The Tipping Point

Since the summer, domestic news headlines have been dominated by stories about Islamic Fundamentalism: the investigation of a Muslim school in the heart of the English countryside; the flight of a young girl from Scotland to Pakistan to her Muslim father: and now, Jack Straw's views on whether Muslim women should wear the veil.

These things are the kind of subjects that are discussed across the length and breadth of Britain, in pubs, clubs and Parish Councils. For an apolitical public, Islamic Fundamentalism in the UK is something in which they are becoming totally immersed. Just as it took decades for the tipping point to occur over Trade Unionism (when the electorate took the plunge and voted for Thatcher), so the same thing is happening about Islamism in this country. Traditional British virtues of fair play and tolerance are being subsumed by anxiety and disquiet over extremist Islamic activities. The tipping point hasn't happened yet but it is a very close run thing. One more terrorist outrage on the London Underground might produce a backlash that no one would welcome. The climate is ripe for a charismatic populist to harness anti-Muslim sentiment and make political capital.

Of course, if our mainstream political leaders decide to properly acknowledge the extremism in our midst and do something about it - then this might not happen. I want to live in a country in which extremist Muslims are marginalised, arrested and deported, in which most Muslims are encouraged to integrate properly into British society - not one in which law abiding Pakistani newsagents' shop windows are smashed as some lunatic political populist talks of the supremacy of the British race. To stop such a dark world from emerging, we must act now.

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