Ep.77 - Muslims and the making of 'The Enemy Within' with Peter Oborne
It is fair to say that Muslims in Britain feel, when it comes to the political and journalistic class, we have few friends. Most politicians, even those that are elected in large Muslim areas are unwilling to act with fairness or represent our concerns. Instead, this establishment often foments naked animosity towards our faith, religious symbols and contributes to a hostile environment. The only consolation, we tell ourselves, is that things are worse in Europe. Yet we remain on edge, waiting for the next faux outrage that yet again maligns our community.
This episode’s guest, the journalist Peter Oborne stands out as one of the few defenders of our community in the mainstream press. Over the past two decades he has worked tirelessly to speak truth to power. He is currently a writer for the Middle East Eye and was named as British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013. Previously, he worked as the chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph until he resigned in 2015. His latest book is The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam, which takes a look at the often-opaque world of the Islamophobia industry. Importantly, Oborne is a conservative and until 2019 was a member of the Conservative Party until he resigned in disgust at Boris Johnson’s leadership.
In this interview, Peter provides a fascinating insiders perspective of how Islam has been deliberately fashioned to be the ‘enemy within’. I suspect many of you will find his analysis explains your lived experience since 9/11. Our conversation takes us to British conservatism, King Charles’ comments on Islam and how many young Muslims are looking to leave the UK, a trend I suspect that will only intensify over the coming decade.
Thanks to the team: Riaz Hassan, Musab Muhammad, Reem Walid, Adeel Alam, Yusra Zainuddin, Ahaz Atif and Umar Abdul Salam.
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This is a largely accurate clean verbatim transcript. Please refer to the original programme where incomplete or unclear.
Peter Oborne: It really breaks my heart. What you just told me. I didn't know that. But you can see, I do think that the atmosphere towards Muslims has changed.
Muhammad Jalal: I think it is fair to say Muslims in Britain feel when it comes to the political and journalistic class, we have few friends. Most politicians, even those who are elected in large Muslim areas are unwilling to act with fairness or represent our concerns.
Instead this establishment often forments naked animosity towards our faith and religious symbols and contributes to a hostile environment. The only consolation we tell ourselves is that things are worse in Europe. Yet we remain on edge waiting for the next faux outrage that yet again, maligns our community. My guest today, the journalist Peter Oborne stands out as one of the few defenders of our community in the mainstream press.
Over the past two decades, he has worked tirelessly to speak truth to power. He's currently a writer for the middle east eye and was named British press awards columnist of the year in 2013. His latest book is "The Fate of Abraham, Why the West is Wrong About Islam", which takes a look at the often opaque world of the Islamophobia industry.
Importantly Oborne is a conservative and until 2019 was a member of the Conservative Party until he resigned in disgust at the Boris Johnson leadership. I found this interview particularly fascinating. Peter provides an insider's perspective of how Islam has been deliberately fashioned to be the enemy within. I suspect many of you will find his analysis explains your lived experience since nine 11. Our conversation takes us to British conservatism, king Charles' comments on Islam and how many young Muslims are looking to leave the UK, a trend I suspect that will only intensify over the coming decade. I am your host Mohammed Jalal and this is The Thinking Muslim Podcast. Please do remember to subscribe on your favorite podcast app as well as on our YouTube channel. And do remember to leave a review. This helps us reach more listeners.
Peter Oborne, thank you for coming to my show, The Thinking Muslim. It's great to have you here with us.
Peter Oborne: Oh, it's a real pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me.
Muhammad Jalal: Peter, I've been looking forward to this discussion because I think you are a rare, maybe even unique example of the journalist in the mainstream media who has consistently called out politicians and and the political establishment on their positions towards Muslims and Islam.
I want to explore the growing Islamophobia in Britain and Europe. And I also want to take a look at the role of the British Conservative Party and the underlying motivations and ideologies of the modern party. You recently published a book, "The Fate of Abraham, Why the West is Wrong about Islam."
So let's maybe start here. What is it that the west gets wrong about the religion of Islam?
Peter Oborne: The west has got Islam wrong systematically. Sure Islam or Muslims to say perhaps more properly, has been wrong about the west as well, but you can trace a set of bogus, bigoted and violent ideas relating to Islam, right from the crusades. Pope Urban II sort of wrote Islamophobic sort of nonsense in the 11th century, right up to the Neo conservative tracts emerging from Washington in the end of the 20th and start of the 21st century is a very consistent, the same tropes, the same quite blinkered misunderstanding of the teachings of the Prophet and the nature of Islam.
Muhammad Jalal: Is it a misunderstanding of Islam? And when we think about the crusades and the way Islam was characterized and the more recent Neo conservative movement, can we put that down to ignorance a misunderstanding or is there a willful attitude to present Islam in the most extreme terms?
