09 June 2014

Cameron must do to Britain’s Islamists what Thatcher did to the trade union barons

.... It’s important to grasp at the start that not all of the 21 schools in which Ofsted has carried out emergency inspections have been criticised: indeed, Ninestiles School, Small Heath School and Washwood Heath Academy were all praised.

But evidence was found elsewhere of the axeing of parts of the curriculum, bars on sex education, the segregation of boys and girls, discrimination against non-Muslim pupils, prejudice against gay people, and the presence of extreme speakers and the preaching of anti-western doctrine at religious assemblies.

Some of the more colourful allegations include children chanting anti-Christian slogans at Oldknow academy primary school in Birmingham and being banned from dancing at Park View Secondary. Five of the schools will be placed in special measures.

[A COMMENT] It would help if commentators stopped following the BBC in referring to these people as religious conservatives. Whatever they are, radicals, fundamentalists, hard-liners, extremists, they are not conservatives.

When I moved to a northern mill town in the early 1980s, there were no burkhas and only very old men wore clothing that you might have seen in rural Pakistan. Immigrations were keen to blend in as best they could; it was a decade later that I began to detect a significant change in attitude.

This shift in cultural and religious matters has been described as conservatism: it is nothing of the sort. It is an artificial construct resurrected, imported and actively encouraged by the disastrous policy of multiculturalism: it is a creation of radical, progressivism.

[ANOTHER] It's far too late. Unfettered immigration from Asia and sub Saharan Africa has injected a mass of people who are culturally and socially backward in their beliefs and behaviours.

Our political class has been too cowardly to rigorously confront medieval Islamism in the past and I see no evidence that they will change now. On the contrary, the Left still sees fundamentalist Islamism as a convenient pretext to attack and destroy all faith schools in the State sector. No, it's just too late, and our children will face the consequences.

[ANOTHER] However there is a real problem with Muslims who are keen on imposing their views on others, and who would like to balkanise British society into precisely defined religious groups each with their own internal authorities, in a pious attempt to recreate their vision of the past.

The principal victims of such attitudes are actually other Muslims. We had an example today on Sky TV when two anonymous female pupils at one of the schools explained how they are enveloped by a restrictive regime aimed at stopping them talking with male fellow pupils. That is no way to teach pupils in 2014. [ConservativeHome] Read more