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Immigration ‘powder keg’, violence, and the suppression of free expression: Just what is going on in the UK?

Published

4 months ago

10 minute read

Douglas Murray at the Theatre Antoine in Paris on June 3, 2024.  (Geoffroy Van Dew Hasselt via Getty Images)

News release from The Free Press

Our Friend Douglas Murray

We know that nothing will stop our columnist from truth-telling. The more they try to intimidate him, the more they prove him right.

Douglas Murray is not just a Free Press columnist with a love of poetry and rhetoric. He has also emerged over the past decade as one of the most important and articulate defenders of the West—and, especially since the massacres of October 7, one of the most fearless.

If you haven’t read his best-selling books—including The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam—now would be a good time to purchase hard copies. Because if certain authorities in Britain have their way, we suspect they’ll be titles that might be harder to find.

To understand why this is the case, we need to go back two weeks. The story begins in Southport, a small town in the northwest of the country, when, on July 29, a 17-year-old named Axel Rudakubana allegedly murdered three girls—ages 6, 7, and 9—in a Taylor Swift–themed dance class. Many others were critically injured.

The alleged perpetrator was neither Muslim nor an immigrant; his parents immigrated from Rwanda. But none of that mattered to the thugs who attacked the local mosque based on the rumor that he was both. In Belfast and Bristol and in towns across the UK, mobs gathered to variously harass migrant centers, attack mosques, and burn police vehicles.

These working-class rioters catalyzed others. The counter mobs were composed of Muslim men, some wielding hammers and knives, who were spoiling for a fight.

It’s very clear who started this: the brutes who went hunting for migrants and Muslims. But the violent breakdown is not a two-week-old story, but a tragedy years in the making and one with many authors. Namely, it is the story of a governing class that offered few answers as immigration took off and ignored a population that, at every turn, voted against it.

Almost everyone ignored that powder keg primed to explode because the price of noticing it was to be called a racist and a xenophobe.

Don’t take our word for it. Listen to what Nadhim Zahawi—who fled Saddam’s death squads as a boy only to become Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer—wrote last week in our pages.

The warning signs have been present for years, but for every person who tried to tip-toe through the minefield of topics pertinent to this disorder—society, culture, religion, disenfranchisement, racism, the speed of change, feelings of powerlessness—there were ten more who wanted to bury their heads in the sand. Even I, a brown man born in a Muslim country, feel the need to caveat what I say, and hide behind facets of my identity such as the color of my skin (facets that I largely consider unimportant) just to pass comment on things of importance to my country.

Almost everyone buried their heads in the sand. Almost everyone, that is, except Douglas Murray.

For years now, Murray has been one of the voices warning of what might happen in Britain with poorly controlled, exploding immigration; an obvious lack of assimilation; and a police force that appears more worried about violating multicultural pieties than enforcing the law. He has also warned about the cost of suppressing, rather than debating, difficult subjects.

You would think that now would be a good time to heed his advice. To look carefully at how this happened. To impose law and order. To assure those citizens who are convinced that their country has adopted a two-tiered justice system that justice remains blind—meted out equally, irrespective of the religion or ethnicity of the perpetrator. That is how things are meant to go in liberal democracies.

But the United Kingdom, which lacks a First Amendment equivalent, has opted for a different strategy: a campaign of suppression that includes criminal charges for speech.

On Thursday, a 55-year-old woman named Bernadette Spofforth was arrested “on suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred” and “false communications” after she spread the false rumor that the man who killed three girls in Southport was an asylum seeker.

Spofforth is just one example of how the United Kingdom is prioritizing jailing its people for social media posts rather than addressing the causes of the violence. The director of public prosecutions of England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson, said this week that even retweeting a post “which is insulting or abusive, which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred” makes one liable for arrest.

Worse yet, in the same interview, Parkinson spoke about “dedicated police officers who are scouring social media. Their job is to look for this material and then follow up with identification, arrests, and so forth.”

