England’s Troubles

The Law & Liberty Podcast

Riots and speech crackdowns are only the latest symptoms of a growing factionalism in England along cultural lines. In a recent essay, Helen Dale argued that the kind of religious and ethnic divisions that emerged in the July elections reflect a new style of politics more familiar to Northern Ireland than to England. Dale, who will be a regular guest host of the Law & Liberty Podcast, joins James Patterson to discuss this “new sectarianism”—and also how her Australian countrymen performed in the Olympics.

Show Notes:

“The New Sectarianism” (Helen Dale for Law & Liberty)
Helen Dale’s Substack
“The Sporting Genius of the English-Speaking Peoples” (Rachel Lu for Law & Liberty)

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Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name’s James Patterson. Today is August 15th, 2024, and today, we are speaking with the one and only Helen Dale. She is a senior writer at Law & Liberty and has won the Miles Franklin Award for her first novel, The Hand That Signed The Paper, and read law at Oxford and Edinburgh. Her most recent novel, Kingdom of the Wicked, was shortlisted for the Prometheus Prize for science fiction. She writes for a number of outlets, including The Spectator, The Australian, Standpoint, and Quillette. She lives in London and is on Substack at helendale.substack.com and on Twitter @_helendale. Today, we are going to be talking about a few things. One is her dynamite article, “The New Sectarianism,” which appeared on Law & Liberty on August 7th. But before that, we are going to talk about Australia’s Olympic performance. Helen Dale, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Helen Dale:

Hello, James. Thanks for having me.

James Patterson:

So before we got started, I had some questions about some of the athletes, one of whom became something of an internet sensation for not being terribly athletic. But my goodness, how on earth does Australia manage to put so many incredible Olympic athletes out into the world, given its relatively small population?

Helen Dale:

Australia is a sporting phenomenon for two reasons. One of which is the obvious one: it’s a very rich country. If you balance how you have to use several different measures to work out which is the wealthiest country in the world and where it’s genuinely wealthy, it’s not just oil wealth concentrated in a few hands and that kind of thing—it tends to be competing with say, Switzerland and Norway for the wealthiest country in the world and is ahead of the US. So it’s very rich. Very wealthy country. So it can afford to pay for lots of things, both at the state and the private sector levels with sport. So that’s part of it.

The other reason is biological or genetic. Australia has a deceptively large population in genetic terms, despite only having 26 million people, roughly. 27, it might be now in it. Someone was saying it was the population of Texas, roughly. I don’t know what that is in America, but about there.

But the thing is, Australia has the highest proportion of overseas born people in its population sourced from all over the world of any developed country. And I think to get to the equivalent even in developing countries, you have to include places like Israel with a very unusual history of immigration there for particular socio-cultural and political reasons or countries that are war zones full of refugees.

So you have a large influx of people sourced from all over the world and an immigration policy that for many years and to a large degree still does, although it’s a little bit more subtle about it now, was assimilationist, I would say, and is now integrationist. So you get very, very wide out-crossing. So you get all these people drawn from all these different countries all over the world, and then they all marry each other and have children. And this has been going on since 1945.

So there have been a number of generations for all these people to marry each other and have children and then their children to marry each other and that’s why you look at the Australian team and you go, what ethnicity are they? They’re vaguely white-ish, but not really. So that is why. It’s a genetic quirk and the country has the wealth to exploit it basically. There are many, many talented sprinters in West Africa, the ancestors of the Jamaicans and African-Americans, and you don’t get to see them. You see the Jamaicans, and you see the African Americans because they’re from wealthy countries.

James Patterson:

I’m wondering if this is also … Oh, by the way, you recommended before the podcast another Law & Liberty piece by Rachel Lu, “The Sporting Genius of English-Speaking Peoples.”

Helen Dale:

Yes. It is my favorite piece of hers and quite possibly my favorite piece that I have ever read in a magazine.

James Patterson:

I need to unseat Rachel, so I need to get writing.

Helen Dale:

Yes. I think it is. There have been a number of very good pieces on the Law & Liberty magazine or in the Law & Liberty magazine, and I’ve been very pleased with some of my own writing. Yes, writers are allowed to be smug. But that piece of Rachel’s, The Sporting Genius of the English-Speaking Peoples or words titled to that effect, which I know wouldn’t be hers. Brian will have written that or something. Is pretty much my favorite piece because it just captures exactly a real thing that is very intense in Australia. What she describes in that article, and she applies it to basically the British Commonwealth plus the USA appears in an exceptionally intense form in Australia and underpins that Olympic success.