Peter Oborne: I would say that when it comes to sophisticated people who ought to know better, for instance, United States intelligence operatives, politicians, academics, and so forth, the same applies in Britain as well, that it has to be regarded as a willful issue because all of the facts are available. And one of the things I do in this book is to show how intellectuals and politicians and media set about constructing a false discourse or a discourse about Muslims and about Islam in the west, in the wake of nine 11, which was based on a series of deliberate misapprehensions about the teaching of the Prophet.
Muhammad Jalal: In your book, you make reference to a secretive home office unit that draws on cold war methods, along with a network of influential think tanks, some drawing on dubious American funding. Tell me about this network of Islamophobia you uncovered.
Peter Oborne: I really looked very hard at the response in Western capitals to 9 11. 9 11 was a blessing particularly for the United States, I think in the sense that you can shape, you can show how there is a kind of sympathy or common set of misapprehensions almost as if Al-Qaeda and the neocons needed each other.
They show the same false apprehension or false understanding of Islam as a violent religion. They show the same readiness to embrace violence and they show the same hostility to democratic or representative institutions and the rule of law. And they mirror each other on either side of the Atlantic or 6,000 year miles away in Afghanistan and New York.
And actually Islam or which is to say nine 11 came to the rescue of the United States, which had really been bereft after the fall of the Soviet union in 1990, because they needed an enemy. And nine 11 was curiously foreshadowed by the Huntington thesis about clash of civilizations in which he said that Islam had bloody borders and predicted a great a set of wars or struggles between Islam and the west representing two countervailing on opposite forces. And of course, nine 11 came along and gave every excuse for the United States to go to war.
Now, the central argument of my book actually is that as I think most people who have a, an understanding of this subject is that actually there's much more in common between the three great monotheistic religions than we have against each other, that was not the analysis taken by the think tanks and the politicians and the officials and the media in the west.
They set out to categorize stigmatize and turn Islam in the west into the enemy within. Now this was, they very self-consciously modeled themselves and they went back to the year, early years after 1945 and the emergence of the cold war when Western intellectuals and policy makers set out a structure, which in order to deal with what was a real menace, Soviet communism.
And they did that by say creating fake civil society movements and organizations, magazines, media, which while appearing to be socialist or pro on the left were actually run by a organs of the CIA or MI6 in Britain. And they created, they divided between good communists or i.e. Communists who were sympathetic to the United States and bad communists who had to be combated.
It led to this sort of a series of neurosis of which the most notorious of course is McCarthyism where any film producer or politician in the United States, who'd had any kind of sympathy on the left was stigmatized and persecuted and in some many cases driven out of the United States by the McCarthyites.
Muhammad Jalal: We know that there is now a state and a threat to, or a challenge to America that comes from a state China, rather than from non-state actors, like Al-Qaeda or ISIS, or a perceived threat from Islam. In your reading, do you think these think tanks and policy units have now moved beyond Islam, albeit with maybe a residue of Islamophobia persistent?
Peter Oborne: I think that's true in the United States and in fact, it was really interesting about a year or maybe two years ago, the Henry Jackson society, which was a keen Islamophobic organization suddenly started to publish a series of tracts and sort of policy, position papers denouncing China and identifying China as the new enemy, which took a lot of pressure off Muslims.
On the other hand in Europe, where Europe has been obliged to following follow that agenda, but nevertheless, the pressure on Muslims is increasing still, i, it may be more relaxed in the United States. We're seeing the emergence of quite some very attractive Muslim politicians. But in the states and Joe Biden is Is not much less inflammatory than Trump, but on the other hand in the Europe I think the things are getting darker and darker.
Just think of the French elections. Macron has adopted the rhetoric of the far right. And the policies in Britain, I see Truss as pushing through a whole series of almost of securitizing Islam or Muslims in a way which intensifies, what was already the situation. A and we see the think tanks, policy exchange, putting out position papers, a new security architecture an intensification of the prevent strategy.
And so in Europe, I'm very gloomy at the moment.
Muhammad Jalal: And why do you think that is? Is it just narrow electoral advantage? Islam is easy to win votes off.
Peter Oborne: Part of that is true. The part of this strategy of the conservative government and I don't, it is not conservative for member in a traditional way.
It's not it's actually a far right government, which has got the name conservative. It's actually in many ways a NeoCon government or a radical right government. The traditional conservatives have been, thinking of people like Ken Clark, the former chancellor, Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general and people like that.
They've been driven out of the party. And so it's been captured by the far right and or the extreme right. And that has consequences. They are determined to wage a series of culture wars. And we're already seeing this with the war on woke which is really again, inventing a series of imaginary enemies.
But one of those wars is too tempting for them, I think. Is that, is the, is that war on what you might say are politically active Muslims people who take Islam seriously, who try to bring it into public life. And I think what you are, I think what you can see, and there's been several articles by people connected to policy exchange, David Cameron being the most, the former prime minister being the most egregious in the piece in the times people connected with Henry Jackson society have been advocating a new regime towards Muslims.
And of course we're awaiting the Shawcross review long delayed and we're of the prevent strategy. And he is not gonna review it in the sense that, he's addressing its faults. So he seems to have made claim that he's just making it worse. And that's significant and troubling.
