The harmful rise of the identitarian state

The range of UK society has introduced us many advantages. However the prices of failing to fulfill our rising range with a strong concentrate on integration have gotten more and more obvious, too. Final autumn, in Leicester, gangs of masked Muslim and Hindu youths fought one another on the streets. This September, racial tensions flared in Peckham, south-east London, after an Asian shopkeeper violently restrained a younger black lady. And now pro-Palestine / anti-Israel demonstrations are being held on a weekly foundation in our cities, usually with ugly outcomes.

Britain is a profitable instance of a multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy. However we should guard towards complacency and handle the social and political forces that threaten social cohesion. And one of many foremost threats comes from the state’s embrace of id politics. This has led to the appointment of tribalists in positions of decision-making affect.

Take the Metropolitan Police. It seems that, in recent times, it has been growing formal relationships with divisive, self-appointed ‘neighborhood leaders’. Over the weekend, for example, it emerged that the Met had been pressured to chop ties with Attiq Malik, the chair of the London Muslim Communities Discussion board (LMCF). Footage unearthed by the Telegraph reveals Attiq main a chant of ‘From the river to the ocean’, which is broadly thought to be anti-Semitic, throughout a pro-Palestine protest in 2021. The LMCF has been utilized by the police as a ‘strategic advisory physique’ for a number of years.

The Met’s issues don’t cease there. It’s now additionally having to research Amina Ahmed, a ‘management co-ordinator’ at Scotland Yard. Final month, she claimed on social media that help for Israel must be handled as a hate crime.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is affected by comparable issues. Final week, it emerged that Mohammed Kozbar, a distinguished mosque chairman who praised the founding father of Hamas, had been advising the CPS as a part of a ‘scrutiny panel’ on hate crime.

No matter one’s perspective on the Israel-Hamas battle – I personally consider within the want for Palestinians to have their very own sovereign nation state and that the Israeli authorities is unjustly punishing Gazans in its response to Hamas’s atrocities – these self-appointed leaders are nonetheless an issue. Because the Met struggles to determine how to reply to the weekly Palestine protests, ‘neighborhood leaders’ who’re so brazenly hostile to Israel are unlikely to be probably the most fair-minded, unbiased of advisers.

It’s not simply the appointment of doubtful ‘neighborhood leaders’ to positions of public affect that’s the drawback right here. The state can also be allocating public funding to radical identitarian organisations that advance sure id teams’ pursuits on the expense of others.

Certainly, there have even been instances of anti-extremist funding being awarded to extremist teams. The latest impartial evaluate into the UK authorities’s Stop programme – which goals to determine would-be terrorists – discovered that it had funded a bunch led by a person with apparently pro-Taliban sympathies. Lest it’s forgotten, the Taliban has been accountable for the violent persecution of minority teams in Afghanistan, together with Shia Hazaras. Given there are established Shia Hazara communities in Milton Keynes, Oxford and Southampton, amongst different locations, how would they really feel concerning the authorities funding a bunch with a frontrunner sympathetic to their persecutors?

Too usually, the identitarian state prioritises racial and spiritual sensitivities over the security and safety of native communities. So, whereas the principal terror risk to the UK comes from Islamist teams and people – accounting for three-quarters of MI5’s counter-terror caseload – only one in six Stop referrals is Islamist-related. It appears that evidently the well being and training sectors, that are the chief sources of Stop referrals, are extra involved with avoiding accusations of racism and ‘Islamophobia’ than they’re with tackling the phobia risk.

This state-led promotion of id politics has, at factors, conflicted with the federal government’s personal insurance policies. In Might, the Telegraph reported that authorities grants had been funding the Paul Hamlyn Basis (PHF), a pro-migration advocacy group that has labelled border management ‘systemically racist’. The PHF has itself funded Detention Motion, which has taken authorized motion towards the UK authorities’s Rwanda deportation coverage.

British state establishments must drop the identitarian posturing and cease pandering to group-based pursuits. Their focus must be on integrating various communities, quite than entrenching divisions between them. The state ought to cease giving tribal opportunists the facility and affect they crave. And it should cease allocating funding for teams that categorical solidarity with terrorist and totalitarian regimes abroad or that peddle warped narratives of Britain’s document on race relations.

It’s time our flesh pressers acquired to grips with the identitarian state and began selling civic solidarity and social cohesion as an alternative.

Rakib Ehsan is the creator of Past Grievance: What the Left Will get Mistaken about Ethnic Minorities, which is accessible to order on Amazon.