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Northumbria Police decide Koran burning is illegal

Since the Rushdie affair more than 20 years ago, British Islamists have been campaigning to ban all criticism of Islam. This move has not been simply an emotional response to a deeply felt insult to their beliefs, but has been part of a wider agenda to introduce sharia into Britain. Their strategy to do this has been to increasingly align British law with sharia, either by a) pushing test cases through the courts; b) pushing for changes in parliamentary law; and c) lobbying for changes in the practices of public bodies such as the police.

Under sharia insulting the prophet is the most serious offence and carries a compulsory death sentence in countries such as Pakistan. An only slightly less serious offence is insulting or desecrating the Qur’an, which in Pakistan carries a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

Unfortunately Northumbria Police have just fallen hook, line and sinker for the "lets align British law with sharia" strategy by arresting six members of the English Defence League for burning copies of the Qur’an in a pub car park on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In a press release Northumbria Police stated that: "The arrests followed the burning of what are believed to have been two Korans in Gateshead on September 11". A police spokesman is also reported to have specifically stated that the men were not arrested for watching or distributing the YouTube video of their actions, but on suspicion of burning the Qur’an.

Let me say straight away that that this was both a foolish and an unnecessarily provocative act. The proposed Qur’an burning in the USA caused rioting over several days in Afghanistan, which resulted in several people receiving serious injuries. However, we are moving into very dangerous territory if the British police start to think that it is a criminal offence to burn a copy the Qur’an – or the Torah or the New Testament, however offensive those acts may be to the rest of us.

The actions of Northumbria Police have in fact played straight into the hands of the Islamists, who want to see any insult to the Qur’an made illegal in Britain precisely because it is one of the most serious offences in sharia.

Perversely, the overreaction of the police has also given a significant propaganda coup to racist groups. The police must realise that not only should they not be "making up the law" themselves on issues such as this, but that both Islamist and racist groups need the oxygen of publicity to survive – and that, unfortunately, is exactly what the police have just given to both groups.

However, what these misguided actions by the police do clearly demonstrate is that there is an urgent need for a root and branch review of how the police deal with incidents related to Islamism and protests – including those by racist groups – against it. Community relations will not be improved by the sort of naivety Northumbria Police have displayed in dealing with this incident, or the ensuing publicity they have given to racist groups.

Wisdom in Foreign Affairs

Martin Parsons reviews Douglas Hurd's Choose Your Weapons: The British Foreign Secretary - 200 Years of Argument, Success and Failure (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010) 414pp.

For anyone who wants a summary of what works and doesn’t work in foreign affairs, former Conservative Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd’s new book is a pretty good place to start. Lord Hurd begins by contrasting nineteenth century rivals Castlereagh and Canning, whose disagreements became so intense that they fought a duel. Canning’s foreign policy was idealistic, unilateral, liberal and interventionist, while Castlereagh’s was based on diplomacy and the building of alliances and embryonic institutions. This contrast is played out in each of the twelve Foreign Secretaries and associated Prime Ministers he selects.

However, the genius of this book is that it is not merely an academic history book, but includes Lord Hurd’s reflections on these events based on his own experience as both a diplomat and later as Foreign Secretary. These pearls of wisdom include:

• His observation that foreign policy is often based on a series of inherited myths, such as the ‘importance’ of Suez when Britain no longer had an Indian empire it needed a short sea route to;
• Lord Hurd also comments that there is often a potentially difficult relationship between Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, as the Prime Minister naturally wants to take the lead in meetings with foreign leaders. On this, Lord Hurd wisely remarks that ‘The Prime Minister is first among equals but should treat his Foreign Secretary as a colleague’ listening to his advice rather than relying too much on his own judgement.
• He observes that ‘A Prime Minister, as Eden found in 1956 and Blair over Iraq in 2003, can always find advisers to praise his wisdom’. However, the British constitutional machine, properly used provides an antidote in the form of solid mechanisms of fact-finding, analysis and recommendations.
• Nonetheless, he also avers that sometimes nations will construct their foreign relations not simply on the basis of logic and reason, but also on the basis of feelings and sentiment;
• Some of Lord Hurd’s most interesting comments relate to dealing with states that don’t play by the same rules that we do. Whilst he observes that there is a link between oppression inside a country and the likely course of its foreign policy. He also acknowledges that it is sometimes the duty of a Foreign Secretary to deal courteously with villains and that some acts of wickedness will go unchecked and some wicked men go unpunished. This is so, he contends, because ‘sometimes attempting what is right would cause more suffering than already exists. In that case, doing what is right would in fact be wrong.’

There are academics who write books and there are people who write from experience; however, this highly readable book does both. Lord Hurd has done us a great service with this book.

Don't simplify the burqa issue

Philip Hollobone and Roger Helmer are right about the burqa, but so is Damian Green and – this may surpise some who have read my previous articles on the Islamist threat – so is Caroline Spellman…!

‘Why don’t your women wear the burqa?’ asked the young talib on the bus between the Pakistan border and Jalalabad where the Taliban had just taken over in 1995.

‘Why do your women wear the burqa?’ I replied

‘Because if a man looked at a woman’'s face there would be a problem!’

‘What sort of a problem?’ I asked, already the knowing the answer...

‘Well a sin!’

‘So, who would be sinning the man or the woman?’

‘Well, the man!’

‘So why don’t you cover the man’s eyes then!’

Clearly this wasn’t an answer that fitted the Taliban rote learning of how to convert a non Muslim as the young Talib fell quiet and the rest of the bus full of Afghans quietly chuckled at someone finally getting one over on the Taliban!