James Patterson:

I know we want to get on to the podcast, but I have just one other question. As you were talking about the Australian experience, it reminded me of one of my favorite new comedians, Jenny Tian, who is making a sensation on TikTok. And she is Chinese, I think by origin. Both of her parents are Chinese. But she speaks with the thickest Australian accent I’ve ever heard.

Helen Dale:

Australian-born Chinese. Yes. ABC.

James Patterson:

And so I think it appears not just in the athletics, but also in the comedy. One of the ways that you make these groups get together and understand each other is with humor.

Helen Dale:

So yes, Australia is a very, very distinctive and unusual country, remember. It produced all those medals and produces all these fabulous athletes, but also produced Raygun, who was the joke of the Olympics. And I will write about this, I think. I’m currently running a Twitter poll, and if the Twitter poll says, “No, don’t write about this, Helen. We expect you to write about your technical analysis of this piece of legislation currently going through the Commons or ping-pong between the Commons and the Lords. That’s what we want you to write about, not random second-rate Aussie breakdancers.”

James Patterson:

@ _HelenDale. Vote for her to write the piece. I am very excited about it. But unfortunately, we must go from this very exciting topic, this very fun topic, to something considerably more dire almost as though we were delaying the inevitable here. But your piece, The New Sectarianism, has really made a sensation. Go ahead and give us an explanation of what your position is and what it has to do with the state of English politics.

Helen Dale:

The reason I wrote that piece, having seen a few casual comments from people here and there, or hearing a few talking heads make this observation, was I thought in the general election we saw in England as opposed to where you normally see it, which is in Northern Ireland, genuine religious sectarianism. And what I tried to do using my knowledge of theology and comparative religion, something that I have for reasonably eccentric personal reasons, using my knowledge of both Islamic theology and the theology that underlies the historic troubles in Northern Ireland, I basically compared and contrasted them and tried to provide some history, some roots for the emergence amongst Muslims in England. And came to a very, very alarmed conclusion. And my alarmed conclusion is this. Because it is emerging in England and not in Scotland and not in Northern Ireland, it’s a new form of sectarianism. And England has not had this kind of intense religious conflict for a very, very long time. The English specifically have forgotten what it looks like.

So you’ve forgotten what sectarianism looks like. So you’re getting all of these very blithe and glib comments. And because the general election and the assassination attempt on Trump were so close together, you got the British pundits just doing their customary thing of, “Oh, I see the Americans are shooting each other again, or the Americans are trying to shoot their presidents or shoot their ex-presidents. Oh, that’s just what Americans do, isn’t it? Let’s take a pop at him. We don’t like him.” And yadda yadda yadda.

And there were all these boatloads of smugness getting on. And I picked out a really egregious one, put that in the article, and people can read it at their leisure. But there was a lot of it. And the thing is, a few people who are history nerds and the kind of history nerds who keep statistics … People like Ed West, but not just him—he’s the one who comes to mind, and he does write a lot of this—were going, “But hang on. Okay, the Americans have lost four presidents, and we’ve only lost one prime minister, but they haven’t lost a congressman since 1978, whereas we lost an MP, David Amess, only two years ago.” Blah, blah. And those conversations started to happen. And so I just sat there and thought, “No. You really, really do need to take seriously the possibility that this is something that is a real problem in Britain, in England, and you’ve done it to yourselves the same way that the Plantation of Ulster you did to yourselves.”

James Patterson:

There’s this irony to this, which is that the new sectarianism you’re describing has with it a weird partial healing of the old one between Irish separatists and unionists who marched together against increased immigration in Northern Ireland.

Helen Dale:

Yes. I don’t know enough about the province, although people from Northern Ireland whose opinions I rate like Ian Acheson did retweet my piece and praise it, and he is a retired prison governor from Northern Ireland and really, really knows his stuff. I don’t know the full significance of that cooperation that was going on in the province. Because my knowledge of sectarianism and what I’m writing from trying to get across to people to not treat it in this glib and casual and light, flippant way. My knowledge of sectarianism is from Scotland via my parents, obviously. Well, Scotland and the Republic. But it’s that very specific Scottish kind of sectarianism which has a relationship with Northern Ireland and the Plantation of Ulster. But outside of certain footballing history, the violence has abated to a large degree. It’s just nastiness now. Whereas I don’t quite know enough about Northern Ireland to know what’s going on there, but you can get that. You can get that uniting of people against what they perceive to be a common enemy.