Muhammad Jalal: You talk about an attempt to conflate innocuous conservative, Islamic practice with extremism. How is this done and what lies behind this approach?
Peter Oborne: Yeah, I have a chapter or two on this subject. It's very insidious and it's involves the creation of a new kind of public language or discourse about Muslims.
I trace the invention or the reclassification or reinvention of certain words like one of them is extremism, which is applied to essentially to Muslims who celebrate Muslim characteristics. I use this very dangerous, I think dangerous anti-democratic word or phrase, I should say nonviolent extremism.
Now we all agree that violent extremism i.e. blowing people up, shooting them, terrorism is terrible. Everybody has a common duty to to combat that and denounce it, but non-violent extremism identifies language or clothing or just religious practices, which well, while not violent as somehow unacceptable itself.
So you are, they're bringing in a thought crime and or another way of putting it, which is, I think, which I'm still brooding on is that they are attacking religious liberty. Muslims have a, all people I'm not talking about Muslim, any, we all have a right to celebrate our religious or non-religious beliefs.
I'm an Anglican, we go to church. We, there are certain, we put on robes. We also have all kinds of traditions which are bound out with the state Catholics. There's no Catholic priests who are women, by the way, you don't read about that because nobody really wants to, no politician ever wants to offend the Catholic vote, but you can go after Muslims who have morays or customs, which do not fit well with modern, secular, liberal society. There are very safe target. So the concept of non-violent extremism has been invented. Then you have the concept of radicalization really interests me you know, when a modern white Western politician who wants to make herself or himself appear interesting so I'm a radical and that, and but on the other hand a radical Muslim is going to be put on a program of of surveillance and it may be criminalized.
Likewise, if you want to denounce a modern, a white politician, you say, oh, these people, he's he or she is moderate or rather a moderate fellow. whereas, if you wanna praise, within the public domain, a, Muslim, you call them moderate because the moderate Muslims are the good ones.
And, these double standards in public discourse, is a way of disenfranchising millions of our fellow citizens. You also feel that there have also been Muslims, politically active Muslims have also been cancelled long before the word cancel culture was invented. I go into this, these secret lists, which have existed in Whitehall to keep out very reasonable and public spirited figures from the public debate.
They still won't talk to the Muslim council of Britain. MEND, which is a civil society organization if there ever was one and they're constantly under attack from Whitehall. I look into the setting up of organizations on the model of the cold war when they were fighting communism, which are actually run or funded or authorized by the state, but masquerade as civil society organizations and so on.
And that is part of, to use a phrase actually adopted by Sayeeda Warsi who was still a member of the Conservative Party, I think and had to leave the Conservative, well left in protest against the attitude of the British government towards Gaza in 2014 called the enemy within.
Muhammad Jalal: How much of this is less political and more part of a broader, I don't know, project of liberalism to chasing religion. Islam is taken probably, and I may be wrong here, Peter, but it's Muslims are far more strict in their adherence to the faith over probably your average Anglican is.
Peter Oborne: There's no question that secular liberalism or coercive liberalism one might call it sees Islam as a target. And this explains one of difficulties which Muslims have in Britain today. On the far right, or even the, the moderate right to use moderate the far, the conservative right is often hostile to Islam as a proxy for racism, because they're so many Muslims in Britain who're immigrants or have brown skins.
And because racism is illegal anti-black or or anti-Asian racism is actually against the law, Islamophobia becomes a proxy, attacks on Muslims become a proxy. And that is on the bigotry of the far, far right now at the same time the Muslims in Britain have been fighting on another front.
They're not just open to attack by the conservative wings, by certain branches of conservatism, you also have progressive attacks. Christopher Hitchens was the commander in chief as it were. He got it going with his denunciations of of Muslims. And that was then followed by a string of others.
The Guardian, the Observer, papers, which you would've expected to have stood up for minorities actually have tended to join in these criticisms and I've studied this, I've written a long study of the press reporting of the Trojan horse affair, for instance, which as you probably know, is a complete fabrication start to finish.
But what was interesting, you don't just get the Murdoch Press the associated newspapers, the Telegraph. You also get the Guardian/Observer on the side of a state attack on a minority group, on Muslims in east Birmingham and that's, and there's virtually nobody who will stand up for them.
And when the New York times, shamingly for the British press, was the first attempt to have a look at what was going on. Of course they would enhance left, right and center, most of all by the Observer and I find that, and that is a problem, which and it is, I think that some secularists are against all religions, but the easiest target as where they're most likely to have allies, but easiest target is in the, on the liberal Islam, even though they against all religions and they'd love to have a bash at Catholicism too or Hinduism, or the whole lot because they, and they're that I think is quite authoritarian, ultimately it's and it's certainly unconservative.
Muhammad Jalal: I want you to elaborate on what you just said there about the journalistic class and how it often echoes the talking points of the political establishment. You used to be a journalist for the daily Telegraph until you resigned and in many ways it's a mouthpiece for the conservative establishment. How endemic is Islamophobia in journalism today and how does it work? Does it come from above an editorial line or is it woven into the culture of most mainstream organizations?