Police officers are authorized to show up at your door for comments on a Facebook page based on a law prohibiting “incitement of racial hatred.” The chief of London’s Metropolitan Police has even suggested that the UK might try to extradite American citizens suspected of violating UK’s hate speech legislation. This is the same police, mind you, that prevented a Jewish Londoner from crossing the street during a Gaza protest, and threatened him with arrest, because his “openly Jewish” appearance was deemed a provocation to the violent mob. The police, in other words, incapable of keeping the peace during an anti-Israel protest, turned looking Jewish into “incitement.”

Last week, the British government issued a warning on X: “Think before you post.” The embedded post reminds Britons that “content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful—it can be illegal.”

Which brings us back to Douglas Murray. It’s not just that his past warnings have gone unheeded. It’s that they are being viewed as incitement to violence rather than as prophecy.

On Friday, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spokesman and former director of communications for the Labour Party, posted a clip of Murray with the following caption:

“Think @metpoliceuk might want to take a look at this book plug.”

Read that twice.

That is a powerful journalist and former spin doctor with more than a million followers on X calling for Murray to be investigated by the police for discussing the ways in which his 2017 book foretold the current violence in the UK. Campbell, the flack that he is, knew just what he was doing, and has succeeded in stirring up others.

You need not agree with Murray on this subject or any other to be alarmed by this turn. But that point seems to be lost on Britain’s commentariat, who are all too relaxed about their country’s speech crackdown. One senior Guardian journalist egged the authorities on, arguing that Elon Musk should face criminal prosecution for tweeting about the disorder in the UK.

As for us? We’re honored to publish Murray’s fabulously popular “Things Worth Remembering” column, which celebrates freedom as well as the beauty of the English literary tradition. Nobody we know embodies the credo articulated almost 400 years ago by John Milton: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

Our columnist—who has reported from Ukraine and Gaza and Israel in the past year—understands that the fight over free speech is, as much as any literal battlefield, at the core not only of Britain’s future but that of the West.

We know that nothing will stop Douglas Murray from truth-telling. The more they try to silence and intimidate him, the more they prove him right.

To read all of Douglas’s columns click here.

And to support our mission of independent journalism, become a Free Press subscriber today:

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That is what happens when “science” isn’t science at all and energy reality is ignored in favor of the prevailing narratives of the political left.

As Congress struggled with yet another chaotic episode of negotiations over another catastrophic continuing resolution, all I could think was how wonderful it would be for everyone if they just shut the government down and brought an end to the Biden administration and its incredibly braindead and destructive energy-policy farce a month early.

What a blessing it would be for the country if President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were forced to stop “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” 30 days ahead of schedule. What a merry Christmas we could have if we never had to hear silly talking points based on pseudoscience from the likes of Biden’s climate policy adviser John Podesta or Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm or Biden himself (read, as always, from his ever-present TelePrompTer) again!

What a shame it has been that the rest of us have been forced to take such unserious people seriously for the last four years solely because they had assumed power over the rest of us. As Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead spent decades singing: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

Speaking of Granholm, she put the perfect coda to this administration’s seemingly endless series of policy scams this week by playing cynical political games with what was advertised as a serious study. It was ostensibly a study so vitally important that it mandated the suspension of permitting for one of the country’s great growth industries while we breathlessly awaited its publication for most of a year.

That, of course, was the Department of Energy’s (DOE) study related to the economic and environmental impacts of continued growth of the U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) export industry. We were told in January by both Granholm and Biden that the need to conduct this study was so urgent, that it was entirely necessary to suspend permitting for new LNG export infrastructure until it was completed.

The grand plan was transparent: implement the “pause” based on a highly suspect LNG emissions draft study by researchers at Cornell University, and then publish an impactful DOE study that could be used by a President Kamala Harris to implement a permanent ban on new export facilities. It no doubt seemed foolproof at the Biden White House, but schemes like this never turn out to be anywhere near that.

First, the scientific basis for implementing the pause to begin with fell apart when the authors of the draft Cornell study were forced to radically lower their emissions estimates in the final product published in September.