In rural Afghan society the wife is regarded as the ‘property’ of her husband. She is also the public expression of her husband’s honour. So any hint of another man viewing a Pushtun man’s 'private property' would dishonour the man and could lead to divorce. While working as an aid worker in Afghanistan some years ago I learned of an incident in which another aid agency had most unwisely insisted on vaccinating everyone entering a Pushtun village. As they vaccinated an elderly burqa clad woman her husband turned to her and said ‘how can I look other village men in the eye now that other men have seen your upper arm, I divorce you I divorce you, I divorce you’ and he went one way and she went the other way. Shocking? The issue there was that the burqa was the outward form of oppressive values – that the women was her husband’s private property. In that situation the burqa was oppressive for women.

However, in other situations it is worn to protect women from the attentions of sexually predatory men. Let me explain. Even in moderate Islamic countries such as Pakistan women are expected to cover their heads with a chaddar or at the very least wear a duppatta (thin scarf) when out on the streets, because it is an outward symbol that she is a morally upright woman. In fact, a former lady colleague who had worked in Pakistan for over 30 years once told me that she had witnessed Pakistani prostitutes soliciting by removing their head coverings.

Defending coastal areas against erosion and flooding

Secretary for State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Caroline Spelman has just announced that this year spending to protect coastal areas against erosion and flooding will be £664 million. This represents a cut of approximately 17%, which is somewhat less than the average 25% cuts most departments are facing.

Nontheless, Caroline Spelman has a thankless task in having to administer spending cuts. However, as I have argued before, now would be a very good time to deregulate some aspects of sea defence, in particular creating a presumption in favour of local landowners and communities being allowed to defend their local coastline themselves.

Sea defence has always been seriously underfunded with the previous budget, which represented less than 0.1% of public spending, quite literally only being adequate to fund a few miles of new sea wall. In the medium term there is an extremely important need for much greater spending on sea defence due to a combination of a) many of the sea defences built by the Eden and Macmillan governments following the 1953 floods either reaching the end of their useful life or being in need of urgent repair; and b) sea level rise which has been averaging around 1.5mm a year since we began recording it around 150 years ago.   It should also be noted that in the South and East Anglia rises in relative sea level are actually much higher around 3-4mm or more a year due to the additional effects of isostatic readjustment (in non technical terms – during the last ice the North of England was pressed down by the weight of massive ice sheets, but now as land in the North of England slowly springs back, the South of England is experiencing a corresponding downwards tilt resulting in a much greater relative sea level rise there).

The implications of these sea level rises are firstly, coastal erosion will increase as more areas become exposed to wave attack; and secondly, some major flood defences will need significant upgrading, particularly as tidal surges are likely to increase in frequency and intensity. It should be remembered that the 1953 North Sea tidal surge killed 307 people and inundated large parts of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk up to 30 miles inland, causing massive damage to property, infrastructure and the economy. The flood defences that will need upgrading include both sea walls in coastal towns and very substantial flood defence structures such as those that protect the fens from flooding.

Whilst painful cuts in the short term are clearly necessary if the economy is not to be crippled with debt, it is really important that we plan now for the medium and long term. We cannot simply put off the issue of sea defence in the way that the previous Labour government did, any more than we can put off building new power stations if we are to keep the lights on. There are likely to be major economic consequences to not significantly increasing spending on sea defence, as was illustrated by a recent Lloyds report calling for a substantial increase in UK spending on flood defence by 2035 to avoid 'disaster'.

I am therefore suggesting that we set an aspirational target of the percentage of public spending on sea defence that is needed in the medium term. To set that figure we need to undertake a sea defence review, similar to the military defence review, which would set out what we actually need to do in terms of reasonable protection against coastal flooding and erosion and how much it will cost.

Unfortunately, the previous Labour government did not do this. They appear to have set the budget, then looked at what needed doing. There was no overall strategy, just an ad hoc approach to repairing some sea defences and abandoning others on grounds of cost. What is now needed is a sea defence review conducted every 5-10 years or so (the Netherlands review every five years), that sets out what we reasonably need to do to protect coastal communities and inland areas threatened by coastal flooding. Some of that data is already there. For example two years ago the Environment Agency concluded that £150 million was needed to defend a few miles of the North Suffolk/East Norfolk coast against flooding. However, it didn’t happen because there was no overall strategy, simply an ad hoc approach to spending a budget.

My best guess is that the aspirational target we need to set is going to be at least 0.5% of public spending – and may well be more. This is similar to the 0.7% target that we are committed to spending on overseas aid in the medium term. However, if we do not plan now to spend significantly more on sea defence in the near future, by which I mean by the end of this parliament, then we will be heaping up major problems for the longer term and leaving ourselves politically vulnerable in the event of a major coastal flooding event such as the 1953 North Sea tidal surge, which we came extraordinarily close to having a repeat of in November 2007.

A glimmer of hope in Afghanistan

British forces are primarily in Afghanistan to prevent Afghanistan becoming a safe haven and training area from which attacks on the West can be launched by Islamist terrorists, including, but by no means restricted to, al Qaeda.

In broad terms, in order to achieve that aim, they must train and hand over control of the country to Afghan security forces. For Afghan security forces to be able to do that requires a stable independent Afghan government. 'Independent' meaning not seen to be merely a puppet government placed and held in power by western governments. For that to happen any Afghan government has to be able to raise sufficient tax revenue to fund is own administration, including at least the pay packets of its own military.

At the moment economically Afghanistan is a very long way from being in that position. Senior civil servants and judges have had to drive taxis on their days off just to meet basic living costs. Afghans are fantastic at developing small scale enterprises employing a handful of people, but the country lacks major industries. Consequently, the government has only minuscule amounts of tax revenue coming in.