Peter Oborne: The answer to that is both. And so if you look at the most powerful media magnate in the Western world by far, Rupert Murdoch he, I think his, if you look at his record has made, he himself has made his Islamophobic comments.
He's made his views known. And if remember, he doesn't just control the the times which is notoriously he fabricates regularly fabricate stories about Muslims, as well as the sort of denunciations of people like Melanie Phillips, but also the Sunday times led the way very largely on the Trojan horse affair led the way on the weaponization of grooming gangs against Muslims.
That was terrible reporting and in lots of other cases and of course, Mr. Murdoch owns Fox news which is deranged organization with a nightmare Islamophobic agenda in the United States. So that comes from that clearly comes from the top. But I think it's also a culture whereby it's extremely easy to sell a story to a paper.
And that's what you are doing as a reporter. You need to get a byline. And if it's one which pillories Muslim so much the better. So there is a news desk culture whereby you can plant those stories much more easily, whereas It's much more difficult to sell a story, which puts Muslims not impossible, but very difficult to sell a story to a news desk, which puts Muslims in a positive light equally. They won't report, they won't correct full stories, Trojan Horse classic case in point when the case against the teachers fell down collapsed that was scarcely reported. When the various reports came out, which showed there hadn't been a conspiracy ignored very largely and so it's a very one sided and I've spent about much, quite a significant amount of time over the last 20 years and it goes into my book, exposing those full stories.
Muhammad Jalal: You've made reference here to Trojan horse affair, but one can read that as a multi-layered collusion. The judiciary, OFSTED, independent layers of the British establishment in a sense, colluded to deny a voice for these teachers. And for those who were calling out this letter to be a fake. Is it as pervasive, as bad going through that?
Peter Oborne: OFSTED was just pathetic. And so the, a few months before the attack was launched on Trojan Horse, OFSTED had given a glowing reviews to the Trojan Horse schools. Yeah. And and it changes it on a sixpence. And it was clearly, well, that the judgment one must make without having looked at the case of OFSTED really carefully is that they came under political pressure and they gave in. The judiciary at least the tribunal collapsed. I think in the end, it's hard to say the rule of law failed. It seems to have eventually worked.
I do think one thing greatly annoys me about it is the British media was a disaster. John Holmwood wrote a book quite shortly after the Trojan Horse Affair blew up, which proved beyond any question of doubt that the whole thing was a fabrication and I find it difficult, but it's true.
Not one review of that book appear in a British newspaper, a mainstream British newspaper. I think I'm right in saying you might have to check with him, he's never been invited on the BBC. One of the problems is the BBC is up to its neck in this. The BBC has the corrections program, which looks at the whole idea is look at false media narratives and exposed them. When the corrections program came to look at Trojan horse, A, they didn't interview, John Holmwood prepare and B they reinforced some of the Islamophobic narratives. They picked up some piece of what appears to be a piece of hearsay, which was never substantiated, put into the Telegraph by Andrew Gilligan, who is one of the most, who's published a number of stories he's had to retract about Muslims and they actually put it back into the public domain.
I wrote to the BBC and asked them to explain what was going on, got a completely unsatisfactory answer. And so it is not simply the militant, right wing, what you might call the militant Islamophobic right wing press, you have the the progressive press and you have mainstream media organizations and above all the BBC, all embarked on a common enterprise to misrepresent British Muslims.
Muhammad Jalal: And you were very critical, I remember of Tony Blair, especially over the Iraq war. And I think you wrote a book at the time about political lying and the way by which the the new political class actively lied as a means to misrepresent its agenda in the public eye. How did the Iraq war inform your thinking about how the Muslim community or at least Islam internationally was treated by the political and journalistic establishments?
Peter Oborne: For me personally, the Iraq war was a career turning point and a personal turning point because I head up to that moment, I was a very, I am a, I would still define myself as a Burkean conservative and actually much of my criticism of the current government and of the, sometimes of the labor positions comes from a position of Burkean conservatism, a defense of religious Liberty, a sort of a defense of multiculturalism and understanding that you don't have to enforce as the French revolution which did, which purgated so much and predicted would go wrong a kind of coercive single view on any matter. This sort of a kind of tolerance book allowed, which I think we are losing, but went wrong in the, when I came to examine the Iraq war, what you saw, there was a sort of dogmatic liberalism, a refusal to understand other points of view and among the promoters of the Gulf of the Iraq invasion, a kind of often a sort of empty, ignorant bigoted contempt for not just for Islam, but for brown people, for what other countries and the way they choose to run themselves.
And the British state had been complicity invasive. I find it very hard to believe that the British intelligence services have been party to fabricating false information about weapons of mass destruction to justify what was an illegal war. And after that I haven't been a pretty loyal, a loyal to British government's conservative journalist, I slowly set out on a different personal direction, and that is what has led, it eventually led to my, the book I published this year. It was why I set about making it. I did it quite consciously. I've got to re-examine everything I believe.
