Scottish politics appears trivial to me now. I find
myself uninterested. Perhaps I will get my interest back. Ordinary life, after
all, goes on and must go on. But the events of the past week have shaken me. Some
people have responded with the usual clichés and the usual complacency. Some
have been determined not to do anything, not to overreact. Some have been more
concerned about demonstrating how nice and kind they are. I’m uninterested in
all those things. I’m interested in understanding the problem and then finding
a solution.
It is purely a matter of chance, or else the
excellence of our security services, that it wasn’t a British city that was
attacked last week. We have been attacked before, it is highly likely that we
will be attacked again. Such an attack will probably happen in one of the big
English cities, but it could equally well happen in Glasgow or even Aberdeen.
Who can tell? If the French president says that his country is at war, then
realistically so are we. We must respond accordingly.
Morally I believe we have a duty to fight evil. Even
if our country had not been threatened by Germany in 1939 at some point we
would have had a duty to fight against people who were acting barbarously
towards others. It is not always practically possible to overcome regimes which
are acting in ways that are monstrous. But where we can, we have a duty to do
so. War can be just and pacifism can be a means by which evil is allowed to
flourish.
The West has made a series of strategic blunders in
the Middle East over the past 20-30 years. With hindsight secular dictatorship
was preferable to religious extremism. It was a mistake to support the removal
of Gaddafi, Mubarak, Assad and in the end it was a mistake to remove Saddam Hussein.
But were not all these dictators evil? No doubt they were, but what followed was
much worse. If you don’t believe me, you haven’t been following the news
recently.
So should we have left the whole region alone? It
would indeed be better to leave the whole region alone, than to make it worse. But
unfortunately the region will not leave us alone. Attacks on our cities will
not suddenly cease if we retreat, rather they will get worse. They are getting
worse. Who knows how many will be killed next time? Five hundred, a thousand?
If you are against action, at what point do you act?
The mistake that the West made in removing dictators
was not so much the removal of the dictators, but the failure to put anything in its
place. Imagine if after defeating Germany and Japan in 1945 we had simply left
them to get on with it. Would they now be the peaceful, prosperous societies we
see today? These countries are as they are because we conquered them and then
ruled them for years afterwards. We turned them into democrats. If we are to
defeat evil in the Middle East we must do likewise. If we are not to finish
the job, it would be better not to start at all.
How is it that we could defeat Germany and Japan in
1945 and turn them into model countries, yet we have a record of failure in the
Middle East? The answer is obvious. We don’t fight as we did in 1945. The media
watches every step we make, rebukes us whenever we make a mistake and treats
the whole event as something that they have to watch impartially. Meanwhile our
armed forces play with a rule book that guarantees defeat while the enemy
plays to no rules at all. We defeated formidable opponents like Germany and
Japan only because we could do whatever was necessary to win. We realised it
was a struggle for survival and fought accordingly. No less is required this
time. Not least it would be kinder to our opponents. If we had fought a little
more seriously in Iraq last time round and if we had ruled with a little more
authority, we might not be faced with a failed state today.
If there is the will, we can defeat evil in the Middle
East relatively easily. Our opponents are not nearly as formidable as the ones
we faced in 1939. But we need to put aside differences with countries like
Russia just like we did in 1941. Putting aside those differences may also help
solve conflicts elsewhere such as in Ukraine. Above all we must recognise that
bombing alone will not succeed. A
country cannot be occupied with bombers.
The people who threaten us are in Syria and Iraq,
but they are not only there. Unfortunately we have to recognise that some of
them live in our own country. Some of them sympathise with our enemies. We don’t
know who they are and we have no means of recognising them. But and this is
very important, I would like to emphasise that our enemies are not immigrants
and they are not Muslims.