James Patterson:

Yeah. I’m sorry. My parents lived in England. I was born there. I remember my mom’s … One of her favorite stories was that she was in line—this was before I was born, and she had my older sister with her, and she was being a bit raucous. And a woman behind her, a good English lady, said, “This country would be doing so much better if it weren’t for all the foreigners.” And my mother briefly was like, “Oh, I wonder what she’s … Oh, she’s talking about me.” So what has happened to England?

Helen Dale:

I am amazed at the normal comment that is made about Americans in those circumstances is, “Oh, dear Americans, they really don’t have an inside voice.”

James Patterson:

Yeah. That is-

Helen Dale:

That’s the British expression.

James Patterson:

I should mention that my-

Helen Dale:

Americans lack inside voices.

James Patterson:

The other thing that’s funny is my mom is of course, self-conscious on this point is that Americans don’t think they’re foreigners. It took her a second to realize that she was the subject of the passive-aggressive comment.

Helen Dale:

That of course being the sport at which Great Britain … Well, England certainly will always win the gold medal.

James Patterson:

That’s right.

Helen Dale:

Passive aggression.

James Patterson:

That is always coming home. They may never win the World Cup, but when it comes to snide remarks-

Helen Dale:

But they will always win passive aggression.

James Patterson:

So what has happened to England where they moved from … Maybe I think to the extent that they had immigration during the period when my parents were there is maybe Jamaicans or people from the Caribbean, but apparently there’s been a pretty serious migration to England and it’s been primarily under conservative watch.

Helen Dale:

Well, the big uptick in immigration started in 1997 with Blair.

James Patterson:

Oh, okay.

Helen Dale:

Okay. So the first probably third to a half of it, is Blair.

James Patterson:

My mistake, then.

Helen Dale:

The second half to two-thirds of it, I think, is probably a 60-40 split, and it has been the conservatives, particularly the conservatives, since 2019. That is when it has gone absolutely and completely bonkers. If you can get it … I don’t have the figures off the top of my head because they are so easy to get. You can get them from the ONS website and they’ll give you pretty graphs if you press the right buttons and you can get the figures from any one of a number of the British pollsters or whether it’s YouGov or whether it’s Survation or whoever. They’ve all done this enormous … It created during COVID and it did drop down and it was just basically the boat people, and that was basically it. But then just went enormously through the roof from 2021, completely mad, unbelievable. We were importing the city of Birmingham, which is the second city of the United Kingdom and just completely unconstrained immigration in addition to the small boats and the asylum seeker problem.

And this was after the conservatives had promised the British people that they would copy Australia’s points-based immigration system. And the reason so many British people know about the Australian system is simply because of historic, very high rates of immigration between England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland. This is really important to remember. It really is the British Isles. It’s not just the UK to Australia. So everybody in both places is very familiar with a very different immigration system that is selective and that has also largely rejected the trendy global sympathy for refugees.

The current big debate in the Australian Parliament, literally as I got off the website of the Australian newspaper, for which I used to regularly write, is about the Australian current left-leaning center-left Labour government wants to give 1200 visas to refugees from Gaza. And the opposition is rejecting this, saying that they are much more likely to be terrorists because it’s very clear for people from Gaza support Hamas. And the attempt by human rights people in Australia to argue as they do in Britain or the United States that you are trying to choose between refugees and say, you’ll pick those, but not these to which Australians of both stripes politically going back to 1990, can just say, this is what we have always done. You don’t get to come here as of right. We get to pick and choose. We have abrogated, the relevant bits of the refugee convention.

Remember, Australia is Bentham. There are no freestanding rights. That is why there are none in our constitution. Your Antonin Scalia, Justice Scalia, when there was a somewhat trivial attempt to discover an implied right of freedom of political communication in the Australian constitution … It’s been some litigation over that a number of years ago, and the right is very small and very constrained and has been chipped away. Scalia’s response to a fairly eminent Australian jurist might’ve actually been the chief justice at the high court at the time. I can’t remember. But Scalia said, “I’m sorry. You don’t have that sort of constitution.” And he is absolutely correct. We do not.

