Downing Street must impose its authority over Sayeeda Warsi. If necessary, she should be sacked.

By Paul Goodman
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Andrew Gilligan notes this morning that the Federation of Student Islamic Societies has been condemned by Theresa May and Nick Clegg for its failure to “fully challenge terrorist and extremist ideology”.  Indeed, the Home Secretary ordered that civil servants withdraw from a graduate recruitment fair held by FOSIS.  These words and deeds didn't arise from a vacuum.  They were shapped by the Government's Prevent policy - one of the four pillars of its counter-terror strategy - which other Ministers are, by extension, also committed to.

It follows that Sayeeda Warsi should have been barred from attending an event organised by FOSIS recently.  I'm told that the matter was raised with CLG by Home Office officials, but that the former claimed that since its own approach to extremism is incomplete, Warsi should be allowed to attend.  This raises interesting questions about that approach (to which I will return), but it is beside the main point - namely, that the Government has a Prevent policy in place, and it must be adhered to.

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Hindu voters = Natural Conservatives

By Paul Goodman
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• 13% more Hindu voters than voters as a whole believe that the Conservative Party shares their values.  (40% compared to 27%.)

• 14% more Hindu voters than voters as a whole believe that if if you work hard, it is possible to be very successful in Britain, no matter what your background.  (73% compared to 59%.)
  

• 10% more Hindu voters than voters as a whole trust George Osborne to manage the economy in the interests of Britain. (51% to 41%).

• 10% more Hindu voters than voters as a whole believe that the Conservative Party is supportive of multiculturalism. (64% to 54%).

• 15% more Hindu voters than voters as a whole believe that David Cameron is supportive of multiculturalism. (74% to 59%).

I've said it before and say it again: Hindu voters are natural conservatives.

The figures are from Lord Ashcroft's latest poll - see here and here.

71% of Conservative voters support multiculturalism

By Paul Goodman
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The detail is buried away in Lord Ashcroft's latest poll of ethnic minority voters.  It is almost exactly the same as the figure for all voters, which is 70%.  The Liberal Democrat figure is 89% and the Labour figure is 76%.  UKIP is the only party whose among whom a majority said they were opposed to multiculturalism.  And that view doesn't command over two-thirds support from UKIP supporters, whereas the opposite one does command over two-thirds support from voters of the other parties.

Multiculturalism means different things to different people.  To some, it means shying away from the fact that some Pakistani-origin men see white girls as second or even third class citizens.  Or tolerating forced marriages and female genital mutilation. Or translating public documents into languages other than English at the taxpayers' expense.

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The Government's counter-terror strategy: Quite a bit done, a lot more to do

By Paul Goodman
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Almost eight years ago, 52 innocents were murdered and hundreds injured by Islamist terrorists on 7/7.  Two years ago, David Cameron made a speech about the causes of that terror in Berlin - his so-called "Munich Speech".  In the years between the two events, debate raged both about policy responses to Al Qaeda terror - dividing politicians, civil servants, the security services, the police and academics into two main camps.

The last Government's CONTEST counter-terror strategy was divided into four strands (and remains so under this one) - Prepare, Protect, Pursue and Prevent.  It was this last that proved the most contentious.

One school of thought held that government could use the bad against the worst - in other words, non-violent extremists against the violent extremists of Al Qaeda.  Individuals and groups aligned with such Islamist movements as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat e-Islami had, it was argued, "credibility" with young British Muslims, and could help turn them against AQ - thus helping to prevent terror attacks.

Others disagreed, arguing that it would be disastrous for the state to fund or patronise movements that were ambiguous, to say the least, about liberal democracy, and held ideas about, for example, the place of women in society that were antithetical to it.  In Munich, David Cameron threw his weight decisively on the side of the second school, and against not only those who committed violent acts, but against those who supported the ideology that helped to underpin them.

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Islamist terror and extremism: "They haven't gone away, you know"

By Paul Goodman
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There has been no mass terror attack in Britain for over five years - since the bombing of Glasgow airport in 2007.  Osama Bin Laden is dead, and the reach of his Afghanistan-and-Pakistan-based Al Qaeda network reduced.  British troops have returned from Iraq and will, before too long, come back from Afghanistan.  It might therefore be assumed that the threat of bombs on the tube - or elsewhere - carried by Islamist fanatics has faded away altogether.

However, yesterday's conviction of three would-be suicide bombers from Birmingham is a reminder that Al Qaeda, as Gerry Adams once said of the IRA, "hasn't gone away, you know".  It never had: for example, innocents in Exeter's Giraffe Cafe were lucky not to die or be maimed in 2008, when Nicky Reilly's exploding bomb injured only himself.  Reilly was a convert to an extremist variant of Islam - a distortion of the classical, traditional form.

