A Response to Rishi Sunak
Islamists and the 'far-right' are not the same
The following is a response to the speech given by Rishi Sunak on Friday, 1st March. A transcript of his speech has been provided; feel free to skip it if you just want to read the response. The full speech can also be viewed here. (Narration of the response begins at 8:48 of the audiotrack if you want to skip to it.)
The Speech
In recent weeks and months we have seen a shocking increase in extremist disruption and criminality. What started as protests on our streets has descended into intimidation, threats, and planned acts of violence. Jewish children fearful to wear their school uniform lest it reveal their identity; Muslim women abused in the street for the actions of a terrorist group they have no connection with. Now our democracy itself is a target. Council meetings and local events have been stormed; MPs do not feel safe in their homes; longstanding parliamentary conventions have been upended because of safety concerns, and it is beyond alarming that, last night, the Rochdale by-election returned a candidate who dismisses the horror of what happened on October the 7th, who glorifies Hezbollah, and is endorsed by Nick Griffin, the racist former leader of the BNP. I need to speak to you all this evening because this situation has gone on long enough. And it demands a response - not just from government - but from all of us. Britain is a patriotic, liberal, democratic society with a proud past and a bright future; we’re a reasonable country, and a decent people.
Our story is one of progress, of great achievements and enduring values. Immigrants who come here have integrated and contributed. They have helped to write the latest chapter in our island’s story. They have done this without being required to give up their identity. You can be a practicing Hindu and a proud Briton, as I am. Or a devout Muslim and a patriotic citizen, as so many are. Or a committed Jewish person, and the heart of your local community. And all underpinned by the tolerance of our established Christian Church. We are a country where we love our neighbours, and we are building Britain together.
But I fear that our great achievement, in building the world’s most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy is being deliberately undermined. There are forces here at home trying to tear us apart. Since October the 7th, there have been those trying to take advantage of the very human angst that we all feel about the terrible suffering that war brings to the innocent, to women and children, to advance a divisive, hateful ideological agenda. On too many occasions recently, our streets have been hijacked by small groups who are hostile to our values and have no respect for our democratic traditions. Membership of our society is contingent on some simple things: that you abide by our rule of law, and that change can only come by the peaceful democratic process. Threats of violence, and intimidation, are alien to our way of doing things; they must be resisted at all times. Nearly everyone in Britain supports these basic values. But there are small and vocal hostile groups who do not.
Islamist extremists and the far-right feed off, and embolden, each other. They are equally desperate to pretend that their violence is somehow justified when, actually, these groups are two sides of the same extremist coin. Neither group accept that change in our country can only come through the peaceful democratic process. Both loathe the pluralist, modern country we are; both want to set Briton against Briton, to weaponise the evils of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred for their own ends. The faith of Islam, peacefully practiced by millions of our fellow citizens is emphatically not the same thing as the extremist political ideology of Islamism, which aims to seperate Muslims from the rest of society. Islamist extremists and far-right groups are spreading a poison; that poison is extremism. It aims to drain us of our confidence in ourselves as a people, and in our shared future. They want us to doubt ourselves, to doubt each other, to doubt our country’s history and achievements. They want us to accept a moral equivalence between Britain and some of the most despicable regimes in the world. They want us to believe that our country, and the West more generally, is solely responsible for the world’s ills and that we, along with our allies, are the problem. In short, they want to destroy our confidence and hope. We must not allow that to happen.
When these groups claim that Britain is, and has been, on the wrong side of history, we should reject it and reject it again. No country is perfect, but I am enormously proud of the good that our country has done. Our place in history is defined by the sacrifices that our people have made in the service of their own freedom, and that of others. When these groups tell our children that they cannot and will not succeed because of who they are, when they tell children that the system is rigged against them, or that Britain is a racist country, this is not only a lie, but a cynical attempt to crush young dreams and turn impressionistic minds against their own society.
I stand here as our country’s first non-white Prime Minister, leading the most diverse government in our country’s history, to tell people of all races, all faiths, and all backgrounds: it is not the colour of your skin, the god you believe in, or where you were born that will determine your success, but just your own hard work and endeavour. We must be prepared to stand up for our shared values in all circumstances, no matter how difficult.
I respect that the Police have a tough job in policing the protests that we have seen, and that they are operationally independent. But we must draw a line. Yes, you can march and protest with passion, you can demand the protection of civilian life, but no, you cannot call for violent Jihad. There is no context in which it can be acceptable to beam antisemitic tropes onto Big Ben in the middle of a vote on Israel-Gaza and there can be no cause that you can use to justify the support of a proscribed terrorist group like Hamas. And yes, you can freely criticise the actions of this government or, indeed, any government. That is a fundamental democratic right. But no, you cannot use that as an excuse to call for the eradication of a state, or any kind of hatred or antisemitism.
