How much ink has been spilled, in recent months, on the matter of “Anglo-Gaullism”? Here he is, at last, le Général — and he was under our noses all along! The actual policies of de Gaulle, his “certain idea of France”, all this was only secondary. The real lesson of Gaullism is this: when the state is on the edge of crisis, when it is crying out for a radical reimagining, it is best to entrust power to one who has already proved his mettle.

Tony Blair has proved his mettle. We want economic growth, political stability, and a state that can do things; he brought us all these things before, and he can do so again. Iraq might have been a catastrophe, but other countries know the benign power of his touch. Perhaps soon our cityscapes will contain his statues; perhaps our own playgrounds will teem with “Toniblers”.

Of course, we know it cannot be. Blair is unpopular, we are told, hated by the Left for Iraq, by the Right for the constitutional mess he left behind, and by both for the globalism he let rip. He continues to make fortunes from dodgy regimes and multinational companies who pay him for his advice. He was the future once, people say; he is now best left in the past. And yet the sound of him on the radio, deftly batting away Nick Robinson’s questions and presenting a considered plan for government, cannot help but make the heart flutter. The way he speaks about Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting, those misguided little pipsqueaks, calls to mind that irritating centrist cliché of the “adults in the room”. He has aged graciously, and his years of rest have served him well — one gets the sense (thanks perhaps to his Big Tech, jet-setter lifestyle) that he is really plugged into the world, that he knows what it’s all about. Surely it is time to state the obvious without shame: the argument for his return has become impossible to ignore.

The Labour Party is searching for a Prime Minister who can do the job and win elections. Blair can do the job, is more popular nationally than Starmer, and would demolish any rival in a debate. He is not a sitting MP, but Andy Burnham shows us that this needn’t be an obstacle. Where there’s a will, there’s a way; surely we can find him a safe by-election.

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The invention of David Attenborough

By Samuel Rubinstein

It’s one of those events which, were it to occur, would somehow command that powerful feeling of inevitability. Ten years in power never was enough; “the Master” was always meant to be one of those political titans who bestrides generations. It was only the pettiness of Gordon Brown (and the bellicosity of George W. Bush) that cut his time short; it was only the pettiness of two subsequent Labour leaders that kept him out of the political discussion. The old cadre of Blairites, in their wilderness years, spoke of him as though he was the Mahdi in occultation. His spirit was present in Chuka Umunna and “Change UK”; Lord Adonis was a one-man “Bring Back Blair” brigade. In 2021 it was reported, to the excitement of SW1, that Blair was “on the verge of a comeback”. Here, at last, it is.

That comeback, a 5,700-word essay, may not appeal to the soggy center. It is not a hodgepodge of clichés about “moderation” and the “sensible center ground”. It says nothing about “polarization”, “extremism”, or some abstract, demonic force named “hate”. Blair’s “Radical Centrism” is not fence-sitting Lib Demmery — at one point he takes an easy shot at the Lib Dems. It is not the centrism of The Rest Is Politics, which makes a fetish out of umm-ing and ahh-ing before concluding that we should all be nice.

Blair’s centrism is a promiscuous sort: he picks up ideas wherever he finds them and takes them back home. He was never afraid to break the Left-wing shibboleths of his own party; he is not afraid to break “centrist” shibboleths, either. He confesses an admiration for Donald Trump; he wants to abandon Net Zero; when he says that the small boats must be dealt with “whatever it takes”, he hints that Britain should leave the ECHR. He does not speak histrionically about Reform meaning the End of Britain. He struck the right note on the trans question well before For Women Scotland, while much of the “sensible center” was busy defending the indefensible. He is clear-minded about the world. When he wrote an essay on antisemitism for The Free Press, he did not duck away from something that many of his political tribe would fear to address head-on. Antisemitism in the British Muslim community, he straightforwardly declared, is “frankly unacceptable”. Whatever charges Dominic Cummings might lay at Blair’s feet, he cannot call him an “NPC”.

Although Blair remains true as ever to the Atlanticism that wreaked disaster in Iraq, his essay may reveal some ambivalence about the constitutional reforms which his governments engineered. Given his emphasis on state capacity, he must regret some of the ways he diluted Westminster’s power and outsourced decisions and responsibilities to quangos, judges, and devolved administrations. Before the Blairite restoration, there ought perhaps to be some public statement of contrition. But if we could forgive Churchill for Gallipoli, we can surely forgive Blair this.