That is why the discovery of quite how vast Afghanistan’s potential mineral resources are is so incredibly important. Surveys by US geologists suggest the country may have one trillion dollars of mineral reserves. Afghanistan has always known it had significant mineral resources, the country has had a ministry of mines and industry for many years. It has long been known that it had reserves of copper and iron. The country has also been famous for its lapis lazuli, a deep cobalt blue stone, possibly even supplied to King Solomon, while other gem stones such as tourmaline and aquamarine are found in its Hindu Kush mountains. However, it now appears that it may have some of the world’s largest reserves of iron and copper and may rival Bolivia as the world’s largest supplier of lithium, as well as having gold and other rare metals. It is the vast extent of ore deposits such as these that gives just a glimmer of hope for Afghanistan’s long term economic future. A future that could potentially allow the Afghan government to in at least some measure become much more independent of the West than it currently is; a future that could allow the government to actually do something for its own people in terms of financing its own schools, hospitals and roads – as well as military.

The Big Society: Time to deregulate sea defence

Last week former Environment Secretary John Gummer observed that spending on sea defence is unfortunately vulnerable to public spending cuts.

Now, a strong case can be made for protecting sea defence from any spending cuts – it has for years been woefully underfunded. Despite being an island nation we spend less than 0.1% of all public spending on sea defence. Moreover, two of the 3 UK regions most vulnerable to coastal erosion (the South and East) receive the lowest amounts of all public spending per person. Eastern England which includes Mr Gummer’s former constituency of Suffolk Coastal receives the lowest amount of public spending anywhere in the UK (18% below average) despite having not only huge needs for sea defence, which Mr Gummer most ably championed, but also a percentage of elderly people well above the national average and a worse transport infrastructure than any other region (where else in England is two hours drive from the nearest motorway and an hour from the nearest dual carriageway?).

John Gummer is right of course though. The interest alone on the debt run up by the previous government is currently £43 billion a year, which is more than 50 times the total UK budget for sea defence. In such circumstances even the minuscule amounts we currently spend on sea defence are clearly vulnerable.

Yet, if we must have cuts to sea defence and I am certainly not advocating that we do, then herein lies an opportunity. Put simply, it is an opportunity to allow local people to undertake small scale works to defend the coast themselves. In short it is an opportunity to create the ‘Big Society’ that was a central themes of the Conservative manifesto.

However, there are currently two obstacles to this happening, the policies of Natural England and the Environment Agency.

Parliament MUST complete investigations against defeated MPs

The possibility of a hung parliament has raised a real possibility that MPs who are currently being investigated for serious abuses of parliamentary expenses – could have those investigations dropped if they lose their seats on May 6th.

This week I submitted a complaint against my constituency MP and Labour government minister Bob Blizzard (Waveney) to Andrew Walker, the Director General of Resource at the House of Commons. Mr Walker has for the last few months at the request of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards been investigating two previous complaints I made that Bob Blizzard had repeatedly used his £10,000 p.a. Parliamentary Communications Allowance to publicise attacks on Conservative controlled Waveney District and Suffolk County Councils and even encouraged people to vote against them. Both of which are of course in clear breach of the most explicit prohibitions in the Commons rule book which repeatedly and categorically states that the Communications Allowance cannot be used for any form of party political campaigning.

The third complaint that I made this week was that Mr Blizzard , a government minister and whip responsible for ensuring that Labour MPs keep the parliamentary rules (!), appeared to be using his parliamentary expenses to employ a local Labour councillor as his ‘Constituency Political Secretary’. The use of parliamentary staffing allowances for any form of party political or non parliamentary work is most explicitly forbidden in the principles set out in the Green Book.

However, the response to my complaint from Mr Walker’s office was that whilst the complaint could be investigated after the election

"As you will be aware, there are currently no Members of Parliament and therefore I will not at this point be able to take your complaint further."

The implication is that the parliamentary authorities intend to drop any ongoing investigations against MPs who are not re-elected on May 6.

However, this would mean that it would then be quite possible for MPs such as Bob Blizzard, if they are defeated on May 6, to have all the expenses investigations against them dropped, but for them to then stand again a few months later in a second general election resulting from a hung parliament – as if they had a clean sheet, with local voters being none the wiser.

This general election has in many people’s eyes quite rightly been about cleaning up parliament. So, now would be a very good time for us to take the lead in insisting that investigations into MPs expenses must be completed – even if they are defeated on May 6. The real possibility of a hung parliament makes that absolutely essential.

NOW... Three Labour ministers caught 'red handed' using parliamentary expenses for Labour Party campaigning

Yesterday I revealed that two Labour Ministers had been (mis)using parliamentary expenses for Labour Party campaigning.

Now make that three Labour ministers caught doing so just hours after the Labour Party launched its election manifesto telling us all how quickly and decisively the present Labour government had acted to clean up the parliamentary expenses scandal. Although it is noteworthy that Gordon Brown himself broke the rules by launching Labour's manifesto at an NHS hospital.

Pensions minister, Anglea Eagle joins the sorry ranks of Transport minister Sadiq Khan and Labour whip/Deputy Minister for the East of England Bob Blizzard in having had been caught using parliamentary expenses for Labour Party campaigning.

Miss Eagle is reported to have used House of Commons stationary and prepaid envelopes to write unsolicited letters to voters in her Merseyside constituency on the very day Gordon Brown called the general election.

Parliamentary rules specifically forbid the use of House of Commons stationary for any unsolicited letters, as well as strictly forbidding their use for party political purposes or to help MPs gain re election. Yet Miss Eagle even sent a letter to the home of a former voter who had been dead for five years, something that has been reported to have caused significant distress to the man’s widow.

Not a very satisfactory start to an election that was supposed to be about cleaning up parliament...

Two Labour ministers caught 'red handed' using parliamentary expenses for party political campaigning

As an aid worker one of the things you become acutely aware of is government corruption – such as government ministers diverting tax payers' money for their own party political campaigning. But, for it to happen in 21st century Britain should be profoundly shocking to all of us.

In their manifesto launched yesterday, Labour claimed (section 9:2):

"We acted swiftly to clean up politics…And we will take further measures to restore trust in our politics. We face a deep crisis of trust in politics following the parliamentary expenses scandal. Faith in our political institutions was seriously eroded by the abuses of the expenses system. Only radical change can begin to renew our democracy."