This week, I’ve met with senior police officers and made clear that it is the public’s expectation that they will not merely manage these protests, but police them. And I say this to the police: we will back you when you take action. But if we are asking more of the police, we in government must also back up that call with action. To that end, this month the government will implement a new, robust framework for how it deals with this issue, to ensure we’re dealing with the root causes of this problem, and that no extremist organisations or individuals are being lent legitimacy by their actions and interactions with central government.
You cannot be part of our civic life if your agenda is to tear it down. We will redouble our support for the Prevent programme, to stop young minds being poisoned by extremism. We will demand that universities stop extremist activity on campus. We will also act to prevent people entering this country whose aim is to undermine its values. The Home Secretary has instructed that if those here on visas choose to spew hate, or protest, or seek to intimidate people, we will remove their right to be here. Our Britain must not be a country in which we descend into polarised camps, with some communities living parallel lives. It is not enough to live side-by-side, we must live together, united by shared values and a shared commitment to this country.
And I want to speak directly to those who choose to continue to protest: don’t let the extremists hijack your marches. You have a chance in the coming weeks to show that you can protest decently, peacefully, and with empathy for your fellow citizens. Let us prove these extremists wrong, and show them that even when we disagree, we will never be disunited from our common values of decency and respect. I love this country, my family and I owe it so much. The time has now come for us all to stand together, to combat the forces of division, and beat this poison. We must face down the extremists who would tear us apart, there must be leadership - not pandering or appeasement.
When they tell their lies, we will tell the truth; when they try and sap our confidence, we will redouble our efforts, and when they try to make us doubt each other, we will dig deeper for that extra ounce of compassion and empathy that they want us to believe doesn’t exist, but that I know does. If we do that, we can build on our great achievement in creating today’s Britain, a country of kind, decent, tolerant people. We can make this a country in which we all feel a renewed sense of pride. This is our home. So, let us go forward together, confident in our values and confident in our future.
A Response to Rishi Sunak’s Speech
Right off the bat, Sunak equivocates Islamism with ‘far-right’ extremism, but then proceeds to hardly speak at all about so-called ‘far-right’ extremism throughout the speech. Presumably he couldn’t find much to say on the topic, but simply wanted to throw it in there to not seem so one-sided, to avoid the inevitable labelling of ‘Islamophobia’ thrown at anyone who raises the issue of Islamic violence and intimidation.
It is impossible for our politicians to criticise the words and actions of the enemy within (Muslims, Leftists, and anti-British immigrants or immigrant-descendants) without also mentioning the far-right. They feel they have to pretend that those natives who have seen themselves made a minority in their own cities, their daughters raped by grooming gangs, and their culture erased, and who are rightly aggrieved by this state of affairs, are somehow as morally reprehensible as the coalition of lunatics who hate and want to destroy Britain. It is worth bearing in mind that native Britons did not ask for any of this, and have repeatedly voiced their disapproval of it; they had it foisted upon them. As Conservative MP Sir John Hoyle rightly said last year on the topic of mass immigration, “This has been done without consent - indeed, without as much as consultation, let alone consent.”
For as long as there has been anything more than neglible levels of immigration into Britain, there has been vocal resistance. No political party has won a general election on a manifesto promising increased immigration; of the four general elections the Tories have won in the last 14 years, all were won on manifestos promising a vast reduction in immigration numbers. In 2010, the year that the Conservatives took power - promising a reduction of immigration numbers to “tens of thousands” - net migration was 252,000. In 2022, the latest year for which we have official immigration figures, that number was 745,000. Almost triple. (Full disclosure: the provisional figure for 2023 puts the net migration number at a slightly lower 672,000, but the provisional figure for 2022 was 606,000 before it was revised upwards to 745,000, so we cannot be sure of the exact number yet. At this point, it wouldn’t be a surprise if it ended up topping the record broken in 2022.)
Is it any wonder that a growing section of the populace feels itself to have been repeatedly betrayed by its representatives, and, as such, begins to question the efficacy of the political system as a whole? What is the use of a democracy in which the wishes of the people are consistently ignored, and the needs of the people routinely unmet? Naturally, native Britons are incredibly frustrated. If anything, it’s a testament to British temperance that instances of far-right extremism are actually incredibly far and few between - a stark contrast in comparison to the plethora of terror attacks which have been perpetrated by Islamists over the years.
Of all the examples Sunak gives of extremism - Jewish children fearful to wear their school uniform, Muslim women abused in the street, council meetings being stormed, MPs feeling unsafe in their homes, and parliamentary conventions being upended due to safety concerns - all bar one are directly attributable to Muslims. The example of Muslim women being ‘abused on the street’ almost certainly took place at a pro-Hamas march, so I can’t say I have all that much sympathy. “Immigrants who come here have integrated and contributed,” he says, as immigrants can be heard screeching about a foreign war somewhere in the distance.
