Islamists and the woke Left are uniting to topple the West

A new force is emerging in our politics. It’s not the “far-Right populism” that so many seem to fear. Quite the opposite. And the first step to getting to grips with it is to describe it honestly.

Some see the attempt to cancel Nigel Farage at this week’s National Conservatism conference in Brussels as EU globalists cracking down on dissent. I don’t think that’s quite right. No doubt there’s little love for free speech in the EU institutions. But it has to be acknowledged that Alexander De Croo, the Belgian prime minister, spoke against the ban and a top Belgian court eventually overturned it. No, the real pressure seems to have come from elsewhere.

The threat, real or imaginary, from far-Left “anti fascist” demonstrators seems to have played a part. But Emir Kir, the local mayor, justified his ban more on classic woke grounds: the supposed threat from nationalists and conservatives opposed to gay marriage and abortion. Yet Kir himself isn’t particularly woke, more of a machine politician backed by migrant votes. In 2019 he controversially accused the Belgian government on Saudi TV of behaving like Nazis for targeting Muslims in a security crackdown. Kir’s cherry on the top of this was a meeting in 2020 with members of the MHP, a half far-Right half Islamist Turkish nationalist party, which finally saw him kicked out of the Belgian Socialists.

Where else have we seen this interweaving of far-Leftism, Islamism, and wokeism? Not so much in Davos. Much more on the streets of London protesting about Gaza.

For if you look at those anti-Israel demonstrations, you see just those three elements. First, the convinced Muslims – whether just orthodox, fundamentalist, or genuinely extreme. Second, the old Leftists – communists, Socialist Workers, and the like. And finally, the fashionable supporters of woke causes, LGBT rights campaigners, identity politics believers. However unlikely it is that LGBT campaigners would be warmly received in Gaza, all show solidarity in their cause.

I think this new mix of ideologies explains why so many people, in my experience, are not just critical of these intimidating marches but actually unnerved by them. They sense something different, something sinister, in British politics.

I also suspect it is why Lee Anderson’s ill-phrased comments last month about London mayor Sadiq Khan still struck a chord with so many. He was of course wrong to claim that Sadiq Khan was under the control of Islamists. But those who reasonably enough noted that it would have been fairer to criticise the mayor for being too woke still showed a kind of false consciousness in seeing woke causes and Islamist politics as pure opposites. On the streets, they have been allies not opponents.

Far-Leftists and Islamists have learnt to work together. In France this phenomenon even has a name – Islamo-gauchisme, Islamo-Leftism. But those groups are on the political margins. The key to the breakout to the mainstream that we are seeing is the outreach to “woke” opinion, now the common currency of much of the centre-Left. And these unlikely bedfellows can work together because they share a common view of society.

All these activists see society as based on group rights: a regressive form of essentially communal politics where people view their rights as deriving from their class or group status, whether race, religion, economic status, sexual identity, or even just opinion. They believe that society is driven not by productive collaboration between individuals, but by zero-sum conflict between groups to get on top, a fight in which there is no room for tolerance or free expression of opinion.

Because this is so obviously unhistorical, they want to reset the present day as year zero, so they can create a fantasy view of the past as simply about repression of minority groups by the rulers. For some, the ruling class is rich white men or simply “whiteness” or Christian or Western values; for others it is capitalists, big business, and neoliberals; and for others it still is, and always has been, Jews. That’s why criticism of Israel, a successful Western country based on freedom and free markets, has been the perfect cause to bring them all together in public. But it won’t stop at Israel. It’s aimed at all of us.

The first step to fighting this fundamentally anti-Western communalist movement is to recognise that it exists. The second is to vigorously police our laws against intimidation and harassment and in favour of free speech. The third is to deprive it of its institutional purchase: repeal the Equality Act, remove all ability to recruit or promote people by category rather than as individuals, refuse attempts to rewrite our history, to change names, topple statues, or suggest that Britain has always been “diverse”. The fourth is to kick out of the Conservative Party anyone who isn’t comfortable with this.

And the fifth? That’s for the Labour Party. Are mainstream social democrats going to keep giving house room to communalism and sectarianism, sniggering as the Labour front bench did this week when they heard about the NatCon ban? Or are they going to see it as what it really is: fundamentally anti-tradition, anti-Western, anti-civilisation, and inimical to their aims, too? I’m not holding my breath.