James Patterson:

So the large number of migrants … And I should mention I’m not terribly … I’ve never been much of an immigration hawk. I grew up in Houston, Texas, where migrants were in large numbers, and I grew up with them. So, this conversation has always been difficult for me. So, pardon me if I don’t use the right terms. But there’s been an accelerant in Labour politics, especially where there are essentially Hindu groups and Muslim groups. And it’s the Muslim groups that have been posing the greatest challenge to Labour and to ongoing politics in England. How has that cashed out?

Helen Dale:

Well, what has happened historically, it’s become fairly clear is that initially, because of the parties of the left or the parties of anti-racism, this seems to be what’s happened in the UK. Didn’t happen in Australia. The Australian system is very different because of the selection effect with the migrants. But in the UK, at least initially, the parties of the left are the anti-racist ones. So they get the ethnic minority votes, they get all of them or nearly all of them. And then over a period of time,a reasonable number of years, two, three decades, enough for another cohort to grow up … So you have black British and you have Indian British and so on and so forth, is you get a divergence. And the more economically successful ethnic minorities, famously in Britain, “British Hindus,” but also Sikhs, the Sikhi, you get this as well. You see this and you see it among the Igbo Nigerians and some Yoruba, but particularly the Igbo who tend to be economically very successful as well. And they’re often your market-dominant minorities.

And so within a generation, they drift Tory. And in Britain they were led. That market-dominant minority group were led In a way they were dragged along accidentally. This was completely accidental as Jews shifted from left to right in Britain. And so now Jews mainly vote conservative in the UK. And they dragged with them British Indians, East African Asians who were the very specific market-dominant minority who were expelled in large numbers by various East African governments, most famously Idi Amin, for being economically successful in their particular countries and being foreign. So it was exactly the same prejudice that you saw in various European countries directed at Jews and for the same reason.

My father used to very cynically and nastily say, because Scottish people will make finance comments like this, “How do you know if your religion was founded by a person who was both poor and stupid? It will attempt to ban the lending of money at interest.” This is a very Scottish approach to the world.

James Patterson:

That’s very Scottish.

Helen Dale:

You are allowed to make jokes about Scots being tight.

James Patterson:

As a person of Scottish and just a little bit of Jewish descent, it’s all true.

Helen Dale:

So yes. That is what has happened. So that is the origin of this. And then the way it’s cashed out is that there was a bit of a blip during the Iraq war, but nowhere near as bad as this. And to be fair, that blip was first generated by a single individual, George Galloway, whose history, I give it a fair bit of detail with lots of links in the piece. I do that for a reason. Because this first hint that British Muslims who are mainly Pakistani and Bangladeshi … There are a few Palestinians and there are a few Lebanese and so on and so forth, but they are in much smaller numbers. They’re overwhelmingly Pakistani and Bangladeshi extraction. The others are in tiny numbers.

The first hint that perhaps Labour had been taking its British Muslim voters for granted who’d stayed loyal to Labour when the other ethnic minorities were starting to drift. Were taking them for granted. This George Galloway character used to periodically when seats always off of Labour, he would tip and he would use his knowledge of what is called in Pakistan [foreign language 00:24:11] or [foreign language 00:24:12] politics. That comes from a Farsi word, which I’m going to pronounce wrongly because I don’t know any Farsi, and I was taught how to say it by Arabic speakers. [foreign language 00:24:22] just means brother [foreign language 00:24:24]. And it’s basically where you recruit entire communities based on their blood kinship to each other and effectively harvest their votes.

James Patterson:

Oh, no.

Helen Dale:

And Labour had been doing this for quite a long time, and yet the areas that British Pakistanis and British Bangladeshis lived in tended to be poor, to have poor amenities, to have rubbishy schools and related. There was some success stories as well. Shabana Mahmood went to Oxford and went to Lincoln College, which is the rival college of Brasenose, that kind of thing. So there were some success stories as well, people who came from the upper rungs of Pakistani and Bangladeshi society and finished up in the UK and became stellar high achievers, but they were a minority. The bulk of British Muslims have not been winners in the race to economic advantage I think it’s probably fair to say, compared to lots of other ethnic groups. And they’d always loyally voted Labour and Labour had been in government for quite a lot of that.