The tragedy is that even before the print was dry on this section of Labour’s manifesto, at least two Labour government ministers had been caught ‘red handed’ (mis)using parliamentary expenses for party political campaigning.

Transport minister, Sadiq Khan is reported to have sent out thousands of unsolicited letters to voters in his marginal Tooting constituency in South London just days before parliament was dissolved for the general election. The letters on House of Commons stationary and sent using parliamentary prepaid envelopes detail his achievements as their MP and told voters how to contact him during the general election. The House of Commons rule book ‘The Communications Allowance and the use of House Stationary’ repeatedly states that such parliamentary stationary:

"should not in any circumstances be used...for the benefit of a political party or supporting the return of any person to public office."

How to convince undecided voters in target seats on the economy

The election seems likely to be fought - at least on a national level - predominantly on the economy. However, it will be won or lost in the 117 marginal seats we need to win in order to gain an overall majority; and it will be won or lost on the decisions of swing voters in those constituencies.

So we need messages on the economy that will convince such people on the doors to vote Conservative, messages that are personal to voters own immediate circumstances.

To help those trying to win those 117+ seats I’d like to invite readers to make suggestions of simple one-liners that will be meaningful to ordinary people who are as yet undecided voters, many of whom will never have voted Conservative before.

I’ll kick off with two I tried yesterday morning in a Labour held target seat:

 "The first thousand pounds of income tax you pay - just goes to pay the interest on the debt the Labour government have run up."

and

"The entire amount of income tax paid by people earning £11,000 a year or less (such as teaching assistants and care workers) now just goes on paying the interest on the debt the Labour government have run up"

(For the record - interest on government debt is now £43 billion a year - which is more than our total defence spending of £40 billion and nearly twice our transport spending of £22 billion).

Please post your suggestions below - and indicate whether you have actually tried them among swing voters – thanks!

Speedboat attacks on British ports: we need a new paradigm for counter terrorism

Security minister Lord West has announced that he is concerned that al-Qaeda terrorists could launch a radiological dirty bomb on London.

This announcement is not in itself new. As I observed on Centre Right last November, one of the major justifications for our current military engagement in Afghanistan is that there is clear evidence that the Taliban have already obtained nuclear materials and hence have the potential to create a radiological ‘dirty bomb’.

However, Lord West went further by highlighting the possibility of a radiological or Mumbai style attack launched either against London or another UK port from speedboats. He observed that hundreds of thousands of small boats arrived in Britain unchecked every year and that the agencies responsible for guarding the coastline did not know “with any clarity what is going on around our coasts”.

What is needed in the face of such threats is a paradigm change in the way we approach counter terrorism. Lord West’s comments illustrate the failure of our present approach. He is rightly concerned that the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) simply do not know about every small vessel entering British waters or heading for UK ports. However, as I revealed on Conservative Home recently, the MCA are at present considering closing one of only two main coastguard cordination centres on the East Coast of England...

Government plan to close main coastguard station on East Coast

According to a well placed source within the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) discussions are currently taking place with a view to closing one of only two Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres (MRCC) on the East coast between the Thames and the Scottish border. The plans currently being discussed are apparently to either close the main coastguard station at Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk/Suffolk border or to relocate it 70 miles inland to Cambridge by 2013.

In response to a freedom of information request I submitted in January the head of organisational development at the MCA admitted that as far as Great Yarmouth MRCC was concerned “future provision will be the subject of full consultation with all relevant stakeholders” and that this future consultation process would take place before June 2013. Further confirmation of this closure plan has come from the government’s announcement that it plans to close the HMRC office in Great Yarmouth which shares the same offices as the Coastguard Maritime Rescue and Coordination Centre. Local Conservative candidate Brandon Lewis who has already been campaigning against the closure of the HMRC office with the loss of 125 local jobs commented:

"This would be a devastating blow for Great Yarmouth. More government agency jobs would be moved away from an area that desperately needs secure jobs in addition to those in the traditional tourist sector. Another link with the town’s proud maritime heritage that goes back centuries would be lost for good.”

When this news becomes known there are also likely to many people with very real concerns about the impact this will have on safety at sea. No matter how sophisticated satellite and electronic communications equipment is, there is simply no substitute for local coastguard officers with local knowledge of the coast and personal relationships with the local volunteer lifeboat and search and rescue crews they have to call upon.

Terrorism risk posed by tankers off the East Anglian coast

Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and more specifically since the London 7/7 attacks in 2005, the UK has been slowly coming to terms with being a major terrorist target. However, whilst ‘climate change’ is a theme being taken up across virtually all government departments, the same is not yet true of counter terrorism. Yet the threat of terrorism potentially affects almost every sphere of government. Major international sporting events now have specific terrorist threats against them. For example, the Hockey World Cup and Commonwealth Games both due to take place in India in March and October respectively have each received very specific threats from an affiliate of al-Qaeda. In short, we cannot assume that anything will be immune from the threat of Islamist terrorism. It is therefore somewhat odd to say the least that the government have not made preventing terrorism a cross departmental responsibility in the way that they have made tackling 'climate change'.

One illustration of the present government’s lack of joined up thinking on preventing terrorism is the large number of oil tankers that for the last year have been anchoring off the East Anglian coast as a result of a series of government decisions or more recently lack of decisions about them.

