Category: Britain

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has taken a hammering for claiming that the BBC didn’t display the same integrity over its role in the Jimmy Savile scandal as the churches had done over allegations of child abuse in their own ranks. The archbishop was immediately accused of hypocrisy. The broader point he made was perhaps more interesting. “I think,” he observed, “we are a kinder society, more concerned with our own failures, more willing to be honest where we go wrong.” A kinder society? Really? To read my entire…

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Jerusalem Post At its annual conference this week, Britain’s Labour Party crossed a chilling and fateful line. At a fringe meeting there was a call to treat Holocaust denial as a legitimate contribution to debate; Israel was compared to the Nazis; and there was a demand to expel pro-Israel Jewish groups from the party. On the conference floor itself, a Jewish woman spewed a stream of defamatory falsehoods, distortions and smears about Israel. She then received an ecstatic standing ovation for stating: “I am not an antisemite. This party does…

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The reverberations from Tuesday’s Jew-baiting hate-fest at the Labour party conference rumble on, as well they might. David Collier’s blog post here on what he experienced at the conference is a must-read. I found this observation particularly chilling: “At the Labour Friends of Israel event, there were anti-Israel activists actually taking photos of the MPs who were present. No doubt to add new faces onto existing expulsion ‘lists’… To my knowledge, I had my photo take twice at the conference. Once as I was leaving the ‘Free Speech’ event, an…

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What has been revealed about the Labour party at its annual conference in Brighton should make all decent people shudder. A fringe meeting hosted a call for Labour to debate whether the Holocaust actually happened, the libelling of Israel as a racist, Nazi, apartheid and colonialist state and a demand that Jews who supported Israel should be kicked out of the Labour party. What was so chilling was not just that the meeting, called Free Speech on Israel (aka Safe Space for Hate) provided bigots with the opportunity to spew…

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The now (in)famous article Boris Johnson wrote about Brexit in the Telegraph (on his Facebook page here) has been presented entirely in political terms. It was an attack on Theresa May, an act of disloyalty or treachery, a sackable offence, the outcome of blind ambition and his positioning for a leadership challenge. Well ok, maybe it was such a challenge and then again, maybe it wasn’t. But what was so wrong with the article itself to have provoked such apoplexy? For it was no more or less than a passionate…

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In 2002, on the BBC TV show Question Time, I was accused of dual loyalty in front of a jeering studio audience. My crime had been to defend Israel against demonization and double standards by both the audience and other members of the panel. At that time I had visited Israel only twice in my life, two years previously. No matter. A British Jew defending Israel was – and is – immediately accused in some quarters of incipient treachery toward Britain, just as throughout history antisemites have accused Diaspora Jews…

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One of the key dividing lines in political debate is whether people are largely helpless victims of circumstance or responsible for their own fate. The Labour MP David Lammy seems well aware of the trap of elevating the former belief into an irresponsible dogma. Nevertheless, he appears to have fallen into it in his report on the over-representation of black, Asian and minority ethnic people in the criminal justice system in England and Wales. Lammy’s report acknowledges the part played in this by personal circumstances. He still concludes, however, that…

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There are many things that could be said about Tony Blair’s suggestion that the UK should toughen its immigration policy to reduce the numbers coming in from Europe. He claims this can be done “by measures within our own law or by negotiation with Europe”. Hey presto! – the British will then suddenly come to their senses, demand a second referendum and vote to stay in the EU after all. I don’t know which is the most startling here – the fantastic magical thinking, the fathomless hypocrisy or the deep…

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The charity Girls Not Brides UK is campaigning to raise the minimum age for marriage from 16 to 18. The primary reason is to stop the practice of forced marriages. In 2016, the UK Forced Marriage Unit’s helpline dealt with more than 1,400 cases; 15 per cent involved children aged 16 and under and 11 per cent involved 16-17 year-olds. The campaign, however, illuminates a wider question. At what age does a child become an adult? To read my whole column in The Times (£) please click here.

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