Let's turn to the Conservative Party and conservative
Muhammad Jalal: ideology now. Are you at risk of romanticizing past conservative thinking? The party, at least in my reading has always been quite reluctant to embrace multiculturalism and traditional conservatism believes in monocultural societies as a form of order. There is a strong strain of empire thinking within traditional conservatism in Burke was an imperialist.
Even there is a strain of cultural and possibly even ethnic superiority in early conservative thinking. And how much of this is embedded or enmeshed into the frame of thinking of conservatism regardless of its strand, if it's Neo conservatism or the more traditional one nation style conservatism.
Peter Oborne: I agree with some of what you've just said, but not all of it. Above all Neo conservatism is not the same as traditional conservatism as defined by Burke and rearticulated by Oakeshotte, who was the primary, the most distinguished conservative thinker, quite difficult to read in some parts is not as you describe it. It's key insight is that great projects, let's say the Iraq war are dangerous because of you can't predict or the French revolution are dangerous, but you can't predict however, virtuous your motives in going in and doing this, overthrowing the king of France or deposing Saddam Hussain, you can't predict the consequences.
It's a sort of humility, almost a religious sense that only God or Allah knows and if you, and therefore, since you haven't got the knowledge or wisdom to predict the the consequences of great public acts, the best you can do is to observe due process, minor things like being courteous to your friends, looking after the people around you who are sick or poor, telling the truth, you could make sure that you yourself tell the truth.
Whereas this is a critique of the progressive left that they, the progressive left sees. Hence Iraq, Iraq was a left wing project, really. And somehow man has got such a virtue and wisdom that he can embark on a great project and turn Iraq, which is oppressed by this villainous authoritarian figure dictator, Saddam, and turn it into a benign democratic society.
That and because that vision is so virtuous, you are in justified to make it happen in lying, cheating, torturing, killing, et cetera, because the end justifies the means. And that's a left wing analysis story. The right wing analysis is the opposite. That's one answer to your question. Although I say right wing the conservative analysis. The other answer, it's a much more complicated answer to the conservatives association with imperialism, which of course exists. And of course there were terrible crimes committed under imperialism. Empire is the opposite in many ways of nationalism. There was a really good essay published two months ago in a conservative website, I don't know if you've come across, I never met him before [inaudible] Rashid, he makes this rather brilliant point to my way of thinking. The late queen and her conceptions of empire and later Commonwealth were the opposite of nationalism. And actually the queen was the, British monarchy was the great prophylactic against Enoch Powell's vein of English nationalism.
And this was be because, and there was a kind of very generous inclusivity about empire. This doesn't just apply to the British empire would also apply to the Ottoman empire, the ability, the wish and the desire to, and the acceptance of minorities, of different religions races, all living on an equal basis.
Hence the British nationality act of 1948, which give Commonwealth members the equal rights of British citizen. As British citizens, we do have an nationalist, something quite close and dangerously close to a nationalist government now in Britain under Truss which is why she and Johnson were although they pretended to be fond of the Queen, Johnson lied to the queen, remember and Truss is now trying to exploit the monarchy, the new king by going on his tour of the nations with him and so on. Weaponizing the monarchy for political purposes. It won't survive if they, if that is allowed to happen. Is that a coherent answer I hope?
Muhammad Jalal: It's a very coherent answer. Yes and I am interested in how you represent Liz Truss. I know Boris Johnson cynically used Islam and Muslims as a means to stoke his culture wars. But you wrote recently in your middle east eye piece that Truss presides over a virulently Islamophobic party and contributes to that effort.
How much do you believe she has bought into this narrative? Or is this a phase that the party will, would inevitably move beyond now that they've seen the back of Boris Johnson or have they seen the back of Boris Johnson? That's another question.
Peter Oborne: I think we can be certain that Truss is herself entirely empty. She has been an anti monarchist. Now she claims to be a monarchist. She was pro-European now she's anti-European, she was the Den now she's Tory. What you see here is a, not unusual is a purely, a pure opportunist, and she's hiked us in order to become Tory leader. She has formed this, and I don't know how, where you would be this very dark deal with the European reform group it's called, or is it the European research group?
The ERG a militant group of far right Tory bat benches and she went to meet them a and she convinced them that she offered the best hope for the for their agenda. And that's how she won the Tory leadership and that's how she became prime minister. So she's hiked herself into a very far right.
And I think people might criticize that term far right? The conservative party has become something else. It is not the pragmatic British conservative party, which we, which governed Britain in many ways for 200 years, it's become a narrow factional English party hostile to the idea of Britain.
It may be that she can mutate since she is ideologically ultimately empty. She may conclude, but she, the way she can win the next election is by abandoning these people who pull her in a, and returning to a more expansive version of Britishness, which traditionally the conservative party has represented.
I of course, hope that she will do that. Nationalism historically, is the enemy of minorities, it tends to do there are terrible examples. The generosity of a British identity was very friendly towards immigrant groups of whom the largest group in this country is Muslims.