Perhaps we are prone to romanticizing the politicians of the past, but that tendency needn’t be wrong. Blair might not hold a candle to Churchill, who might not hold a candle to Disraeli. But nobody today — not Starmer, not Burnham, not Wes Streeting — can hold a candle to Blair.

If certain journalists are doing their Blair love-in, it’s safe to say that their feelings aren’t reciprocated. Their coverage of politics is a key part of Blair’s complaint. The media has helped to force politicians into a “24-hour pressure cooker”, which prevents them from seeing and studying the world. Blair is frustrated that “politics” seems now to mean Chris Mason and Beth Rigby, having got a taste of blood in Partygate, hunting after more Prime Ministerial scalps. What will people in the future make of the fact that, on the eve of one of the great world-historic revolutions, the arrival of AI, Britain’s chattering classes were obsessing over Peter Mandelson, Olly Robbins, and Lord Alli’s suits?

Blair offers a strong analysis for the collapse of the present government. A classic insult hurled at Sir Keir is that he was a “technocrat”. It sounds right. He looks the part, and has the CV to match. Perhaps this image helped him win the 2024 election. But really, as Blair says, the problem with Starmer is that he is given to the Labour Party’s fits of passion and delusion. Arriving in Downing Street without any clear vision of his own, he made himself the tool of deeper forces. The few times he has tried to break out of the Labour Party’s rigid cast of mind — winter fuel allowance, benefits reform — he has been beaten into submission by angry backbenchers. A good Labour leader would have put them in their place, but Starmer never had much authority to do so. Most Labour MPs in 1997 were acutely aware that they owed their victory to Blair. His strategies and gambles paid off. They were not “Labour MPs”, elected to do vague Labourish things. They were New Labour MPs, and they were elected to do Blair’s bidding.

Sir Keir has never established his authority in this way. He purged Corbyn, and he was to be rewarded by the electorate for doing so. Labour badly needed a rebrand after 2019, and Sir Keir gave it one. But it was only superficial; it never ascended to the realm of ideas. New Labour figures were summoned from the past — some, such as Peter Mandelson, fatefully. But New Labour was never emphatically asserted as the correct path, intellectually as well as electorally.

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Inside Tony Blair Inc.

By Tom McTague

There is a revealing part of Blair’s essay where he describes meeting with Labour people before 2024. He asked them whether they were Old Labour or New Labour. The most common answer was that they rejected those categories; they were “Just Labour”. For the last two years we have had a “Just Labour” government. Starmer has implemented a Left-wing manifesto. That is true both tangibly — abolishing the two-child benefit cap, beefing up renters’ rights — and on the no less significant plane of symbolism: recognizing the state of Palestine, finishing Blair’s job in the House of Lords. And, as a token of thanks, the soft Left is scheming against him, all in favor of someone who did not even compete in the 2024 election, and can claim no part in Labour’s landslide victory. The Prime Minister, as his predecessor suggests, “totters in the breeze”. The backbenchers see this and know how to exploit it. Starmer had a mandate, but he never articulated what he had a mandate to do. Blair would have been less cautious, more forthcoming. He would have purged Corbyn, and he would have repudiated Corbynism. He would have told the party, and then the country, that they had bitter pills to swallow. They would, in the fullness of time, have to do some un-Labourish things; they would have to scrap the triple lock and Net Zero, water down the welfare state, make an accommodation with Trump, and turn the bulk of their attention to AI. Perhaps Blair, if given such a chance, would have won fewer seats at the election — but a massive majority has hardly been of much good to Starmer.

Britain faces a crisis of seriousness. We are becoming an unserious country. Blair is right to say that only an unserious country would cycle through seven Prime Ministers in ten years; only an unserious country would, as Blair says we are projected to do, spend more on disability benefits than defense. In happier times the priorities of government could be “education, education, education”. Such priorities presuppose that a government is capable of forming a clear vision, and then using its means to realize it. We cannot take these things for granted anymore. Blair is right that the priority today can only be efficacy, efficacy, efficacy.