And then you had on top of it, you had Labour being very pro-Israel and very in favor of the war in Iraq. And so first just this George Galloway, who’s a Scotsman who seemed to be able to exploit the style of vote harvesting politics. He seemed to be able to do it better than any British Pakistani could do it. And he would occasionally win seats off of Labour. They’d last one term partly because one of the reasons why British Muslims were voting for him was because Labour had done nothing for them. Then, they would vote for George Galloway, and they would get five years of nothing done for them either. Their constituency was still just as rubbish as it had always been. So he would be tipped out and they’d just go back to usually voting Labour, occasionally voting Tory, occasionally voting UKIP.

That happened in Rochdale. There was one election where it became a Labour UKIP marginal when the Lib Dem vote collapsed. So you would get that. But you didn’t get a true perfect storm of we are really annoyed about living in crappy poor parts of the country that nobody cares about and having our votes taken for granted. And there is a crisis in the Middle East. Those two happened together, plus the emerging sectarianism in the background because people have just been so glib about it and just thought, oh, well, yes, they’re just an interest group or a religious lobby group like any other religious lobby group, and I’m going, I’m sorry you did not treat, and you still do not treat the UDF or Sinn Féin like this. You just don’t. And they don’t. So it is just extraordinarily glib to just open the front door to sectarianism. And the thing is, it’s not just sectarianism with what you could vaguely call white people. That is a somewhat separate issue. The recent riots.

There’s a Muslim-Hindu conflict that has happened in Leicester. There’s historically been Black-Muslim conflict in Birmingham going back, and that was over the market-dominant minority thing. It was directed at East African Asians who once again perceived to be becoming too economically successful. And the glibness of the lightness of people just thinking, oh, this is all funny and cute. Actually, no, it’s not. And we’ve got real problems with…I think I’m quoting here from Arnold Kling, who’s an American economist I admire. Whereas a general rule across the Anglosphere and the European Union countries have agreed that they are pro-Israel by and large. They take Israel’s side more or less in conflicts and have done so for a pretty long time. Occasionally, the French will have a bit of a wobble, but not that much. What I think is happening everywhere except Australia and Germany for distinctive historical reasons is that the Middle East is generally just going to turn into partisan politics.

And I think you in the United States are maybe two election cycles from that. Where the pro-Palestinian side will come to dominate the Democrats, and the old guard, which was represented by someone like Joe Biden, will fall away. And that may well happen if Labour can figure out a way of getting those votes to come back to Labour. The effect could well be, once again, for the Middle East to become a culture of partisan politics for the Tories to become the party of Israel and Hindus, and for Labour to become the party of Palestine and Islam. That hasn’t happened yet because so many Muslims have just walked away from Labour and cut their majorities to tiny votes less than a thousand votes. And you have to understand, these are large constituencies with over a hundred thousand people in them. This is one of those things where a single ballot can occasionally decide who wins the seat.

James Patterson:

You describe the Labour majority as wide but shallow.

Helen Dale:

Shallow.

James Patterson:

Yeah. And this is because of the internal split?

Helen Dale:

Yes. It’s a fractured electoral coalition.

James Patterson:

The thing that I was wondering when I was reading through this is maybe the problem is that the numbers coming in can recreate a cultural hub, and that what I think had previously been the English wager was that the people would secularize more quickly than they could organize, so you wouldn’t have this feel the wrath of Allah, referring to people as infidels following the teachers of the prophets. These …

Helen Dale:

And remember, this is why it’s important to call it by its proper name. This is proper sectarianism because every single one of the people who had those comments directed at them was a sitting Labour MP who also happened to be Muslim. When they went after say someone like Jess Phillips it was more fairly traditional as she identified to be fair, straight up and down sexism. Just don’t like a woman being in authority over them. But when they went after the non-whites after women of color basically, who were also Muslims of color, they went after them very much on the basis of you are a bad Muslim, you are an infidel. If you watch the clip of Shabana Mahmood to the BBC, it’s very good, and it only goes for a few minutes, and I’ve extracted that piece from it. You can see people were bellowing at her across the street. You’re an infidel in English and in Urdu and in Arabic and this kind of thing.

James Patterson:

So there’s no way to expect the sectarianism to diminish over time then because it can reproduce itself within the borders, right?