Sunak talks of Britain as “a patriotic, liberal, democratic society with a proud past and a bright future; a reasonable country, and a decent people.” Now, the patriots are not the problem. The failure of democracy, and the liberal mind-disease of Western societies - those are the problems. Patriotism - actual patriotism, not what Sunak calls patriotism, by which he only means how ‘reasonable’, ‘decent’, and ‘tolerant’ we are - is the antidote to the issues plaguing Britain. Liberalism, through its idealistic pretensions that everyone is essentially the same and that anyone born on a nation’s soil is automatically imparted ownership of, and responsibility for, that nation, is slowly eroding Britain’s culture.
We are increasingly told that our “proud past” is in fact a purely negative one, which, to be fair to him, Sunak does mention. According to the enemy within, the history of Britain has been nothing but a history of oppression, exploitation, bloodshed, and horror. The “bright future” he mentions is being stolen from us through mass immigration, the deconstruction and rewriting of British history, and the constant sidelining of native Britons in favour of those who have, by historical standards, just arrived.
We are, in fact, a reasonable and decent people, but many of those being invited over by the nominally ‘Conservative’ government, are anything but. Teenagers are routinely murdered by immigrants, young girls groomed and raped by immigrants, and terror attacks carried out by immigrants.
He says “You cannot be part of our civic life if your agenda is to tear it down.” Unfortunately, Rishi, it is you politicians who are tearing down our civic society, through your mass importation of foreigners, through your appeasement of terrorists and terrorist sympathisers, and through your passive acceptance of the ideological rot aimed at the demoralisation of the British people. Those ‘far-right extremists’ you denigrate are, for the most part, simply people who are fed up, sick to the back teeth of seeing this country collapse under the contradictions of the progressive ideology imposed on it, the Leftist agenda which deconstructs it, and the strain resulting from the thousands of new arrivals foisted upon it daily.
The claim that Britain is “the world’s most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy” is laughable. In fairness, it may be the ‘the most successful’ in a relative sense, but it is not successful. In fact, Britain’s success has been undermined in direct proportion as it has become more “multi-ethnic” and “multi-faith”, as its unique native culture has been eroded and replaced with a bland, substanceless cosmopolitanism. The increasing ‘diversity’ of the UK goes hand-in-hand with an increasing division, as our new ‘diverse’ neighbours attempt to fundamentally alter the nation to suit them (rather than integrate into it as we were promised), and as a higher importance is placed on their special interests than on the interests of those to whom the country belongs and by whom it was formed.
Sunak speaks directly to pro-Palestine marchers, and implores them not to allow extremists to hijack their protests. It can hardly be called ‘hijacking’ a protest when all those involved support, implicitly or explicitly, the more extreme elements. Imagine a protester telling someone off for chanting “From the river to the sea..” and accusing them of attempting to hijack the protest. They would, at minimum, be laughed out of the protest, if not assaulted for ‘wrongthink’. Of course, there is a spectrum of intensity with regards to the beliefs of the individuals involved, but they are fundamentally united by a wish to see the state of Israel overthrown, violently if necessary.
Rishi says “I stand here as our country’s first non-white Prime Minister, leading the most diverse government in our country’s history,” as if that is something to be proud of. The Conservative Party’s tactic of attempting to score points against Labour by highlighting its ‘diversity’ plays directly into the hands of Labour and the Leftist project more generally. Every time they play the ‘we’ve got more diversity than you!’ card, they are solidifying the progressive paradigm in which homogeneity is seen as detrimental, if not downright unnatural and perverse.
Of course we get to see a repetition of a common theme in modern Britain - a minority group, such as Islamists, engages in extremist behaviour, such as intimidation of politicians, and the response is a blanket strengthening of the anti-extremism legislation commonly used to criminalise concerned Britons. The Prevent programme, initially set up to tackle Islamic extremism, has previously been accused of ‘double standards’ and an ‘institutional hesitancy to tackle Islamism’ for focusing disproportionately on ‘far-right extremism’ rather than its more pressing original purpose.
Sunak ends with what is presumably intended to be a rousing spiel about ‘British values’ of compassion, kindness, and tolerance. That is all well and good, we should be compassionate and kind, and even tolerant to a certain extent. The problem is that an overabundance of compassion and tolerance is precisely what has led to the situation we find ourselves in today. Compassion, kindness, and tolerance are values which when taken advantage of must be rescinded for our preservation. I appreciate the idealism and the sentiment of his words, but we must be realistic; when our virtues become liabilities, when they are weaponised and used against us to our detriment, they must be temporarily paused.
In conclusion, Sunak’s speech displays the deep-seated flaws of the brainrot ideology which pervades the Westminster bubble. It attempts to brush off the understandable frustration felt by some Britons towards a political system which they perceive as repeatedly betraying their interests and needs. The current political situation underscores the erosion of trust that mass immigration brings with it, particularly when the public disapproval and rejection of such immigration is ignored; his call for unity rings hollow as it disregards the fundamental divisions which the government has created, exacerbated, and failed to address. It is clear that a fundamental re-examination of Westminster’s culture and policies is required, and a commitment made to attempt to reverse the damage that has been wrought on Britain and its culture. Unfortunately, Sunak’s words make it quite clear that the Conservative Party is not the party to look to for such a commitment.