All immigrant groups, the queen welcome hence I think she did that meeting with Paddington bear. It makes me cry when I think of it, even let alone watch it. There she is welcoming this pet migrant, this penniless migrant who comes to Britain a and, he says, thank you, mom, for everything.
It's very special that moment. And the queen was magnificent. She was very skillful. She was a great woman. She knew how to communicate messages, very softly and not intervene in politics. But what that said, the British monarchy welcomes migrants, refugees.
Muhammad Jalal: I would like to talk about the British monarchy, but before I do just on the subject of Truss and the current Conservative Party, there is a paradox here, the current contemporary conservative party is the most diverse party probably in British politics. The four major great offices of state are occupied by non-white men. The last leadership campaign was conspicuous I think in the sheer number of non-white candidates. Doesn't this reflect a more tolerant, conservative party in your eyes?
Peter Oborne: It's a very complicated question because let's look at the agenda of the conservative party over the once the Royal funeral is over. The first big thing is Rwanda that it sounds will be intensified.
Muhammad Jalal: This is the home office policy of sending asylum seekers to process fair claims in Rwanda.
Peter Oborne: Yeah, it looks like it's an illegal policy, right? Now in order to make that it, it looks very much under human rights or that policy to send the refugees perhaps is a better way to Rwanda, to be processed in camps. I know [inaudible] European court, the human rights act, the European convention of human rights.
So we'd have to do it. We'd have to pull out the European convention of human rights, which was set up in the immediate aftermath of world war II. As we learned the lessons we helped to draft it we'd learned about fascism. It protects, it's a guard against torture. It protects actually private property a conservative idea, it protects Liberty. Meanwhile, the government is under, according to, I think, a very important article in the Guardian this week, it's being accused of having two categories of citizenship. One for white Britons, you might say, one for people who've come in more recently. Very powerful allegations, which I haven't fully studied, but you can see there's an attack on British citizenship for all.
Then we have the short cross report, which I talked about earlier into Muslims and the intensified what looks like being the intensification of a program of surveillance of Muslim citizens and so forth. Now this is the most right wing government Britain has probably ever had and it's the most hostile to immigrants.
And it's, this has been going on for some time, certainly since Boris Johnson became prime minister and it is true and it's something we of course, should welcome that we have the most diverse cabinet in history. As you say with three or the four offices of state all being non-white.
But I have to say that I've listened and watched the rhetoric of particularly Braverman in which she very explicitly says that majority, that democracy trumps rights.
Muhammad Jalal: So this is Suella Braverman, who is the new home secretary of Indian origin.
Peter Oborne: The will of the majority is more important than the rights of the minority. That is quite explicitly what she says.
Muhammad Jalal: There was an announcement made a couple of days ago, I read that for government, is no longer going to pursue its plans to reverse or to remove the human rights act and Dominic Rob who flirted with the idea of leaving the European convention and human rights I think that's now the thing of the past.
Peter Oborne: No. I'm, that's much too optimistic that proposal of a bill of rights. Yeah of amending, to amend the human rights act, they have dropped that. Yes. But if they're gonna go ahead with Rwanda they're I think they may attack the whole of the human rights act.
Yeah, no, I will not nearly, they can't do Rwanda without moving out of the ECHR. Now it is a, it'll be a moment, but at the don't you are overinterpreting in my opinion, it's only an opinion.
Muhammad Jalal: But then how much of the Rwanda policy was really for the public, for journalists and less about the actual policy of moving, removing migrants to to be processed in Rwanda?
Peter Oborne: It wasn't just for it wasn't for journalists at all. It was for it was aimed at conservative voters who don't like immigrants or let's be absolutely... don't like refugees, the people who would've voted for Nigel Farage who's running. Oh, no, no, no, that's what that, was clearly who they know journalists obviously are needed as mediators in order to pass on the welcome news that Britons are going to be stripped of their rights.
But this is a frightening government. Now I do think that we let's see how Liz Truss emerges from the next couple of weeks, because it will have been a learning process for her. Maybe the queen gave her some words of advice before she died two days later. She may well have dropped some pearls of wisdom in her ear, but as things stand, this is a terrifying government.
And it's terrifying in particular to minority groups, if you are a member of a white majority, you are probably all right. I don't criticize Suella Braverman, I welcome the fact that an somebody of a recent, I think it's first she's second generation immigrant is she has rose risen to the eminence of being at the home office.
But I think her policies are disgusting. Un-British above all. Their nationalistic policies which target vulnerable people and that is the most Un-British thing you can imagine. It's disgusting, it's a betrayal where everything we stand for as a country, it's a betrayal of those who fought Nazism and in world war II, it's a betrayal of the Conservative Party, she should be ashamed of herself.
Muhammad Jalal: So Peter, do you think then that the Conservative Party now is irreparably moved beyond your type of conservatism? With Rory Stewart and Ken Clark and Dominic Grieve and Hammond and others now out of the party, they lost the whip back in 2019. And the party's almost been purged of its one nation and traditional members. And it, it seems now to have a momentum in favor of what you would call a Neo conservative strand. Where do we now see a home for your type of conservative ideas, Peter?
