For my views to align with Suella Braverman’s, it would require an evolution on the magnitude of the Fish-Tetrapod Transition, but incredibly, I think she might be on to something when she hints at the threats to civil society. She was wrong about London’s “hate marches” (there was plenty of hate, but they passed off peacefully enough). She was wrong about Rwanda (wrong in principle, wrong by law). But however she came to it, there is a sliver of truth in the idea that our social fabric is starting to fray.
Braverman herself played a small part in this. By being so inflammatory about the pro-Palestine movement she facilitated the far-Right thugs who turned out to defend the honour of our beloved dead by smashing through a police barricade. Braverman didn’t conjure these men out of thin air: until Remembrance Sunday, they’d been merrily killing time on Peaky Blinders cosplay weekends.
The same is true of the protesters they were there to confront. The pro-Palestine marches included supporters of terrorism and apologists for terrorism, along with many others who were neither. But the toxic elements — Islamists, antisemites — have always been there alongside the thick-as-mince progressives. The war in Israel and Gaza merely drew the poison out into the open.
The footage of protesters denying the Hamas attacks ever took place was as chilling as it was amusing
The appearance of the far Right gave opportunists on the far Left a moment to deflect the public’s gaze from their own horrible opinions. Everyone, even jihadists, can get behind hating racist white men. It turns out extremism is bad. Who knew? A few hours later those same activists would march alongside masked religious hate-mongers wearing Hamas bandanas and calling for the destruction of Israel. There’s no difference between a young woman of colour at a train station shouting “Death to all the Jews” and the vile songs of white racist thugs. I’m sure there are thousands of protesters who feel compelled to march for peace and are upset that their goodwill is being questioned, but if you don’t want to be misunderstood don’t walk alongside anyone chanting “Khaybar Khaybar ya yahud”.
Civil society decays not only in the presence of political extremism but by the unjustifiable assumption that some extremism is more acceptable than others — or by the idea that the principles of tolerance and respect only apply to your personal identity, whether that be your faith, ethnicity, sexuality or culture.
A cohesive society and the rule of law cannot be a mailing list of values from which you opt out at your convenience.
Feeling you are free to repeatedly yell hate speech with impunity, violently antagonise or humiliate fellow citizens and call for the death of a race in a city where hundreds of thousands of those people live feels like something new (though hardly new in history).
Balanced, considerate views may seem as dry as Prince Andrew’s armpits to idealistic youth, but they sure make your street a better place to walk, your children’s school a safer space and universities an open environment for learning. The footage of two young women on a recent London march denying the Hamas attacks on October 7 ever happened then admitting they didn’t even know what the interviewer was asking about was as chilling as it was amusing. The eternal romance between ignorance and prejudice breeds appeasement into our collective future, when even the absolute worst idea can be excused on the grounds that it just “feels right”.
The traditional method of expressing disapproval of your MP was to vote for someone else. Apparently this is very old fashioned. Now what you do if your MP has the temerity to agree with an official policy of their own party is demonstrate outside the constituency HQ in an attempt to intimidate them and anyone else working in the office. The sense that nothing can be done about this, and that something terrible is likely to happen soon, is palpable. Tearing down posters of kidnapped children requires an unusually high degree of anti-social licence. Even if it isn’t illegal, it’s a perverse declaration of independence from the previous agreement of what constitutes basic decency.
I’m all for context, but to contextualise this extremist aggression beyond judgement or consequence is as much a threat to civil society as the abuse itself. Our values and the laws that underpin them rely on consent and on the idea that they are shared, even if we sometimes disagree with them. Braverman doesn’t appear to get this any more than the protesters she despises.
When religious exceptionalism, braindead racism or one-eyed dogma overwhelm our need for commonality and cohesion, we are all in danger. We have had just a taste of this extremism over the past few weeks. Just a taste was plenty for me.
