," he added. "You can only say that delaying net zero is a desirable option if you don’t accept the scientists’ assessment of the scale of the problem."
Ward said this has “allowed those with even more whacky views on climate to rear their heads again and start making ridiculous claims about the science”.
Where is the Support for Black and Ethnic Minority People Living with Dementia?
Of the almost one million people living with dementia in the UK, around 25,000 are from a black or ethnic minority background. This population is set to double to 50,000 by 2026, and grow to 172,000 by 2051.
This seven-fold increase compares to a two-fold increase in the general population, as quoted in a report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Dementia.
Dementia is a high-profile issue.
The family of actor Bruce Willis, diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia last year, is shattering preconceptions about the condition and caregiving. Recent studies suggest scientists are close to creating a blood test to predict dementia. And the late activist Wendy Mitchell, who died last month, advocated powerfully for awareness.
But black and ethnic minority communities are under-represented in dementia debate and action – despite facing a triple whammy of inequality related to the condition. They are considered to be at higher risk. Awareness and diagnosis rates are lower (some South Asian languages have no word for dementia). Culturally appropriate, faith-sensitive provision is scant.
The disparity has revealed itself starkly to me as my extended family now includes two older relatives living with dementia – one is from a white British background, and one was born in India, but has lived in England since childhood (it was a surprise to find my South Asian relative reverting occasionally to their mother tongue, for example).
One reason dementia is rising in ethnic groups is, as a 2021 Alzheimer’s Society report states, some people who moved here during the 1950s and 1970s are reaching an age where dementia is more likely to develop.
Vascular dementia is also thought more to be common due to higher prevalence of risk factors such as diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. Research by University College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, suggests that black and South Asian patients survive for less time after diagnosis and die younger.
The inequality extends to carers, according to a Race Equality Foundation (REF) paper, which found they feel culturally obliged to provide support but are unwilling or unprepared. However, mainstream services assume families do not need external support.
Dr Sahdia Parveen, Associate Professor at the University of Bradford’s Centre for Applied Dementia Studies, who co-authored the REF paper, says: “On the family level, people from minority ethnic backgrounds have less awareness or knowledge of dementia and don't always recognise symptoms, which delays the process of seeking help. Dementia is often seen as being the same as 'old age’.”
At a community level, dementia is stigmatised, she says: “In South Asian communities there is a misconception that the person may have nazaar – evil eye – placed on them or the person is being punished by God. In African and Caribbean cultures, dementia is linked to witchcraft.”
Families might hide the diagnosis, which prevents access to support.
Challenges at a health systems level include diagnostic questions that rely on British history knowledge.
“We currently don't have diagnostic tools that are culturally sensitive and reliable for minority ethnic communities," Dr Parveen adds. "The cognitive tests have a western and education bias. There are also issues of lack of cultural sensitivity from health care professionals – racism – and services not being set up to meet the needs of diverse communities.”
Solutions, she says, include services working with community groups on awareness, and developing culturally appropriate cognitive tests, post-diagnostic services and diversity training for professionals.
Dr Parveen co-led a collaborative project, The South Asian Dementia Pathway study, which created resources including culturally appropriate assessments. Recommendations for service commissioners and managers included information being given face-to-face and tailored support for families.
Mainstream professionals should consider the work of the Leeds-based Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Dementia Service, run by health and wellbeing charity Touchstone.
Launched 11 years ago and jointly commissioned by the local authority and NHS, it provides specialist support to people living with memory problems or a dementia diagnosis and their carers. Despite its tiny size (its support worker and administrative officer are both part-time), the service has helped more than 300 people since 2020, through self-referral or via other organisations, GPs or memory clinics.
The BME Dementia Service. Photo: Ripaljeet Kaur
Ripaljeet Kaur, its service manager, says: “Our core aims are raising awareness of dementia, to enable early diagnosis, breaking down stigma as that creates hurdles for people to access mainstream services, and supporting people and carers to get a diagnosis. We also provide post-diagnostic support – the whole dementia journey.”
As well as awareness-raising talks in mother tongue in local faith and community settings, there is a walking group for carers and a weekly dementia cafe, Hamari Yaadain (“Our Memories”), supported by four volunteers.
The 20 café members do an hour of physical activity like yoga or games like carrom – which originated in India – or 'food bingo’, using pictures of vegetables found in Asian cuisine. The second hour is spent chatting over drinks and snacks.