This fleet of tankers numbering 30-40 at any given time and including some of the world’s largest supertankers has in the last 12 months become one of the highest concentrations of oil tankers in the western world (research by the Daily Mail last year showed that even UK oil ports normally have only 4-6 tankers anchored offshore - see map). The issue only came to light last summer when Suffolk Coastal MP John Gummer asked the government why so many tankers were anchoring off the North Suffolk coast in his constituency. It subsequently transpired that the government had, without any local consultation, secretly made an agreement with oil companies that this would be the one place in UK waters where ship to ship oil transfers would be allowed offshore. This has led to it becoming the international location for tankers from accross the world to transfer Russian oil to supertankers that are too large to enter the Baltic. In response, Mr Gummer very rightly raised serious concerns - the Suffolk coast happens to be an area of outstanding natural beauty (AONB) as well as being home to internationally important nature sites and is heavily dependent on tourism, all of which were potentially threatened by any oil spillage. There has followed a series of government ministers saying that they were moving ‘quickly’ to ban the practice. These included Transport Secretary Lord Adonis, who 'hoped' it might be banned before Christmas 2009 and Deputy Minister for the East of England Bob Blizzard MP, off whose Waveney constituency some of the tankers are anchored. Mr Blizzard recently announced that legislation would be laid before parliament ‘as early as May’, which for anyone with the slightest knowledge of the electoral process means ‘not in the lifetime of this parliament’. This week the government finally started a six week ‘consultation’ on  banning these offshore oil transfers…before it drafts a statutory order which on current timescales is unlikely to come into force until 1st October…

The British and US governments must stop undermining President Karzai

Afghanistan needs a strong government, one that will prevent groups such as al-Qaeda using the country as a base from which to plan and launch terrorist attacks and preferably one that is prepared to slowly and gradually liberalise the country.

Few would disagree with that. Yet the reality is that the West, particularly Britain and the USA have repeatedly undermined the standing of President Kazai in the eyes of his own people. This week’s London conference on Afghanistan organised by Gordon Brown is just one such example of this.

Yet Hamid Karzai is a unique man on the Afghan political scene.  Head of the important popalzai clan of the Pushtuns from which the Afghan royal family traditionally came, he is also Cambridge educated. He bridges the huge gap not merely between the Pushtun tribes and the Farsi speakers of the North and West of Afghanistan, but is also a man who understands the Western world. Even more significantly, in 2001 he was almost unique among Afghan political leaders in not having blood on his hands. Whilst other mujahaddin leaders had overseen atrocities committed against rival groups during the Soviet occupation, Karzai had been in the West mounting a diplomatic mission to bolster support for the Afghan resistance.

Yet President Karzai has been undermined by both the British and US governments:

1. The withdrawal of necessary military and intelligence support far too soon after the Taliban were ‘ousted’ from Kabul in 2001. This was due to the false assumption by the US and UK governments that the Taliban were ‘finished’, when in reality they were regrouping and re-establishing their hold on significant parts of rural Afghanistan. As a result huge amounts of western military and intelligence resources planned for Afghanistan were hurriedly ‘reallocated’ to Iraq following its occupation in 2003. These included 75% of all the predator drones that were so important in the fight against the Taliban, and the CIA's postponement of an $80 million plan to set up a new Afghanistan intelligence service. The British government was no less at fault with Defence Secretary John Reid publicly stating that he hoped the British troops he was sending to Helmand in 2006 would leave the country ‘without a single shot being fired’. So, the most immediate answer to the question Tony Blair this week posed to the Iraq Inquiry, about what the world would be like today if we hadn’t invaded Iraq – is that Afghanistan might now be a safer place.

A new Conservative government must reverse 'managed retreat' policies around our coast

Earlier this month Hilary Benn the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs lectured farmers on the need for them to produce more food in the UK, in order to combat climate change and feed a growing population. I am sure I was not the only one to be struck by the irony of that. Mr Benn is responsible for the Environment Agency whose ‘managed retreat’ policies propose abandoning to the sea thousands of acres of farmland that have for centuries been defended or even reclaimed from the sea.

Now, a think tank linked to the Royal Institute of British Architects has suggested applying the government’s ‘managed retreat’ policies even to UK cities, such as Hull and Portsmouth, as a possible response to rising sea levels. Their report suggested allowing parts of large urban areas on the UK coast to flood, while preserving their historic centres – so that they would become ‘like Venice’.

That so respected a body as the RIBA should suggest a partial abandonment of sea defences around cities shows quite how strongly the government’s deeply flawed 'managed retreat' option for sea defence has taken hold. The underlying reason for this is not that most of the areas currently under threat of 'managed retreat' are technically difficult to defend, although cost is certainly a factor in many instances. For an island nation it is shocking to think that we spend less than 0.1% of government spending on sea defence. However, the most fundamental reason is that neither the Environment Agency nor any other government body has any statutory duty to defend the British coast. Instead, the Environment Agency have what are termed permissive powers. In other words they are permitted to interfere in decisions about what sort of sea defences are allowed, but they do not actually have to do anything themselves.

Islamists make up their own rules

This week seven Islamists refused to follow court procedure by standing up when the judge entered court. The seven were accused of shouting abuse at soldiers of the Royal Anglian Regiment during a home coming parade on the regiment's return from Iraq last March. The abuse included:

 "British solders, murderers," "British solders, baby killers.," "British solders go to hell," British soldiers burn in hell," "Baby killers and rapists all of you" and "British solders, you will pay."

Appearing in court this week the seven refused to stand as the judge entered the court room, claiming that their religion only allowed them to stand up for Allah.

Now I have read the entire Qur’an, large parts of the vast number of Hadith, as well as Islamic commentaries and so forth and I have to confess that I have never come across that one. Nor, I suspect, have the vast majority of ordinary British Muslims, most of whom come from cultural backgrounds that place a far greater emphasis on honour and respect than is common elsewhere in Britain - and there is much in that respect that some of the less polite members of British society could learn from them!

Now, the reason why so few people have ever come across this claim is that one of the fundamental beliefs of Islamism is, to simplify things just slightly, that you can make up the rules yourself about what is and isn’t ‘Islamic’.