Peter Oborne: I think that I think the current we've had it with the current conservative party, the best hope is that it's voted out of office.
It is heading off in the direction of, it is waging a war against the rule of law. That's what it's doing. You people throw around the word fascism. I think that's previous, but what it is doing is attacking the institutions of the British state and waging and hostile to the rule of law.
Now that is really not, those are not conservative ideas at all. They have to be thought politically are the only party which can get rid of them is Keir Starmer, it's Labour. I have all sorts of reservations about Starmer, you've gotta in this, in these very dangerous circumstances, I think you'd have to support Starmer who is not nearly outspoken enough on these issues, by the way.
Muhammad Jalal: Let's move on and talk about your thoughts on King Charles. You recently wrote a piece with my friend Imran Mulla and you argued that he is the most Islamophile King Britain has probably ever seen citing his very positive remarks and sympathetic remarks towards Islam. Tell me more about king Charles and his perspectives on Islam and wherever you feel this will impact the current Conservative policy towards Islam?
Peter Oborne: I must say, Imran Mulla, it was his idea, that piece and I think it illuminated me enormously trying to write it because it showed how longstanding the prince of Wales, now King interest in Islam was and how real, actually Mehreen Khan in response to the pieces, who's the financial times, economics correspondent recalled he went to her university 10 years ago and it became clear to her that he knew in her words far more about Sufism, it's not just a public show, far more about Sufism than she did. So it is a real, real intense engagement with all kinds of strands of Islam, obviously he has travelled widely and been criticized for it across the Gulf, but he's also engaged with Sufism, Traditionalism, and it's part of and he defends Islam as being part of the British tradition and not as the current government does with these, the constantly invidiously marginalizing our Muslim citizens. So it's his knowledge and his sympathy, which sets him off really, doesn't differentiate him from his late mother, although I don't think she ever got interested, she's more interested in horses, whereas I think that girls has a genuine intellectual interest in Islam, but it's, it is remarkable therefore that we have a king who, who comes into.. Do Kings enter office? What do they do? Who ascends the throne with that kind of background.
Muhammad Jalal: I wonder, certainly there's been a lot of discussion in the Muslim community about Kings Charles and there been a number of videos and your article has been doing rounds on WhatsApp, in various groups, that's really positive, but can I suggest that maybe, I suspect, king Charles does have a sincere approach towards Islam and it's a longstanding reading of Islam and religion in general, but are we in danger of decontextualizing his otherwise positive comments? Since the Arab Spring began in 2011, he's held something like 95 meetings with eight pretty repressive Arab monarchies and has played a key role in promoting UK arms exports, according to one figure, I read 14.5 billion pounds of UK arms exports have been done since the Arab Spring.
These regimes are notorious in their attitude towards the Muslim masses and many of them do not accept dissent and do not take dissent very kindly. How do we square that circle? How do we place king Charles, as someone who has a love for study and the study of Islam and Sufism but King Charles as a soft power actor on behalf of the British state.
Peter Oborne: By the way, I completely agree with your analysis of what's happened since the Arab Spring, the Western, not just Britain, of course, the Western alliances with a series of dictators, repressing, generally speaking legitimate strands of political Islam with the aid and abetted by the British state. Catherine Mayer in her biography of the Prince published and I think then prints published in 2016, revealed that he was refusing anymore to get involved in arms deals. That's been confirmed also in another authorized book by Robert Jobson about the King published three years ago. And this happened apparently reportedly in 2015.
By the way, I'm relying on other sources, not me, I haven't... which was the eve of the criminal, the Saudi attack on Yemen and the BAE systems, which is quoted in quite a lot of the articles against Charles. And I think the British involvement in the Iraq, sorry in the Yemen i business is shocking and terrible actually and one of the worst episodes in our entire history. I'm not defending his entire record, I can see that he was used as an instrument of soft power, but I can also see that as a man of deep, he does agonize about things, he's very visible, you can just see his face and you can see how much he does. He's obviously thought about it and thought that's wrong.
Muhammad Jalal: That was Prince Charles as a prince. Now he's the monarch, his political opinions will be less strident possibly. He effectively said that in, in his speech and it is I think most commentators now suggest that he's going to be less animated about some of these causes. I wonder whether, even if he does have a sympathy towards Islam, the constitutional monarchy means that he's really going to have to stay silent about what many would describe as and what you would describe as an extremely problematic British state policy towards the Arab and Muslim world.