The service is also the founder member of the 10-strong BME Dementia Forum, uniting local organisations involved in dementia support.
Kaur recently supported a woman with vascular dementia who had been discharged from the memory clinic with a dementia diagnosis. She and her husband had a general information leaflet but struggled as the condition progressed.
They came to the BME Dementia Service by word of mouth. Kaur’s assessment revealed that the husband did not understand dementia or how to cope with its symptoms. The couple had stopped socialising due to stigma and the husband had not sought help because he feared services were culturally inappropriate. He thought his wife was possessed as she would talk to herself about blood.
Kaur did one-to-one sessions with the husband, provided written information in his mother tongue, explained the prevalence of dementia and the benefits of joining social groups.
Kaur learned that, as a child, the wife had witnessed her father’s fatal accident and explained to the husband that the talk of blood was due to the return of repressed memories.
The couple joined the Hamari Yaadain café and Kaur arranged for someone who shared their cultural background to provide respite care so the husband could have a break.
More people should benefit from this kind of support.
While the Government’s brutal cuts to local authority funding and lack of investment in social care offer little hope for replication of the BME Dementia Service, much of its work relies on attitudinal change.
Kaur says mainstream services can adapt at low cost: “Just be mindful and patient and show that compassion – you can still work with people from different backgrounds by acknowledging their cultural needs.”
A focus on the widening inequality in dementia care for people from ethnic minority backgrounds is vital, not only because the population is growing but because this group is struggling disproportionately in the cost of living crisis.
A study funded by Alzheimer’s Society and the National Institute for Health and Care Research last year showed a fifth of social care users with dementia had cut their spending on support to save money – and this was especially true for those from non-white ethnic backgrounds.
As Dr Sahdia Parveen says it is not “an issue we can ignore anymore”.
“The minority communities have 'caught up’ age wise with the population and have higher prevalence of dementia risk factors… a lot of effort has gone into understanding perceptions of dementia in minority communities and raising awareness. However families affected by dementia urgently need culturally competent dementia care.”
Without the creation of more inclusive dementia support, an overlooked but growing population is being failed.
‘The Country has Noticed the Conservatives’ Lack of Levelling Up’
The Government could have used Boris Johnson's 'levelling up’ project not just to transform Britain’s regions, towns and poorer cities, but also to redraw the political map of the UK. That it has failed spectacularly to do both is a key reason why it is now facing political oblivion and why the Conservative Party will find it hard to rebuild public support.
In 2019, levelling up was a masterstroke. Even then, the public was well aware that a decade of under-investment had damaged public services and made inequality between and within regions ever more stark.
Johnson’s pledge to level up the UK – combined with specific promises to increase the number of nurses, doctors, police offices and hospitals – signalled a radical change from the policy of austerity pursued by his predecessors.
Had Johnson been true to his word, levelling up could have transformed Britain’s regions, investment could have poured into regional transport and other infrastructure, and the NHS and other public services could have full quotas of staff instead of record shortages.
Instead, as we approach another general election, the failure of levelling up has been made clear in a report published by the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee last week.
As of last September, it found that local authorities had spent only £1.24 billion of the £10.47 billion the Government promised to tackle regional inequality across the UK.
Crucially, the committee found that the Government has nothing in place to measure this policy’s impact in the long term. In other words, as has been pointed out, there is “no compelling evidence” that levelling up has achieved anything.
As recently as 2022, the Government were talking up the transformative impact of levelling up.
The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) said in 2022 that the economic prize was potentially huge: “If under-performing places were levelled up towards the UK average, unlocking their potential, this could boost aggregate UK GDP by tens of billions of pounds each year.”
The disconnect between this rhetoric and the reality could not be more stark.
Since 2010-11, local authorities have experienced a 27% real-terms cut in core spending power due to reduced central government funding. Eight of the 317 English local authorities have effectively declared bankruptcy since 2018.
In the most egregious example, Birmingham City Council – Europe’s largest local authority – is to severely reduce or do away with a swathe of council services in pursuit of savings of about £300 million. This is the deepest programme of local cuts ever put through by a UK council.
Cuts will impact some of the most vulnerable groups in Birmingham. Spending on children will be cut by millions, including cuts to an early help service that helps families in crisis and to transport for children aged over 16 who have special educational needs.
Youth services will be almost halved. Spending on the arts will now be zero. Eleven community centres are being sold off. Highway maintenance, street lighting, recycling, bin collection, and street cleaning suffer. Yet residents face an increase to council tax of 21% by 2026 – a cruel fate for residents facing years of cuts to what, for many, have been essential services.