Classical Islam fixed the interpretations (ijtihad) of the Qur’an in medieval times and most Islamic theological schools are based on rote learning of those interpretations. However, Islamists, whether in Afghanistan or in the UK, claim the right to reopen the door of Qur’anic interpretation (ijtihad) and come up with their own interpretations. In theological terms this is the essence of Islamism.

The government has questions to answer about flood defence

In 1947 the UK suffered devastating floods – caused by a combination of heavy snowfall and deep freeze, followed by warmer weather melting the snow at the same time as torrential rains slowly moved across the country. The ensuing floods left large parts of the UK paralysed for several weeks. Two years ago an analysis was made of the likely impact if floods of a similar magnitude, however caused, were to occur today. In theory, there should have been a significantly reduced impact – as the Conservative governments of Eden and Macmillan invested heavily in flood defences following the 1947 floods and subsequent  1953 North Sea floods. However, the authors found great difficulty in assessing how different the impact of modern flooding would be compared to that of 1947. The reason for their difficulty was quite astonishing. The government does not keep a national record of where flood defences exist.

"No national database is available which contains the type, height,design level, and maintenance conditions of U.K. river flood defenses even for main rivers."

(1947 UK Floods: 60 Year perspective p8)

If there is no national database of flood defences it also follows that the government has no national record of the state of repair of those flood defences. Although given the wholly inadequate levels of funding there are certainly some issues there, particularly in rural areas.

Most significantly however, it is clear that if the government has no national record of either where flood defences exist or their state of repair – then any claim by the government that they have a credible flood defence strategy is clearly nonsense.

Withdrawing from Afghanistan would be like appeasing Hitler

Standing around our village war memorial on Sunday I was struck by how few WW2 veterans were now able to be there. With them is literally dying out a living memory of why we fought the second world war, the Gestapo, what happened to the Jews and the gypsies and everyone else who didn’t fit in with Hitler’s radical ideology.

At the same time it also struck me that very few who read the western press have any real understanding of what life under the Taliban was really like before they were pushed from power by the western intervention after 9/11.

Life under the Taliban: I lived in Jalalabad, Afghanistan as an aid worker during the time that the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan. It was a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.  People lived in daily fear of the religious police known as the ‘vice and virtue’ police. When they appeared people froze with fear, just as those living under Nazi rule must have frozen at appearance of the Gestapo. The traffic was stopped every day at the Islamic prayer times, at which point the Taliban who patrolled the streets with lengths of plastic hose pipe whipped anyone found not praying. Girls schools were closed, women were banned from being out on the streets without a male relative, which literally meant a death sentence for the thousands of widows whose husbands and sons had been killed in 20 years of fighting – they couldn’t even go out to beg. Those who tried to were savagely beaten up by the Taliban. Others suffered far worse fates. Captured soldiers from the various mujahaddin groups that the Taliban had seized power from were given a stark choice - either join the Taliban or walk through minefields as human mine clearers; There were reports of large scale ethnic cleansing, particularly of the Hazara population; while non Muslim Afghans – chiefly Hindu and Sikh shopkeepers in cities such as Kabul and Jalalabad, were forced to wear yellow cloth badges in public – not dissimilar to the star of David that the Nazis forced the Jews to wear.  The few remaining Jews left in the country, remnants of an ancient community there, were imprisoned and tortured by the Taliban in an attempt to force them to convert to Islam. While any Afghan who dared to leave Islam suffered a more immediate fate. Just outside Jalalabad where I lived at the time, the Taliban searched a man’s house and found a Bible. He was immediately taken outside and hanged. He courageously maintained his Christian faith to the end. There were many stories of atrocities, but I can vouch for the truth of this one as a colleague carefully questioned several Afghans who had witnessed it to establish its truth.

The future cost to Britain of Labour's flirtation with shari'a finance

Understanding Shari’a Finance: The Muslim Challenge to Western Economics by Patrick Sookhdeo (McClean,VA: Isaac Publishing,2008). This is a further volume in Dr Patrick Sookhdeo’s excellent series of books on Islamism specifically written to inform non specialists, particularly those involved in the development of political policy.    

Reading this book I could not help but be reminded of the words of the Abul A’la Mawdudi (1903-79), the leading Islamist writer in the Indian sub continent:

The truth is that Islam is a revolutionary ideology which seeks to alter the social order of the entire world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals...Islam wishes to do away with all states and governments which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam. The purpose of Islam is to set up a state on the basis of this ideology and programme…regardless of the rule of which nation is undermined in the process of the establishment of an ideological Islamic state. Islam requires the earth - not just a portion, but the entire planet. (Chapter 1 Jihad in Islam – translated by Khurshid Ahmed, published by UK Islamic Mission 1997).

Mawdudi went on say that:

As soon as the Ummah of Islam (i.e. Muslim community) seizes state power, it will outlaw all forms of business transacted on the basis of usury or interest; it will not permit gambling; it will curb all forms of business and financial dealings which contravene Islamic law. (Chapter 4 Jihad in Islam).

Patrick Sookhdeo’s book Understanding Shari’a Finance: The Muslim Challenge to Western Economics begins by quoting Timur Kuran, a Muslim scholar and Professor of Economics and Political Science at Duke University, who states that Shari’a finance is an ‘invented tradition’ that does not go back to Muhammad’s day. In this book Dr Sookhdeo demonstrates how shari’a finance has in fact been specifically developed in recent years by radical Islamists as means of bringing increasing areas of society, in both Muslim majority and Western countries, under Islamist control.

Martin Parsons: Lessons from Pakistan on how to encourage marriage

By Martin Parsons

One of the greatest long term social challenges facing the next Conservative government will be gently to encourage people towards changes in culture and thinking that are more beneficial and less harmful to society as a whole. Encouraging marriage is a particular case in point.

Melanchthon is absolutely right that the cost of wedding services puts some people off getting married.