The German historian Heinrich von Treitschke once remarked that the Prussian King Frederick William III, who was crushed by Napoleon, “seemed as if made to lead a well-ordered middling state honorably through quiet times”. These are not quiet times. It is a stroke of bad historical fortune that Starmer couldn’t have been Prime Minister between 1997 and 2007, and Blair Prime Minister today; each would have suited that moment better than the one they got. Starmer could have had that Love, Actually moment with an American president, refusing to send British troops to Iraq: he was a young and dashing human rights lawyer back then, as though plucked from a Richard Curtis romcom. Blair ripped apart a working constitution without due care; there is plenty of cause today to take a Jacobin chainsaw to the state. Blair developed a vision of social democracy that was committed to business, growth, and the extraordinary potential of technology; such a vision now is more needed than ever.

It’s not too late. Blair is a sprightly 73, a year younger than Lord Palmerston was when he began his second term as Prime Minister, over a decade younger than Gladstone during his final stint in Downing Street and five years younger than the American president was when elected for a second time. He is our Général de Gaulle; he is our Grand Old Man. We need him more than the Gazans do. Bring him back.

It isn’t just his stubborn refusal to accept that he made a disastrous call about Iraq. In general, the man renowned for his likability comes across as brittle and defensive, with an air of irritable weariness in having to explain anything at all. Clips inserted from early in his premiership, reminding us of the Bambi phase — prolonged eye contact, suppressed mirth hovering at the edges of his mouth, a look of being slightly aroused by the attention — only underline his rather hunted look now.

He tells director Michael Waldman he has no interest in psychoanalyzing himself. He professes bafflement about “why anyone would be interested in doing a programme on me”, almost as if, had he not won three consecutive elections for Labour, normalized technocratic managerialism across the UK, and had a seismic influence on the shape of the Middle East, Gordon Brown would have done it all instead. But an explanation for the reticence emerges towards the end of the second episode, when Waldman presses the 72-year-old to be honest about his flaws. Blair says it would not be “very wise as a politician” to admit to any. Protesting, Waldman points out: “You’re no longer a politician!” Blair makes it clear he does not consider himself in retirement.

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Nick Clegg’s Meta morality

By Kathleen Stock

It is a reminder that his position is not exactly that of a pensioner summoned from the greenhouse to the rare excitement of a television studio. Thanks to his not-for-profit organization — the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) — he is still in the thick of things. And presumably the last thing his stellar client list or billionaire investors want to hear is frank soul-searching about the past.

His policy unit attempts to set the agenda for national governments — including our own — on things like AI investment, digital passports, and climate policy.  Meanwhile the consultancy wing of the TBI advises foreign leaders and CEOs about how to be more effective. As “executive chairman”, Blair gets a virtual red box every morning, takes private jets to Davos, and has phone chats with presidents. He will soon be attending the inaugural meeting of Trump’s “board of peace”. A confident brand image must be maintained.

With Blair, it’s always all about the future and there is never much point looking back. Luckily for viewers, other interviewees are willing to fill in the psychic gaps. A couple of the women talking to camera seem particularly immune to the Blair charisma. Perhaps surprisingly, one of these women is his wife. “Tony being a very charming person, I think he can often make people think they hear what they want to hear,” Cherie pronounces, with the air of someone who had been there and got the T-shirt. At the end of series, she sums up with brutal finality: “He is an amazing politician. As a husband and a human being, that’s a rather different matter, but that’s really between me and him”.

Clare Short is also perspicuous on her former boss — a “smoothie”. While great strengths lay in his charm and communication skills, “his weakness was the lack of deep thinking, knowledge of history… I think he wants to be a big thinker but that’s not what he is.” Nevertheless, former Cabinet Secretary Richard Wilson suggests this could sometimes be an advantage, allowing him to “solve problems which had defeated everybody else”. On approaching the Good Friday Agreement negotiations, Blair is said to have told Wilson: “I don’t need to know the history, I’m better off if I don’t know the history. You watch, it’ll work”. And it did.

The main thing Blair seems to have grasped about history is that — as he keeps saying —  it “goes on for a long time”. He thinks that eventually, the populist revolt against his legacy will fail. “People in these last years have moved against some of the things I stood for… globalization… Britain being in Europe, liberal interventionism… but I remain committed to those things,” he says. “People will come in time to realize there are merits in the position I took”. He clearly sees himself as playing the long game. This might lead one to wonder: who does he assume is keeping the score?

As is well known, he doesn’t believe in Left versus Right, preferring to talk about right versus wrong instead.  For some commentators, this makes him “post-ideological”, again making him sound like the prototype for Starmer. But this is to underestimate Blair’s Christianity — or at least, so the documentary has it. The Third Way was really God’s Way all along.

