Charles Moore is giving the prestigious 2008 Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture at the Centre for Policy Studies tonight (7pm), about conservative attitudes to Islamic extremism. I know a number of MPs and key thinkers on the centre-right will be there as several of them have cited it as an excuse for not attending tonight's champagne reception for CentreRight contributors!
Moore identifies three "bad conservative attitudes" to the problems relating to Islam in Britain:
- Dismissing Muslims as “primitive and fanatical”;
- Trying to exploit controversies for short term political gain;
- Ignoring them.
He will say that "conservatives, with a big and a small c, have made a great many mistakes" in their approach to Islamic extremism. He believes conservatives now need to challenge the extremists head-on for the sake of moderate Muslims, in the same way that Keith Joseph and the CPS first questioned the premise that the Unions couldn't be curtailed and therefore had to be appeased.
Click here to download a copy of his speech.