The cost of weddings is actually a problem in many countries and a lot has to with social expectations and obligations. You are expected to have a certain standard of event and some people, often including distant relatives you haven’t seen for years, expect to be invited.  Well, if you think weddings are expensive in white British society – spare a thought for our friends from Asian cultures – many of them are expected to invite literally hundreds of people to wedding receptions and the weddings often go on for three days or more, something that is financially crippling for many families.

When I lived in Pakistan, some of my Pakistani friends told me that many years earlier the Pakistani government had for a number of years actually banned wedding receptions – all you could have was a cup of tea and piece of cake after the wedding. Sounds draconian, but according to my Pakistani friends it was incredibly popular – because it set people free from a whole series of social obligations which often led to many poor people particularly being in crippling debt.

No one would suggest that we follow exactly the same policy in England, but perhaps we can encourage people towards marriage both by means of economic nudges and by measures that lower the cost of weddings.

Two possibilities for a future Conservative government would be:

1. A marriage grant – say £500 per couple, not to pay for, but just to nudge people towards, the idea that getting married is a good thing.
2. Being able to offset the cost of a wedding reception against income tax – provided that the total cost of the reception before tax did not exceed say, £2,000. That would have a similar effect to approach previously tried in Pakistan. i.e. it would reduce the cost of weddings by effectively pruning down some of the social obligations, such as having to invite large numbers, that raise the cost of weddings to amounts that are simply unaffordable for many people.

The first would cost approximately £57 million. The second would cost approximately £100 million (based on a marriage rate of approximately 230,000 per year). But given that:

• Only 6% of married couples split up by the time their first child is 5 years old, compared to 52% of cohabiting couples splitting by the time their first child is five years;
• And children whose mum and dad split up are 75% more likely to give up on school and leave school with few or no qualifications, are approximately twice as likely to experience adverse outcomes on a whole range of measures including behaviour problems and engaging in crime, mental health problems, become sexually active at an earlier age, turning to drugs, smoking and heavy drinking….

Given the cost that just some of these impose on society, spending £157 million a year nudging people towards marriage – could well be an investment that will actually reduce public spending in the medium term.

A Conservative approach to sea defence

Approximately half of the coastline of England and Wales is made of rocks that make the coastline vulnerable to coastal erosion (various types of sandstone and clays, chalk and limestone). This is roughly the area from South Devon eastwards, including most of the south coast and the entire east coast of England. Sea defence is a hugely important local issue in many of these areas. Nearly 2/3 of constituencies along it are Conservative controlled and many of the rest are seats we need to win. While even on the west coast of England and Wales, there are many low lying areas that are subject to coastal flooding. So this is a serious issue that a future Conservative government should have a clear well thought policy on.

There are also important principles of conservatism, such as localism and community – allowing people to act on behalf of their own community rather than restricting some activities to the government, that we should be seeking to apply in developing a much clearer and more coherent approach to sea defence policy than the present government is doing.

Six principles for future sea defence policy

1. There should be a presumption in favour of landowners being allowed to build their own sea defences – as they have done for at least a thousand years. Regulation is principally needed a) where defences interfere with longshore drift of sediment and so could adversely affect erosion rates in other areas; and b) where proposed sea defences have a significantly adverse affect on the visual appearance of the coast. However, where neither of these apply, landowners should not have to face a lengthy application process to build basic sea defence structures such as clay banks to protect their land.

2. County councils, rather than district councils, to be designated as the key local authority responsible for sea defence. This would enable allow local councils to employ specialist sea defence staff, rather than simply relying on employing costly engineering consultancy firms. Equally importantly, it would enable much of the DEFRA funding currently channelled through the Environment Agency to be devolved to elected local councils. A forthcoming Conservative green paper will advocate devolving powers from unelected quangos to elected local councils. The Environment Agency would be an excellent example to start with.

3. Joined up government: The impact of climate change means that sea levels are already rising, something that increases Britain’s vulnerability to both coastal flooding and to more extensive coastal erosion. Moreover, as it takes up to 100 years for atmospheric carbon to break down, it is almost inevitable that sea levels will rise still further even with significant reductions in carbon emissions. Yet, the present government currently only spends around 0.1% of public spending on sea defence. To put this into context, this is enough to build just 10 miles of sea wall. Whilst there is no question that public spending will have to be cut in the immediate future, there is an urgent need to give relatively greater weight to sea defence spending if we are not to find ourselves in a few years times facing significantly greater expenditure.

We should not forget that the 1953 North Sea storm surge affected not just coastal areas, but also flooded huge areas of the Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire up to 30 miles inland.  307 people drowned, 30,000 had to be evacuated, while 24,000 homes were destroyed with total damage estimated at between £30 and £50 million (in 1953 prices). The present urgency of giving greater priority to sea defence was well illustrated in November 2007when a similar North Sea storm surge was only a few centimeters short of over topping existing flood defences in East Anglia.

The Taliban are not the only threat to peace in Afghanistan

This week the BBC obtained a rare video clip of Afghan warlord Gubadddin Hekmatyar leader of the notorious Hezb-i-Islami group. The appearance was hugely significant, not simply because Hezb-i-islami was the most brutal and radical of all the Afghan mujahaddin groups, but also because a number of other recent events, including terrorist attacks that Hez-i-islami have claimed responsibility for, suggest that he may be seeking to stage a come back. If so, it could potentially lead to a new front to the east and north of Kabul that coalition forces would have to fight. 

Who is Hekmatyar and his Hezb-i-Islami faction?

Hekmatyar was one of the leaders of the original student Islamist movement in Kabul in the early 1970s and led most of the student demonstrations between 1965 and 1972. It was this student Islamist movement that was largely responsible for the initial spread of radical Islamism in Afghanistan.

