Are we being ‘poisoned’ by extremism? The Prime Minister seems to think so. His speech on the steps of Downing Street following the Rochdale by-election described a country where values of tolerance and civility were being deliberately undermined by Islamists and the far right. ‘Islamist extremists and the far right feed off and embolden each other,’ he warned. But in conflating those two threats, the Prime Minister made the same mistake as his predecessors.
Sunak followed the script, endorsed by too many institutions in Britain, that the big threat to our way of life comes in two equal halves. Yet treating the far right and Islamist terror as two sides of the same coin defies all the realities of who is in custody, who is in the graveyard and what makes up 75 per cent of the terror caseload. The equity obsession seems designed to comfort the sensibilities of a progressive audience rather than respond to what the data says. Islamist extremism is by some margin the biggest terrorist threat in this country. Sunak could, and should, have been much clearer on this point, about the extremism that has rocketed levels of antisemitic hate and infiltrated both pro-Palestinian marches and our electoral process. Seeking to leaven these uncomfortable facts with false equivalence is dangerous.