But it isn’t just Birmingham. In 2019, the entire country was promised increased investment, public services, and a restoration of the kind of public realm the Conservatives had dismantled over the previous decade.
What the public has received is more of the same – austerity and higher taxes from the Government and, in many cases, cash-strapped local councils.
This is one of the main factors damaging the Conservatives’ poll ratings. They have wildly over promised and under delivered in a way that is obvious to anyone using public transport, the NHS, education, or other public services, or indeed anyone walking down their local high street.
In 2019, Boris Johnson explicitly thanked Labour voters who had ‘lent him their vote’. He said “we have won votes and the trust of people who have never voted Conservative before" and that "those people want change".
"We cannot, must not, let them down," he added. "We must recognise the reality that we now speak for everyone from Woking to Workington, Clwyd South, Sedgefield [and] Wolverhampton."
He and his successors have betrayed that trust – a betrayal that will take a generation at least to overcome.
Those voters in Sedgfield, Clywd South, and Wolverhampton will not be so quick to trust a Conservative next time, whatever their policies and whoever their leader.
But the failure of levelling up – and the prior decade of austerity that preceded it – is doing deeper harm to our politics and public realm.
Resolution Foundation research shows that living with crumbling public services undermines people’s trust in the ability of the state to effect change for the better, whoever is in power.
“This isn’t a small problem,” says the Resolution Foundation’s chief executive, Torsten Bell. “Change requires citizens to imagine a better future so they can embrace the disruption involved in getting there.”
This warning is consistent with wider research looking across 166 elections post-1980. It found that austerity measures tend to reduce voter turnout but also boost votes for non-mainstream parties – hence, at least in part, explaining last decade’s UKIP popularity and the more recent rise of Reform.
Labour’s task, if as expected it wins a sizeable majority in the next election, will be not just one of rebuilding public services, but of rebuilding faith that politics can make a real difference to lives and communities.
‘Liberty’ criticises ‘extremism’ definition
At the start, I should make clear that Akiko Hart is the director of Liberty and gives her simple objections in just over a minute. I also should point out that I am also one of Liberty’s members: Liberty, have, in spite of their name, been very factual, restrained and even diplomatic. Not so, the... Read more
Levelling Up: 90% of Promised Schemes are Nowhere Near Completion
Ninety per cent of the "Levelling Up" projects promised by Rishi Sunak and former Prime Minister Boris Jonson are still years away from completion, a parliamentary report has revealed.
A report by the Commons Public Accounts Committee found that only £1.24 billion will be spent on the projects by the end of this month out of £10.47 billion programme originally promised by Johnson’s Government to improve dilapidated town high streets and run down areas of the country.
This month is supposed to be the completion of the first round of “Levelling Up” grants which councils had to put in bids under the scheme but the report reveals the deadline has had to be extended for at least a year because so few have been finished. The report reveals that out of 71 so-called “shovel ready” projects due to be completed this month, only 11 had been finished and the remaining 60 would not be completed until next year, if not later.
It also says only £3.7 billion out of the £10.7 billion has been allocated to councils by the ministry because the bidding procedure has been so complex and many councils have wasted council taxpayers money on projects which stood no chance of being accepted by ministers.
Ministers changed the rules midway through the bidding for Levelling Up projects so that councils that were successful in bidding in the first round were disqualified from bidding in the second. As a result 55 councils wasted scarce council taxpayer’s money by putting in bids that were ruled out.
Dame Meg Hillier MP, Labour Chair of the Committee, said: “The levels of delay that our report finds in one of Government’s flagship policy platforms is absolutely astonishing. The vast majority of Levelling Up projects that were successful in early rounds of funding are now being delivered late, with further delays likely baked in.
“DLUHC [The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities] appears to have been blinded by optimism in funding projects that were clearly anything but ‘shovel-ready’, at the expense of projects that could have made a real difference. We are further concerned, and surprised given the generational ambition of this agenda, that there appears to be no plan to evaluate success in the long-term.
The ministry tried to claim to the National Audit Office that the majority of the programme was under way but when MPs questioned civil servants from the department it was revealed that “under way” only meant that construction was at the design stage or required planning permission.
Both the Local Government Association, which represents local councils, and the South East Councils, which represents local authorities in London and the South East, were highly critical of the bidding process to get the money.