The religion theme emerges in the second episode. His friend Anji Hunter talks of spotting a bible in his undergraduate rooms at Oxford. Blair himself remembers a close friend he made there, an Australian priest called Peter Thomson: “Peter was probably the single biggest influence in my life …  I still think about him virtually every day”. We see a clip from an interview with Thomson from 1996, anticipating Private Eye by a year or two, saying his friend “could have easily gone into the church”.

Blair tells Waldman that his intense discussions with Thomson meant “my Christianity and my politics were linked”. Cherie Blair talks of how the vision of “Christ as a radical… who fought for what was right, was something that very much appealed to Tony”. The huge window frames flanking Blair’s chair suddenly look like crosses.

For the novelist Robert Harris, Blair’s belief that “there was a battle for good and evil” made him dangerous as a leader, because “the world doesn’t really divide in that Manichean way”. He partly attributes Blair’s foolish obsession with intervening in Iraq to this presumption; a point which, if made seriously, seems absurd. It is not the mere belief that there is a line between good and evil that invites catastrophe, but hubris about where exactly the line is and what should be done about it. In other words, Blair’s errors stemmed not so much from his Christianity, but rather from his God complex. Or as Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam once famously put it: “the trouble with Tony is that he thinks he’s fucking Jesus”.

His favorite film, he tells Waldman, is Schindler’s List, because it shows that “you cannot be a bystander… you owe some responsibility to the bigger world”. When ordinary people say things like this, they mean volunteering or making cakes for coffee mornings, but a globalizer tends to think in global terms. Blair’s continuing obsession with the world stage, combined with his apparently scant awareness of any surrounding complexity, is certainly a worry. For he is now unconstrained by democratic processes, cabinet members, or the adversarial parliamentary system. He is therefore much freer to pursue his idiosyncratic vision of the good.

His technocratic bent makes him susceptible to the idea of technology as a benevolent force — a simplistic fairytale told by friendly billionaires looking for credibility and influence. The TBI gets millions in funding from Oracle boss Larry Ellison; indeed, one recent report described the institute as a “sales and lobbying operation” for the multinational tech company. Whether or not this is true, Blair and his employees are now messianic about AI, advocating its use in developing countries, England’s schools, and the NHS, to name just a few places. And there seems to be little sustained consideration of the downsides.

What this has to do with religion is unclear.  In the early days, New Labour sounded a lot like Blue Labour does now, which is to say vaguely Judeo-Christian, with an emphasis on individual realizing his better nature in a community. In 1994, Blair himself said that “the individual does best in a strong and decent community of people with principles and standards, and common aims and values”. Over Labour’s time in power, this fairly thick vision of human nature thinned out, placing ever more emphasis on individualism, choice, and the ability to efficiently harness technological “progress” to one’s private ends. At the TBI, the communitarian element appears to have vanished altogether. How are we supposed to develop common aims and values with other people when our main interlocutors are personalized robots telling us only what we want to hear?

Equally, the supposedly important idea of seeking “radical” change in the name of social justice tends to disappear at convenient moments. Instead, Blair urges us to treat technology as a galloping horse we can only harness, not repel. This is how he always frames political decisions he finds exciting, as somehow outside the sphere of human decision-making altogether. European integration, globalization, and now AI: such things are as inevitable as the weather. The actual weather, on the other hand, can be altered by more efficient carbon dioxide removal — and the TBI have a policy briefing on it.

I don’t doubt that Blair is sincere in his beliefs. But he seems to think it a happy accident that his interpretation of the Bible has also brought him close to unfeasible wealth and power. Jesus may have been a radical about social justice, but he was also a figure of huge ambition who sought global relevance. If Blair was able to be honest with himself, he might admit he likes the second part too. It must be quite exhausting to suppress the suspicion about himself. No wonder he no longer seems to like interviewers.

Perhaps the most plausible current replacement for Starmer is Streeting — and his stock has clearly risen. On a personal level, he’s surely a more dynamic, believable and telegenic politician than the PM. Where Starmer has no tonal register that doesn’t land as a pained, pre-rehearsed vacuity, the Health Secretary can at least appear sincere, fluent and relatively spontaneous. Nor would Streeting be lumped with Morgan McSweeney and a Downing Street operation that has, according to one exasperated Labour figure I spoke to, “descended into pure paranoid insanity”.

