The Labour Government’s decision to recognise the state of Palestine is a triumph of sentimental, gesture-politics over tough-minded realism. It is an exercise in virtue signalling which will not deliver a single truckload of aid or bring peace any closer or enhance democracy in the region. But the move also smacks of epic hypocrisy. The quest for Palestinian nationhood has become the most cherished cause on the left, yet the same progressives who work themselves into a frenzy of indignation about the creation of this new state treat British nationhood as a matter of supreme indifference. They pore over the details of potential borders in the desert, but care nothing about Britain’s own borders.
They denounce Israeli settlements on disputed territories but welcome the demographic transformation of British society through an unceasing flood of new arrivals. In their narrative, Palestinians who challenge Israeli expansion are heroic freedom fighters, whereas native Britons who challenge unprecedented levels of immigration are a bunch of knuckle-dragging bigots. In the same way, left-wing campaigners eagerly embrace the symbols of Palestinian identity, like the Keffiyeh scarf but view emblems of Englishness, like the flag of St George, with profound suspicion.
One activist claimed in a radical newspaper that waving the red cross of St George “is shorthand for celebrating a country with a bloody and racist history”.
That miserable attitude is in stark contrast to the joyful explosion of national pride that greeted the victory of the England women’s football team in the European Championship, epitomised by the huge crowds that gathered in central London on Tuesday to cheer the winners.
The undiluted mood of national pride was captured by several of the heroines, like our outstanding goalkeeper Hannah Hampton, who declared, “we’ve got English blood in us”, and Chloe Kelly who said she was “so proud to be English”.
But if Kelly or Hampton had used such language in another setting, say on a university campus or in a town hall meeting, they could have been the target of complaints from professional grievance-mongers, accompanied by demands for police action.
And beyond the left’s hostility to English identity, the women’s achievement exposed another fissure in modern Britain.
The England win was rightly hailed as a tremendous advance for equality, yet women’s rights in Britain are now under sustained assault from misogyny imported from other cultures.
In the very week the team lifted the trophy an advertisement appeared on an official Government website for a Sharia administrator to be employed on £23,500-a-year at a mosque in Greater Manchester. Defenders of this advert argued that the post was privately funded, but why on earth is our government facilitating the acceptance of Sharia in Britain?
The fundamental principle of equal treatment under the law is collapsing due to the creeping Islamification of Britain fuelled by multi-cultural dogma and mass immigration, with the result that women are increasingly treated as oppressed, second-class citizens.
That disturbing process can be seen not just in the establishment of Sharia tribunals and the informal toleration of polygamy, but also in medieval Islamic dress codes, sectarian identity politics, the surge in domestic violence and the pressure for a new blasphemy law in the name of cracking down on Islamophobia.
This sort of dissonance is all too common in our country, which is why faith in our traditional institutions and parties is plummeting. Our whole system of governance is riddled with contradictions and double standards.
The Cabinet promises to do “whatever it takes” to defend Ukraine, yet fails to defend Britain’s own streets from knife crime and gang warfare, while illegal migration across the Channel continues to soar.
Ministers bang on about protecting the environment, yet preside over filthy rivers and widespread destruction of the countryside. Taxes have never been higher or standards of public services lower.
The Government preaches fiscal restraint while dragging the country towards bankruptcy. Supporters of the woke agenda proclaim their compassion, but their policies have created border anarchy, immunity for grooming gangs, and a breakdown in social cohesion.
The tragic farce of national decline is embodied in officialdom’s favourite slogan “diversity is our strength”. How hollow those words sound. What we see around us is not the strength of diversity but the speed of disintegration.