South East Councils described the process as a “whole system of “beauty contest bidding” [which] is bad government. Levelling up funding further contributes to a “begging bowl culture” through a wasteful, inefficient, bureaucratic, over-centralised, unpredictable, short-termist, demoralising, time-consuming and frustrating way of allocating money to councils.”
In the South East only four councils got any money – they were Gosport, Gravesham, Test Valley and the Isle of Wight.
Is the UK’s ‘debt’ ‘sustainable’?
My very simple and straightforward submission to the House of Lords’ enquiry into the sustainability of UK debt is now within their website. My effort (downloadable from the above link) is written below – I tried to give the submission a final twist: WRITTEN EVIDENCE SND0013 – SUSTAINABILITY OF THE UK’S NATIONAL DEBT INQUIRY 1.What... Read more
Michael Gove: The Extremist
The UK Government’s new definition of extremism is out. And its purpose, according to Communities Secretary Michael Gove is to “ensure that government does not inadvertently provide a platform to those setting out to subvert democracy and deny other people's fundamental rights.” Unfortunately, he has failed in this endeavour because by the Government’s own new definition, Michael Gove is an extremist.
The new definition, released on Thursday, describes extremism as “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance” that aims to “negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others”, or “undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights”. It also includes those who “intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve” these aims.
Racism is Funny
Gove’s track record of extremism is, in fact, astonishing by any standard and started when he was a young man. As president-elect of the Oxford University debating society in 1987, Gove used the racist term “fuzzy wuzzies” to describe black people, arguing that the British empire was “moral” because the “fuzzy wuzzies couldn’t look after themselves.”
In 1993, while a journalist for BBC television, he used homophobic and sexist language at Cambridge University debates, including describing economist John Maynard Keynes as a “homosexualist” because “homosexuals thrive primarily on short-term relations”, and made a sexist joke about the then head of the Cambridge Union Lucy Frazer for doing “remarkably well coming as she has done from the back streets of the slums of Leeds”’.
We don’t know what Gove’s excuse for all this is because he’s refused to comment, let alone apologise. Instead, the BBC noted that a “source” close to him said that Gove made the statements "in jest" (i.e. he basically thought they were funny), but that they were not his actual views. Oh, that's ok then.
So we know that Michael Gove inhabits an alternative reality in which making jokes about people’s race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality is all fine and dandy. This perhaps explains his defence of Tory donor Frank Hester’s ‘joke’ that Diane Abbott, the longest serving Black MP, “should be shot” and makes him “want to hate all Black women”. Although Downing Street belatedly conceded that Hester’s comments were “racist and wrong”, Gove insisted that he would exercise “Christian forgiveness” over the remarks – and the Conservative Party has no intention of handing back the £10 million.
At least Hester did indeed apologise – which is more than can be said for Gove over his own racist, sexist and homophobic remarks. No wonder, then, that when confronted in Parliament over GB News co-owner and Tory donor Sir Paul Marshall liking and retweeting far-right, racist and homophobic content (including a tweet calling for a race war in Britain between Muslims and non-Muslims), Gove defended him as "a distinguished philanthropist".
Eugenics and Education
But Michael Gove’s fascination with extremist ideologies tied to racism resurfaced in 2013 when he was Education Secretary. A 237-page private thesis drafted up for Gove by his then-special advisor, Dominic Cummings, was leaked to the press. The document claimed that a child’s educational performance has more to do with their genetic make-up rather than educational standards, and called for giving “specialist education as per Eton” to “the top 2% in IQ”.
As author of Human Genetic Engineering Pete Shanks observed, the Gove paper promoted “the blatantly eugenic association of genes with intelligence, intelligence with worth, and worth with the right to rule”.
But the bulk of the ‘science’ cited in the Gove paper came from controversial scientists affiliated with scientific racism and eugenics, some of whose work came from research funded by the Pioneer Fund, a Nazi foundation set-up in 1937 – and classified as a hate group by the civil rights law firm Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
Pro-eugenics scientists cited by the Gove paper include Charles Murray, Stephen Hsu and Robert Plomin. Murray is the author of The Bell Curve, which claims that Black people are intellectually inferior to white people due to genetics and environmental causes. He’s also identified as a “white nationalist” who uses “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics” by the SPLC. Plomin is an avid defender of Murray’s work, and has spoken and published with the racist American Eugenics Society, and addressed the racist British Eugenics Society. Hsu has promoted eugenic breeding schemes using embryo selection to improve the overall IQ of the population.