That, of course, still leaves the question of policy. Starmer’s own pitch was always one of quiet professionalism — “a politics that treads lighter on our lives”, as the man himself once put it. After years of Tory psychodrama, an understated seriousness appealed to many, even if it came in lieu of an intellectual hinterland. Such was the implicit bargain after 10,000-word Fabian Society pamphlets and soporific “This is what I believe” essays failed to reveal much about anything. “There’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be,” the Prime Minister told colleagues for good measure before taking office. “I will make decisions one after the other.”

And so he has. His leadership has been characterized by a sporadic series of disjointed, scattergun choices, made seemingly ad hoc and without any overarching context. Most policies are announced and then forgotten, lost in the news cycle, or else abandoned after a backlash. Remember winter fuel and disability benefit reform? How about our “island of strangers”, or troops on the ground in Ukraine? Let’s see how digital ID goes.

If Starmer’s myriad failures are ultimately tied to his lack of ideological ballast — his lack of “Starmerism” — then what could we expect from “Streetingism”? As a talisman of the Blairite Right, Streeting would likely pursue a more robust implementation of Tony Blair Institute-style policy points: AI adoption; a streamlined, lean state; welfare reform; an Atlanticist foreign policy; and a full-throttle embrace of Big Tech. But while this agenda may be pursued more consistently and vigorously under the Health Secretary, it doesn’t veer radically from our current path, and is unlikely to deliver us from our secular malaise. Just as New Labour’s Faustian pact with the City left us brutally exposed during the 2008 crisis, TBI Britain would leave us as a European outpost of American interests, over-reliant on the tech asset bubble. What’s more, we’d risk becoming an appendage of Silicon Valley, still beholden to trade and capital flows in a rapidly deglobalizing world, with an emaciated state apparatus and growth concentrated in sectors with few employment prospects and low economic multipliers.

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Britain’s wage slaves are revolting

By Jonny Ball

There are alternatives. The favored replacement candidate of the Blue Labour tendency is Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who has wooed some with her hardline stance on migration and crime. This week, she called for the emulation of Danish policies on refugees and asylum. Yet this same social conservatism risks repelling Labour members, as well as many MPs. Her speaking style is tepid and overwrought. Whether she can make the transition to a leader for a populist age, one that demands a challenging mix of emollience and pugnacity, along with an easy, authentic patter, is unknown. And for all the emphasis on her “Blue Labour” credentials, that second word in the duo risks becoming obscured. While she is comfortable talking tough on crime, it remains to be seen whether she makes the grand arguments needed for a restoration of national industry, of domestic production, of a strong, protective state.

It’s telling, perhaps, that it’s been left to a non-parliamentarian, Andy Burnham, to spell out the most obvious departure from Starmerite political economy. The Mayor’s putative, alternative vision of “Manchesterism” — centered around publicly owned utilities and mass social housebuilding — will attract the Labour rank and file. But Burnham has no Commons seat, and is therefore ineligible for the leadership. A re-energized Ed Miliband has been touted as an alternative talisman for the mushy soft-Left, and he would likely run in this vein too. His Net Zero and progressive credentials would allow him to run as an unashamed anti-Reform leader, looking to unite Labour, Liberal Democrat, centrist Tories and Green voters in a “Stop Farage” alliance.

Meanwhile, given that the Labour brand among voters attracted to the anti-systemic iconoclasm of the populist Right may be irrevocably damaged no matter who is leader, uniting the Left and center in a broad coalition probably makes sense in electoral terms. Even reviving the complacent, liberal-metropolitan spirit of London 2012 would represent an improvement on Starmerism’s cautious and self-defeating desire to appear as all things to all men, alienating more or less everyone in the process. And with Starmer’s personal ratings lower than any prime minister in history, any alternative would likely lead to a significant, if temporary, polling bounce. That’s hardly surprising: the small circle of Labourites currently running the shop have confused what was once an effective electoral plan — “nuking” the Left and hoping for the best — with an actual governing project.

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Wes Streeting is a man for all factions

By Ian Martin

Yet if progressive liberalism with a human face might be the best way to weave the necessary strands into a coherent electoral bloc, the fact is that Labour’s problems run far deeper than mere personnel. To that extent, Starmer is merely the symptom of a far broader failure of imagination: never in the postwar era has Britain been led by a political clique so devoid of a vision or transformative purpose. Notice, here, that I avoided saying faction: that would imply some semblance of a worldview, or a consistently pursued framework for governing, beyond the attainment of power for power’s sake. It would also require the identification of winners and losers, according to a broad scaffold of political morality, and an idea of how the country ought to be.