And then, the DOE study findings turned out to be a mixed bag proving no real danger in allowing the industry to resume its growth path.

Faced with a completed study whose findings essentially amount to a big bag of nothing, Granholm decided she could not simply publish it and let it stand on its own merits. Instead, someone at DOE decided it would be a great idea to leak a three-page letter to the New York Times 24 hours before publication of the study in an obvious attempt to punch up the findings.

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There can be little doubt that this reality would have held little sway in a Kamala Harris presidency. Granholm’s and Podesta’s talking points would have almost certainly resulted in making the permitting “pause” a permanent feature of U.S. energy policy. That is what happens when “science” isn’t science at all and energy reality is ignored in favor of the prevailing narratives of the political left.

What a blessing it would have been to put an end to this form of policy madness a month ahead of time. January 20 surely cannot come soon enough.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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Canada among NATO members that could face penalties for lack of military spending

Published on December 21, 2024

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Trump should insist on these measures and order that unless they are carried out the United States will not participate in NATO. If Canada is allowed entry to the Brussels headquarters, then United States representatives would stay out.

Steps Trump Could Take To Get NATO Free Riders Off America’s Back

In thinking about NATO, one has to ask: “How stupid do they think we are?”

The “they,” of course, are many of the other NATO members, and the answer is they think we are as stupid as we have been for the last quarter century. As President-elect Donald Trump observed in his NBC interview, NATO “takes advantage of the U.S.”

Canada is among the “they.” In November, The Economist reported that Canada spends about 1.3% of GDP on defense. The ridiculously low NATO minimum is 2%. Not to worry, though, Premier Justin Trudeau promises Canada will hit 2% — by 2032.

A quarter of NATO’s 32 members fall short of the 2% minimum. The con goes like this: We are short now, but we will get there eventually. Trust us, wink, wink.

The United States has put up with this nonsense from some members since the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is how stupid we have been.

Trump once threatened to pull the United States out of NATO, then he suggested the United States might not come to the defense of a NATO member like Canada. Naturally, free-riding NATO members grumbled.

In another context, former Army Lt. Gen. Russell Honore famously outlined the first step in how the United States should approach NATO: Don’t get stuck on stupid.

NATO is a coalition of mutual defense. Members who contribute little to the mutual defense are useless. Any country not spending its 2% of GDP on defense by mid-year 2025 should see its membership suspended immediately.

What does suspended mean? Consequences. Its military should not be permitted to participate in any NATO planning or exercises. And its offices at NATO headquarters and all other NATO facilities should be shuttered and its citizens banned until such time as their membership returns to good standing. And, of course, the famous Article V assuring mutual defense would be suspended.

Further, Trump should insist on these measures and order that unless they are carried out the United States will not participate in NATO. If Canada is allowed entry to the Brussels headquarters, then United States representatives would stay out.

Nor should he stop there. The 2% threshold would be fine in a world at peace with no enemies lurking. That does not describe the world today. Trump should declare the threshold for avoiding membership suspension will be 2.5% in 2026 and 3% by 2028 – not 2030 as some suggest.

The purpose is not to destroy NATO, but to force NATO to be relevant. America needs strong defense partners who pull their weight, not defense welfare queens. If NATO’s members cannot abide by these terms, then it is time to move on and let NATO go the way of the League of Nations.

Trump may need to take the lead in creating a new coalition of those willing to defend Western values. As he did in rewriting the former U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, it may be time to replace a defective arrangement with a much better one.

This still leaves the problem of free riders. Take Belgium, for example, another security free rider. Suppose a new defense coalition arises including the United States and Poland and others bordering Russia. Hiding behind the coalition’s protection, Belgium could just quit all defense spending to focus on making chocolates.

This won’t do. The members of the new defense coalition must also agree to impose a tariff regime on the security free riders to help pay for the defense provided.

The best solution is for NATO to rise to our mutual security challenges. If NATO can’t do this, then other arrangements will be needed. But it is time to move on from stupid.

J.D. Foster is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.

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