The Cummings dossier further revealed that under Gove’s leadership, Plomin was invited into the Department for Education to “explain the science of IQ and genetics to officials and ministers”.
Racist and Anti-Muslim think-tank
Gove was also closely involved since inception with the Henry Jackson Society, as a signatory to its founding statement when launched in 2005. HJS would later be described as a racist, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant organisation by two former directors, Marko Attila Hoare and Matthew Jamison.
In 2017, Gove joined HJS as a director. That was an interesting year for HJS – it was the year two other HJS directors, Douglas Murray and Alan Mendoza, spoke at the annual Restoration Weekend organised by the David Horowitz Freedom Centre.
Held the year after Donald Trump’s election, the 2017 Restoration Weekend was a key celebration of the success of ‘Alt-Right’ nationalists who had risen to power thanks to the election of Donald Trump.
The Restoration Weekend is hosted by David Horowitz, who spent years mentoring President Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller, regarded as the driving force behind his administration’s “racist” policies – including the legal architecture of the ‘Muslim ban’. Horowitz himself has been described as “a driving force” of the “anti-black movement” by the SPLC. Just a week before the event attended by the HJS, Horowitz declared that “the country’s only serious race war” is “against whites”.
The Restoration Weekend was a veritable Who’s Who of US white nationalism, attended by the likes of antisemitic Holocaust denier Gavin McInnes, founder of the violent Proud Boys designated as an extremist group by the FBI; notorious far-right commentator Katie Hopkins; and Sebastian Gorka, who co-founded a far-right Hungarian political party with known antisemites. Other speakers included key figures in US white nationalism such as Ann Coulter, Robert Spencer, Steve Bannon, and Milo Yiannopoulos.
At the event, Douglas Murray delivered an astonishing racist speech characterising Europe’s ethnic minorities as fundamentally “different people” who have simply “walked into that continent”. He singled out Indian and Sudanese immigrants, noting that while an Indian migrant might “vim up the local cuisine”, a wider range of cuisines in Europe would be offset by “more gang-rape and beheading.”
Murray, a longtime associate of Gove and one of his ardent defenders, is a populariser of the far-right Great Replacement conspiracy theory – the idea that Muslim immigration is endangering and replacing white populations in Europe as part of an Islamist plot.
In 2013, he complained about “white Britons” being “abolished” due to too many ethnic minorities in London. He’d previously endorsed a ban on immigration from Muslim countries and, three months before the Trump campaign announced its ‘Muslim ban’, told anti-Muslim extremist Frank Gaffney (the man cited by the Trump team to justify the policy) that such a measure could be the solution to the Muslim “demographic time-bomb”.
Most recently, Murray has suggested “we might need to send in the army” to control pro-Palestinian protestors in London – and if that doesn’t work, that the “British public” might have to take matters into its own hands: a veiled incitement to vigilante violence.
In May 2017, while Gove was a director, the HJS executive director Alan Mendoza invited the host David Horowitz onto his YouTube television show to discuss extremism on college campuses. He claimed that all American Muslim student groups are “terrorist front groups” orchestrated and funded by the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Mendoza nodded as he listened to Horowitz’s claims, even though they have been debunked as anti-Muslim conspiracy theory.
An Orwellian Move
This is just the tip of the iceberg but it makes absolutely clear that Gove has built his career by climbing the ladder of escalating extremism. In this context, Gove’s new ‘war’ on extremism is not just absurd: it is dangerously Orwellian.
Gove thinks racist jokes are funny, has elevated scientific racism within the Department for Education, and worked with an organisation – the Henry Jackson Society – which for years has acted as a transmission belt amplifying mainstream far-right white nationalist ideas into the centre-right of UK policymaking.
Who, then, is really using the platform of Government to subvert Britain’s liberal democracy by advancing ideas rooted in ideologies based on hatred, intolerance and indeed violence, with a view to “negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms” of minorities? It’s Michael Gove. If the Government were to actually act meaningfully on its own definition, not only Gove, but numerous organisations he and the Government have worked with and patronised would fall under its hammer.
That Gove will not allow this to happen illustrates what this Government is trying to rush through before elections later this year: the architecture of a new far-right authoritarian politics that will erode democratic accountability, expand the ideological reach of the state, elevate white nationalist and anti-Muslim ideologies, while restricting the scope for reform long after this government collapses.