All the Labour hierarchy’s problems stem from a fundamental misdiagnosis: that the panacea for a two-decade slump in living standards would merely entail a changing of the guard. The truth, of course, is that Britain’s seemingly intractable structural decline could never just be remedied with the adoption of some new, more arid professional management jargon, after years of Cameroon insouciance or Johnsonian bombast, to say nothing of the Truss calamity. And as Labour has realized that administrative competence — which worked so well at the Crown Prosecution Service, or indeed in Parliament circa 1999 — isn’t enough for genuine political leadership, panic has set in.

What is needed in the current climate — a willingness to decisively break with the old — has clearly eluded Starmer and looks set to elude his successor. Mere adults-in-the-room competence has been blown apart by experience. Rather than smooth efficiency, and slow-and-steady reform, we have desperate scrambling, a grim spectacle of ministers in office but not in power, reaching its apogee as the Prime Minister’s team resorted to invoking the bond markets to save his skin, briefing that a leadership election now would spook investors.

This aspect of the abortive Streeting leadership debacle speaks volumes about the state we’re in. Over the last half century, politicians have voluntarily ceded their powers to anonymous, exogenous forces, making themselves supplicants to international courts, to permanent bureaucracies, to arms-length technocratic bodies and, crucially, to international capital, to the bond markets. The fact that Starmer’s allies plead with colleagues that gilt-traders must, above all, be sated, shows us who really runs Britain: and that nobody is willing or able to “Take Back Control”.

Streeting, Mahmood, Miliband, Burnham — each of them would need to pursue a genuinely radical rupture if they wished to overcome the current Prime Minister’s defects. But such ambition, if anathema to Starmer, is quite possibly beyond them too, and indeed beyond anyone currently in the Labour Party. After all, economic and political sovereignty would require us to eliminate our day-to-day deficit dependency, taking on special interest groups still in receipt of permanent, structural — and enormous — cash transfers. But it also requires a massive shift from revenue spending to capital investment and infrastructure, and a desire to reshore, domesticate and discipline highly mobile capital with the kind of statist interventions that we haven’t seen in 50 years of progressive integration into the liberal-globalist empire.

So instead, and especially given the myopic, moribund culture Labour now seems stuck with, we’ll likely see a continuation of managed decline, with the haphazard focus on policy tidbits maintained as a hallmark. Morgan McSweeney’s sacrifice on the altar of Starmer’s failings might buy time before the PM’s own demise. But whoever takes over will be faced with the same symptoms of broken Britain: fiscal crises and a restive electorate, coupled with a political economy that has generated near-zero per capita growth in a generation. And if, after all that, a Prime Minister Streeting does somehow manage to inject some verve into Labour, the odds are that his Ilford North seat — majority: 528 — will fall to a “Gaza Independent” at the next election. What a fitting postscript that would be, for a government that’s helped bring us so low.

A new report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change returns us to this fraught subject. “Narratives of Hate: The Spectrum of Far-right Worldviews in the UK” takes a look at a number of groups which it identifies as “far-Right”. These are: Generation Identity England, Britain First, For Britain and the British National Party. The report states that if these groups are “left unaddressed”, then they will “continue to sow division in Britain”.

In its assessment, the report takes the beliefs of these groups and compares them with those of the Norwegian terrorist, Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in July 2011. His views, according to the TBI, provide “a clear baseline to examine other extremist messages in the far Right”.

All these groups, according to the report, hold views which include “Believing that Islamist scriptures promote violent jihad and terrorism”; “Claiming that Muslim immigration to Western countries is paving the way for implementing Sharia and Islamic laws, and ‘Islamifying’ Europe”; and “Suggesting that Muslims are more prone to committing acts of sexual violence and rape”. Another accusation made by all these groups is that the authorities and the media have been “covering up crimes committed by Muslims and immigrants”.

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The great Brexit untruth

By Douglas Murray

I am uncomfortable with the idea of using a terrorist or mass murderer as a ‘baseline’ measure. After all, if some madman tomorrow committed an atrocity in the name of the environment, free healthcare or any other idea, would the TBI use this as a reason to tar as a violent extremist anyone who held the same beliefs?  Political violence, by its very nature, steps beyond the ordinary run of political discussion.