Peter Oborne: If you just go through the things that Charles believes in which the current government doesn't, but he believes in the union of the nations in practice, the government. Truss and Johnson praised the union, but in practice, they were undermining it all the time and then you look at the environment. Charles has been incredibly farsighted and on his record of campaigning on environmental issues and being public about it. And whereas Truss, the first thing she'd done is reintroduce fracking. And the second thing she did was to give this huge lollipop to the energy companies and so clearly there's going to be a major, he's gonna disagree with the government on all sorts of diff and Islam, again, we're gonna see what looks to me like a series of coercive measures against Islam or Muslims that is to say in the next few months at some stage. And there are other issues as well. I don't think Charles will be a talking on the Rwanda plan. Now he does have, and he's been warned and actually the monarchy in this country is not a democratic institution. He got he's inherited his post, he hasn't been elected to it and so there's very little, and probably nothing he can say publicly. He's entitled according to the constitutional textbooks, think of Badgett privately to warn and I'm sure as he did print Charles against the Iraq war report, as one reads in the books but he not much more than that, he can set a tone, it'll be a, Charles will have to learn how to to stand up for these issues against what I think is a nationalist English government.
Muhammad Jalal: I want to turn to one final question and you've been very generous with your time, Peter, and thank you for staying the course with me. As a British Muslim, I've noticed that many young Muslims are now looking to move away from Britain. It's probably not as, as stark as it is in Europe, in France, there is an exodus of North Africans, Muslims who feel persecuted by the state, but there is a sizeable minority, let's say of young Muslims who wish to live a life elsewhere, whether it's in another European state or more likely in a Muslim state.
I was in Turkey for a number of months last year and I found that there was a substantial trickle of families who are now moving to Istanbul from London and these are second, third generation Muslims, they're not migrants, but they've decided to start a new life in Istanbul.
There's a question in there somewhere, but what's your feeling about that? Do you find that a justifiable move or response to what you've been writing about for the last two decades? A very anti Muslim environment. Yeah.
Peter Oborne: I can certainly see why people, Muslims are moving out of France. With the out of Britain, it really upsets me by the way, I'm very interested and I might write about it, perhaps we should talk about this subject. You can see the reason for it, the Britain was and this is one of the things that Queen personally represented, a multicultural society, we celebrated multiculturalism. That was the British settlement and what we have seen and Brexit has been part of it, is a move towards a rejection of multiculturals and actually it was happening before Brexit, the David Cameron speech.
Muhammad Jalal: Yeah. Muscular liberalism.
Peter Oborne: Yeah and he was captured really by the American think tanks I think that maybe you remember, he started off as Tory leader though, going to live with a Muslim family and saying how much we had to learn from Islam, but then he seemed to change his mind. It, it really breaks my heart, what you've just told me. I didn't know that.
But you can see, I do think that the atmosphere towards Muslims, think of the Prevent strategy, has changed.
Muhammad Jalal: And I would say by the way, Prevent is the one policy that has resonated in the Muslim community. And those people I spoke to in Istanbul, they all cited prevent as one major reason why they just didn't feel comfortable in Britain.
Peter Oborne: And I tell you what, we must write a piece, I must write a piece about this. Yeah, I think it's so we, when we stay in touch on this..
Muhammad Jalal: Please..
Peter Oborne: Yeah and let's let's write a major piece. But I hope, look there's a struggle ahead. This particular government has got at most, we has to have called an election by January 2025 at the latest. A lot is going to happen before then and I hope that Britain does not turn into a sort of homogenous of ethnic state too fast and we have to start, we must resist this and it is a major campaign. I hope that Labour can be convinced to come out against the Prevent strategy. I haven't seen it doing so so far. Have you?
Muhammad Jalal: No, I haven't. If anything, Angela Rayner made that really horrible statement about shooting first and then asking questions later when it comes to terrorism or terrorist suspects which really didn't play very well in the Muslim community. I don’t know, maybe it's a cynic in me, but the feeling after Corbin, regardless of his politics and where he stands, the feeling after Corbin is that the Labour Party shares much of the, maybe not the virulent Islamophobia, but much of the the tendencies of, especially when it comes to securitization, those policies of the conservatives are shared probably by the current Labour Party.
Peter Oborne: Yeah. The defeat of Corbinism has got all kinds of consequences and it may just be a, Starman judges that as he seeks to get rid of this conservative government, he got to make certain compromises or concessions to a right wing opinion.
Muhammad Jalal: Yeah. That's a worry, I think for lots of Muslims and maybe as a final point, I think certainly writing about what I think is a substantial move. I think it's really mainly amongst younger Muslims who are now looking to move beyond the UK and maybe that's just part of life and they want to work elsewhere but my anecdotal discussions with them, they would cite policies like Prevent and an agenda where they feel their lives of themselves and their kids, and they no longer feel comfortable even in communities like Luton or Waltham Forest, where there are large numbers of Muslims, there is a feeling that the hand of the state is on our shoulders.
Peter Oborne: It really, it's very upsetting and it's very profound what you're just saying and let's hope we can change the atmosphere back.
Muhammad Jalal: Peter Oborne, thank you for your time today. It's really been a fascinating discussion and quite a wide range in discussion. I really appreciate your time with us today.
Peter Oborne: Thank you very much, indeed. I really enjoyed talking to you and let's talk again and remember to keep, let's talk again about and write something about the way that Muslims are being driven out of Britain by Prevent and other anti Muslim measures.