Helen Dale:

This is the problem, and yes, and you are seeing one of the effects of this, and this is something I will write about in the context of the riots that I’m working on thinking through my thoughts through to the end on this. You are seeing what something that used to exist in place and to a degree still does and causes them social problems in countries like Belgium and Holland. They had pillar systems, pillarization, which was a post-confessional state compromise where you had countries with divided religious populations and you couldn’t do the thing of putting all the Catholics in Bavaria and all the protestants in Prussia and so on and so forth. It wasn’t that simple. So, you would have self-governing communities. Note that expression communities. You are hearing that all the time now. And what the state does is it provides a common framework for these different communities to interact with each other, but effectively allows them to police themselves through community leaders.

And the problem with that, of course, is when you have different moral frameworks and different organizing principles, you get things like the grooming gangs. A significant part of the reason for the problem of grooming gangs in Rotherham and in other cities in the north and the Midlands was precisely because of this treatment of various communities as self-governing and engaging with their community leadership rather than engaging directly with the people.

Mark Koyama wrote about this. The fellow who is probably pretty close to being the world’s preeminent economic historian, the fellow who wrote about the emergence of liberalism and the importance of having a single legal system that is applied without fear or favor to everybody in the population. But it’s very tempting to do pillar systems, particularly as some of the European countries that did do them historically, like the Netherlands, the Dutch pillar system were also pretty economically prosperous for a long time. A lot of people think, oh, those systems must be terrible, and when they were millet systems in the Ottoman Empire, they probably were terrible, and it’s one of the reasons why the Ottoman Empire became the sick old man and of Europe and all of this kind of thing. It was poorly run. But competent Europeans could do quite a good job with their pillarization, but it feeds political instability. The historic pillarization in Belgium is a large part of why that country persists in going hundreds of days, years, sometimes without a government after it has elections.

James Patterson:

So there’s something odd about this pillar system, which is that it operates primarily at the discretion of the English government, right? Because there’s a legal system that refers to some people, and then it’s more or less suspended in other communities. What do you expect but riots as a result of this inconsistent form of the rule of law?

Helen Dale:

Well, it’s not the rule of law. But part of the problem with anti-discrimination legislation is the people who developed the ideas behind modern anti-discrimination legislation going back to the 19th century, and probably John Stuart Mill and people like that. I think they thought that if you took away the legal disabilities … Well, no, I don’t think they thought, I know they thought because there’s lots and lots of evidence for this. Words are out of their own mouths. Everybody, from John Stuart Mill to Mary Wollstonecraft to Martin Luther King, and all of these people, they all clearly thought that if you took away the legal impediments to people succeeding, you would have winners and losers of all races and sexes. None of these people was trying to suggest that we would all be equal. That modern woke thing of true equality of outcomes, none of these people were running that line. But they did think that you would have roughly proportionate numbers of very clever, talented black people, very talented, clever women, and very talented, clever, this, that or the other. They thought that you would get roughly proportionate to their population numbers.

That hasn’t happened, and it won’t happen because not only are there average differences between individuals, there are average differences between groups. And so what we have got now is a lot of pent-up anger and irritation from people where they perceive that promises were made to them and then snatched away. I think that is at the root of a lot of this. It’s the liberal state, the modern liberal state bent over backward to do something like equality of opportunity, and that hasn’t happened, and now everything is just being scrapped over and torn apart.

James Patterson:

So the internal dynamics of these groups often disincentivize people from taking advantage of those opportunities too. You were mentioning that this one woman … What’s her name? I’m so unfamiliar with the politics here. Her name, is it, Shabana-

Helen Dale:

Shabana Mahmood?

James Patterson:

Yeah. Shabana Mahmood. She’s treated terribly, and you can only imagine that there are a large number of Muslim girls from Pakistan or Bangladesh originally who understand these cues and have been suppressed in their own ability to thrive.

Helen Dale:

This is what Baroness Gohir is talking about in that quotation from hers. She’s alarmed because it looks like it’s specifically directed at young Muslim girls as a way of just putting the hand on their head and making them sit down. Just because the girls here are mouthy doesn’t mean you get to join in. That kind of thing. Yes. That is a specific within the community issue that people are just not addressing. Because now of course, all of these things, whether it’s equality of outcomes or whether it’s differences between men and women and so on and so forth, there’s just been this extraordinary ideological flattening, so you can’t just make very sensible observations about the fact that, well, I’m afraid some religions are a bit more sexist than others. That’s just a thing that exists, and you have to take that into account and people within those religions who want to, for example, like Shabana Mahmood or Baroness Gohir who want to deal with the sexism in their own religion, the fact that there are problems with sexism in Islam, they have to be confronted, and the rest of us, all of us nice western liberals have to have those women’s backs, and that’s what’s not happening anymore.