But there are pools and swamps of opinion in which people do swim before they commit atrocities. And it probably is worth trying to work out what it is there that leads someone towards violence. To do so, however, is a complex process, and we are all, to some extent, learning as we go along on. The list of arguments provided by the TBI shows how difficult this is.

For instance, there are indeed people who accuse all Muslims of terrible things, as laid out in the list. By doing so, they are clearly uttering an untruth, as well as showing an ugly, bigoted tendency to smear an entire group based on the practises of a small few. What, though, if someone were to point to the fact – which numerous reports including this one from the Muslim-run Quilliam Foundation have shown – that men of Muslim background are ‘over-represented’ (that is, compared to their proportion in the general population) in gang ‘grooming’ cases. And what if someone were to say that the authorities and the media have been involved in ‘covering up’ such crimes?

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The dark games played by political extremists

By Douglas Murray

To suggest that there had been a concerted, orchestrated cover-up which involved every portion of the state and media might sound like a wild exaggeration. It might sound deeply conspiratorial. But the problem is that it is not wholly untrue. It is only an exaggeration – in fact, we only know of the grooming gangs in Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, Oxfordshire and other places because some brave individuals from the political and media establishments broke ranks and reported these horrific stories.

Andrew Norfolk of The Times, for example, spent years chasing the Rotherham story, including speaking to many of the victims. He reported on this and subsequent cases in spite of people still (even then) attempting to charge him with ‘racism’ and ‘Islamophobia’ for reporting the story.

It’s problematic for the Blair assessment, too, that we know that there were cover-ups, and that these were duly exposed. In 2013, Alexis Jay was tasked by Rotherham’s council with looking into the crimes that had occurred there. Her report found that there had indeed been a systematic failure to address the cases when they had come out. And that the rape of children as young as 11 had been ignored by the local police and by the local council, among other authorities.

The Jay report – like Louise Casey’s which followed – found that a culture in which people feared accusations of racism was one of the reasons that these dreadful cases had been able to go on as long as they had. Likewise, there are reliable and verified reports going back a decade and half showing that the media and authorities have often cooperated to ‘pull’ reporting of such horrific stories, to allay other concerns.

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'Nazi hunts' are a sign of our hyperventilating times

By Douglas Murray

So here lies the problem with the Blair Institute’s claims. They seek to draw a line designating as ‘extreme’ some views which are also true. Given that the cover-ups have been proved – and officially registered – why should saying as much be cause to label someone as ‘far-right’ or linked to a mass murderer?

The answer appears to lie in the move from ‘some’ to ‘all’ and from ‘cases’ to ‘endemic’. It is true that some groups – including those which the TBI identifies – may be guilty of wild exaggeration. But all politics – and you may say all political debate – relies on a degree of exaggeration to make a point. The Institute might consult with its founder if it seeks any pertinent examples. And though most of us tire or are turned off by such exaggerations (generally realising in the process that the person in question cannot be trusted), it is some leap to say that an exaggeration should demand the intervention of the law.

Yet the TBI seems to think it should. It argues that depending on where various opinions sit on its scale of extremism, the groups it looks into ought to be ‘designated’ as ‘hate groups’. It calls for political leaders to, among other things, “Stop problematic groups and stem their narratives”. Suggestions for how to do this would include ensuring that ‘designated hate groups’ would be ‘impeded from appearing on media outlets or engaging with public institutions’. But all would not necessarily be lost for the groups in question. “Hate designation would be time-limited and automatically reviewed, conditioned on visible reform of the group.”

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Why should Boris trust Channel 4?

By Douglas Murray

Beneath the bland and unassuming presentation, this, and much else in the report, is in some ways extraordinary.  What is one to say of a situation in which government officials could designate and ban from all media – including state-run and privately-owned media – groups whose views and expressions they disapprove of, pending official investigation and evidence of that group’s realignment with views which are more acceptable? Such a plan would be authoritarian even if the groups in question were guilty of spreading constant and provable lies.

Yet the problem the TBI inadvertently highlights is that while everything these groups say may be unpleasant and ugly, not everything they say is false. Some of the things the Institute would have them banned for saying are true, or true in part.

Here is the test for a society, and indeed a test for independently-financed organisation like the one which produced this report. Where somebody is wrong, they should be shown to be wrong. Where they are wrong in part, they should be shown to be wrong in part. But, as with Islamist groups, asking the state to decide on such matters demands that the state be infallible in making such decisions. Drawing lines in these areas is hard. A fact that the Tony Blair Institute has perhaps unwittingly demonstrated.