However, the movement split over its response to the overthrow of the Afghan monarchy in 1974 when the King’s cousin Daud, with the assistance of the Communist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, seized power creating a republic. Within the Student Islamist movement, the more ‘moderate’ elements and Persian speakers led by Burhanuddin Rabbani (who later became Afghan president) planned to infiltrate the army until the country was ready for an Islamist revolution, while the radicals led by Hekmatyar and others attempted to start military uprisings. This split eventually formalised in 1976-77 into the Jamat-i-Islami party led by Rabbani whose most famous military commander was Ahmed Shah Massoud and the Hezb-i-Islami party led by Hekmatyer. These two parties each came to have their own quite distinct ethos.

The Defence Secretary MUST resign over his attack on the head of the army

General Sir David Richards, recently said that the Army’s role in Afghanistan may need to go on for several decades. Yesterday Bob Ainsworth, the Defence Secretary on BBC's Andrew Marr Show explicitly referred to that professional assessment by the new head of army as ‘ludicrous’ and stated that British troops might begin to be pulled back from front line fighting…in the next 12 months. For the Defence Secretary to openly reject the best professional military advice at a time while we are fighting a major conflict is frankly alarming.

Even more concerning is the timing of this pull back of British troops – within the next 12 months, which just happens to be when the present government has to call an election. Let’s not forget that two years ago Gordon Brown announced a similar pull back of troops from Iraq…immediately before he decided to call off the general election.

For the Defence Secretary to make these comments on the weekend that the death toll of British troops passed the 200 mark is deeply offensive to the hundreds of British troops who have been wounded and the relatives of those who have died.

Instead of his extraordinary behaviour - going on television to publicly insult the head of the army and doing what many people could be forgiven for thinking was playing politics with soldiers lives; Instead of that, the Defence Secretary should be seeking to work with opposition parties to explain clearly to the public why fighting in Afghanistan is essential to our security. Generating that public support is the very least that soldiers on the front line should be able to expect from the Defence Secretary.

However,as the government is not making the case clearly – let’s just remind ourselves why we are fighting in Afghanistan:

The reason Islamists could infiltrate British security services

Patrick Mercer MP, is absolutely right to call for a government enquiry into how al-Qaeda sympathisers, who had attended training camps in Pakistan, were recruited to the security services – and more importantly whether any similar infiltration attempts have gone undetected.

In their recruitment of new staff after the 7/7 London bombings the security services have been potentially vulnerable to infiltration because they appear to have used an inaccurate and far to narrow a definition of what an Islamist extremist actually is. No matter how rigorous the security services' vetting procedures have been, if their fundamental definition of what constitutes an extremist is wrong, then potentially at least, security may have been compromised and the organisation infiltrated.

Time after time following 9/11, 7/7 and later terrorist plots, government statements about ‘extremists’ clearly indicate that the government have meant ‘extreme’ in relation to what they have sometimes openly called ‘mainstream Islam’, rather than meaning ‘extreme’ in terms of the distance of these views from mainstream British values. This in turn has led to a frequently repeated assertion by government ministers and others that ‘Islam has nothing to do with terrorism’. The latter led to the government’s official narrative report on the 7/7 London bombings presenting the most extraordinary conclusion, namely that the security services simply didn’t know what motivated four British young men to commit a major terrorist atrocity in London.

This was a conclusion that frankly shocked a number of us who had undertaken detailed academic study of Islam and pointed to a dangerous unawareness of the way the Qur’an and Hadith have been interpreted since the earliest times of Islamic history. Since its earliest days Islam has had a very strong doctrine of political domination of non Muslims i.e. imposing Islamic government and law on them, which is to be achieved by means of military jihad where non Muslims refuse to submit to it. (See for example Q9:29, which urges Muslims to fight those who do not believe in Islam until they submit and pay the jizya tax imposed on non Muslims in an Islamic state, a text which is interpreted in both classical i.e. medieval, Islamic commentaries and by modern Islamist writers such as Mawdudi as being a command to either engage in or support military jihad to impose Islamic government). Had the security services understood that this teaching is deeply embedded in Islamic history and theology, they would not have been at a loss to understand what motivated four British young men to bomb London in the summer of 2005. Of course, it must also be said that throughout Islamic history many other Muslims have instead emphasised a range of much more peaceful and devotional interpretations of Islam. These include the vast majority of British Muslims who have family origins in the Indian subcontinent. There, following the failure of military jihad against the British in 1856 (aka ‘the Indian mutiny’), Indian ulema (Islamic leaders) made a conscious decision to abandon jihad and instead concentrate on the devotional aspects of Islam. This stance led to a longstanding tradition of peaceful, devotional Islam among British Muslims, until the radicalisation of a significant minority of Muslim youth following the Rushdie affair.

The existence of these twin paths throughout Islamic history, both the violent and the peaceful, means that one can be well within the bounds of historical ‘mainstream Islam’ and still advocate support for violent jihad against non Muslims. So, when the government and the security services have defined Islamic extremists as people who are ‘extreme’ or even ‘deviant’ from ‘mainstream’ Islamic teaching – then their very definition of ‘extremism’ potentially excludes a significant number of those who claim that they only follow ‘mainstream Islam’ as taught in major Islamic centres such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt etc.

The lesson from Norwich - we can revive the working class Conservative vote

And many congratulations to Chloe Smith MP!  There are seats with 5,000 + Labour majorities that we are likely to win at the general election, but a constituency like Norwich North that has such a high proportion of council estates is not automatically in that category. I would suggest that what is most significant about this by election victory is not simply that large numbers of Labour votes stayed away, but that some on the council estates started to switch to vote Conservative. We could see this from canvassing those estates. In fact, yesterday we actually met Labour canvassers using what were evidently old canvassing returns who were knocking up what they thought were Labour voters, but who we knew to be now Conservative voters. Of course not all of the 6.5% increase in the Conservative share of the vote came from council estates, but the fact that some of it did is tremendously encouraging.

The challenge for the party now is to change this widening stream of working class voters into a river.