That’s why it wasn’t hard for me to find all of that information with very detailed links and quotations from politicians and the great and the good and so on and so forth. It wasn’t hard for me to find, but people just do not want to talk about it. They do not want to look it in the face.

James Patterson:

Is it the fear of violence the reason for this? Is it the misapprehension of the threats? What is it that prevents people from wanting to defend these girls?

Helen Dale:

I suspect violence or fear of violence and association of Islamism with violence, which is just an upgraded version of the heckler’s veto, I suppose. It’s just, it’s a heckler’s veto with potentially something explosive on the end of it. I think that is a part of it. I always remember what Iona Italia said. And she’s both written and published articles when she was editor of Areo Magazine and she works for Quillette now. She would publish these articles, but she would never ever put in the magazine the images of the Muhammad cartoons from the Danish press. She would never include them. And she was always completely upfront about this. She would say, no, I’m sorry. I am a coward. This is not worth dying for. I have a very nice life as a magazine commissioning editor. I would like to continue to enjoy it. She was always completely upfront about this. And I actually have to say I have a lot of respect for that because it made me think, what would I do in those circumstances? I have a feeling I’d probably do the same thing as Iona. I quite like my life.

James Patterson:

So what is on earth? Is this Labour government going to do? What possible outcome could there be for them?

Helen Dale:

I don’t actually know if they are doing things like reviewing, for example. There is currently a review going on into the question of suspending UK arms sales to Israel. That’s something the new foreign secretary, David Lammy, has just kicked off. If they continue to go along those lines, it would appear that they are attempting to get a significant number of Muslim voters back by changing the UK government’s approach to the Middle East, which is, as I said earlier, my initial suspicion long before the sectarianism gets truly terrible will just be that what will happen is the Middle East will just turn into a feature of normal partisan politics and it will change from administration to administration or government to government in the UK depending on who is in number 10 or who is in the White House or dominates the White House plus one other of the houses. And so that is the first thing that Labour is probably going to try to get those Muslim voters back because it’s not always going to have the huge buffer provided by the voters who did vote, turnout, even though it was a low turnout just under 60%, and actually only 52% of all of the eligible voters. A little under 60% of the registered voters.

Labour won’t always have the buffer provided by a large number of people who are large because they were drawn from the whole of the UK’s population voting for them. They won’t always have that buffer. There will come a point where, for example, Reform may make a better pitch because it’s got those social populist parties in Europe tend to have social democratic economic policies. Reform isn’t quite there. They are heading in that direction. If they start making a policy offer that has social democratic economic policies along with their immigration restrictionist cultural policies, they will start to undermine Labour votes in those historic red wall seats, which went Tory, Tories didn’t give them what they wanted. Now they’ve gone back to Labour, but on a very low turnout, on a very low percentage, but it was because everybody’s vote share was terrible.

James Patterson:

Well, on that note, we are going to have to close. Again the article at Law & Liberty is “The New Sectarianism” with a very thoroughly linked piece. By the way, I think I learned everything I could possibly know about the state of English politics by reading this and then followed the links encyclopedic and it’s scope. The one in-

Helen Dale:

I’m sorry. I assume that you do understand that it’s a parliamentary system and as a Prime Minister and the cabinet has to be appointed from within the Parliament. It can technically be appointed from outside, but that doesn’t happen very often.

James Patterson:

It just sounds like witchcraft to me, Helen. I don’t know what any of that means. The one and only Helen Dale, who, by the way, will be giving us her own Law & Liberty podcast probably sometime in October. She’ll be showing up every once in a while to add a little bit more spice, a little bit more excitement, but not very much Raygun. She’s very much more of the Australian swimming team and her talents.

Helen Dale:

I will try. I’ll try be good rather than rubbish.

James Patterson:

Thank you so much for appearing on the Law & Liberty Podcast, Helen.

Helen Dale:

Thanks for having me.

James Patterson:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.