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Warsi: Under a quarter of Britons think Muslims are compatible with the British way of life

By Paul Goodman
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Earlier today, Sunder Katawala at British Future tweeted the full text of Sayeeda Warsi's speech yesterday evening to Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks).  The Baroness broadened and deepened the argument she put in her controversial "dinner party speech" last year, but the most striking part of her speech is not the words, but the statistics.  "Early indications are that 50 to 60% of reported religious hate crimes were anti-Muslim", she said, referring to information from the Association of Chief Police Officers.

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Beneath Cameron's drive for same-sex marriage lies disdain for his own MPs

By Paul Goodman
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When I left the Commons in 2010, the local Association activists were more or less the same people as when I entered it in 2001 - though, of course, older.  Others had died during that decade or so, like other, less active members.  Others still failed to renew their membership, or moved away from the High Wycombe area.  But they were essentially the same people at the end as at the start: decent, hard-working, public-spirited, not always well-off, seldom movers and shakers (unlike some of the people I worked with at Westminster, though this wasn't necessarily to their disadvantage), distinguishable from their neighbours largely by being politically active - and, by the end of my time as the local MP, a bit more set in their ways, as older people tend to be.

As time like an ever-rolling stream bore those ten years away, I noticed a change in their attitude to the party leadership.  They didn't exactly become more disenchanted - though this was so in some cases - but they definitely became more detached, as all the while around them election turnout stayed very low, public disenchantment with the political system grew, and party membership fell further.  After David Cameron became leader in 2005, trying to report what he was doing became rather like trying to explain to an elderly couple what their grandson was up to.  Imponderable words and phrases began to flow from my lips even more frequently than usual: "huskies...modernisation...inclusivity...hoodies".

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Warsi says that the party must win minorities to win majorities. She's right.

The Sun reports that Sayeeda Warsi will say in a speech today that -

"Tories have a “brand problem” with ethnic minorities and will not win future elections until they solve it...The Foreign Office minister believes her party must learn from President Barack Obama’s recent triumph. And in a warning to David Cameron, she ups his call for an Aspiration Nation with the need for “an Integration Nation”.

She will also say:

“This issue has gone from a moral imperative to an electoral reality.” By 2050, minorities will make up a fifth of all voters but only one in six of them voted Tory at the last general election. And she will cite Obama’s success in attracting 70 per cent of Latino and Asian voters, and 90 per cent of the black vote".

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It doesn't matter if we think we're not racist. But it matters if ethnic minorities think we are.

By Paul Goodman
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Before the last party conference, Tim Montgomerie reported that most voters aren't worried that the Conservative Party is bigoted, basing this conclusion on polling evidence obtained for ConservativeHome.  "Only 2% say that Conservative attitudes to women are a big barrier," he wrote, adding that "only 1% identify attitudes towards gay people and ethnic minorities".  This is both true and at the same time incomplete - and if considered in isolation (which Tim didn't do, of course) can further a dangerous complacency.

This is because there is an obvious difference between voters in general and voters in particular.  For example, if 1% of all voters think that the Conservatives don't have a problem with people from Yorkshire, but 84% of people from Yorkshire disagree, this will clearly be a barrier to winning votes and seats in Yorkshire.  So let's have a look at the three groups identified in the article (which is surely correct in identifying class, as the polling on which is was based suggests, as the main problem for the party among the generality of voters).

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The Coalition is not doing enough to end the equalities industry - tackling it would be a social and economic good

By Matthew Barrett
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Amidst all the talk of "going for growth", Lib Dem "hate taxes on the rich", and difficult decisions for Ministers having to reduce their budgets, there is one large, flabby area of government which has been insufficiently tackled, but which could be cut down to size easily, popularly, and with huge benefits for society: the equalities sector.

As people working in the private sector - the real economy - knows, hundreds of millions of pounds are wasted on having to comply with equalities regulations, and millions more are spent on funding equalities professionals - unproductive individuals. The Treasury ought to see cutting down on this pernicious aspect of the Whitehall establishment as a priority, not just to save money on those employed to collect meaningless data, but to create the conditions necessary for small and medium-sized businesses to power the recovery.

The idea of having an equalities sector is out-dated. In the 1940s, '50s and '60s, when race relations were considered poor, and legislation like the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and '68 were passed, one could see there was some logic in ensuring government adhered to the principle of racial equality it had legislated for. Race relations improved in the second half of the 1980s and 1990s (when, un-coincidentally, a Conservative immigration existed), but, perversely, the 1980s Labour left saw "diversity", "equality", and other such Guardian buzzwords, as a fundamental part of what Labour should believe in, which led to the expansion of the equalities sector when Labour entered office in 1997.

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