Only a small proportion of Muslims in the modern
world sympathise wish ISIS or wish to fight a Jihad against the West. I don’t
know how large this proportion is. The faith of most Muslims in Britain is as
unconnected with Jihad as my Christianity is unconnected with the Spanish
Inquisition. I do not deny that that burning heretics was something that
Christians did, not least because they themselves believed themselves to be
Christians. But it has nothing to do with my faith. It was part of Christianity
at one time in history to act cruelly, but it is not at all how I understand
Christianity.
Faith is a precious thing to the person who has it.
It would have been awful for me to believe what I do about Christianity and see
others using Christianity to be cruel. Well then I can sympathise with devout
Muslims when they see their religion misused. This misuse is not their fault
and no more touches them than if I had been a Christian in Spain and had
disagreed with burning those who were called heretics.
Let us only fight those who are our enemies, let us
not criticise those who are our friends and fellow countrymen. Some people suggest
that we are up against a medieval interpretation of Islam. On the contrary, I
would far rather live in medieval Baghdad than medieval Edinburgh. In the
Middle Ages Baghdad would have been relatively tolerant. It would have been
clean, cultured and safe. The scholarship, the art and the culture there would
have been far superior to here. The problem is not a medieval interpretation so
much as a modern fanaticism.
The fanatics of the Spanish Inquisition were a
threat to ordinary decent Christians in Spain. In the same way modern Jihadis
are a threat to ordinary decent Muslims in Britain. We can all equally be in
the wrong place at the wrong time. The way to defeat our common enemy is to
come together. Just as in World War II we found a unity and a morale that
helped us defeat evil, so too now we must unite rather than divide.
I strongly suspect that British Muslims are, at
least in part, responsible for foiling many attacks that might have taken place
in the past years. They will, no doubt, continue to do so. Our safety in the UK
depends on everyone feeling equally a part of our country. It is perfectly
possible to have more than one identity. Someone can be proud of the country
where their ancestors came from and equally proud of the country where they are
now. Someone can be Jewish and British,
a Hindu and British and Muslim and British.
The great thing about the British identity is that
it is open to everyone. I know people whose grandparents came from Scotland who
still think of themselves as Scots though they were born and brought up in
England and they speak with an English accent. Likewise I know people who have
lived in Scotland all their lives who are continually reminded that they are
not Scots because they lack a Scottish accent. It is sometimes possible to be
accepted as Scot by committing oneself to Scottish nationalism, but for the
most part a Scottish identity depends on where you are born and where your
parents came from. I wish that this were not so, but it is.
My husband is in the process of obtaining a British
passport. When he does so, he will be a British Russian. That will be the only
identity open to him. He lacks Scottish vowels. The prefix British unites everyone who lives in the UK in a similar way that people in the United States can call
themselves Italian Americans, or African Americans. This common identity is
vital if a country is to remain united.
But here we have a problem. We are rightly encouraging
people whose ancestors came from elsewhere to think of themselves as Brits. We want them to share
this identity with all of us and to realise that we are all in this together. But at the
same time far too many British citizens deny the one thing that unites us all. In
the past twenty or more years Britain has become more and more divided. Too
many people think of themselves as English only, or Welsh only. Too many deny
that they are British. But it is only because we are both British that I have a
common identity with an Indian Sikh in London or a Pakistani Muslim in Birmingham.
If I deny this Britishness, what have I in common with them other than a shared
humanity?
We must stop squabbling amongst ourselves. We face a
struggle that may be as dangerous as the Second World War, which may be as long
as the Cold War. We must unite in our
United Kingdom. Above all we must not divide in the face of our common enemy.
We live in a multi-cultural Britain, where we are all equally Brits. If you can’t
quite bear living in the same country as English people, Welsh people and
Northern Irish people, how do you suppose you will be able to bear living in a
country with people from further afield? If you hate Brits and Britishness, you hate an awful lot of of your fellow citizens. You hate the one identity that ought to join you with them.
Our common citizenship, our
Britishness is the glue that holds us together. It will enable us to defeat our
present foe just as we have defeated all those that have come before. Don’t
make us come unstuck. We need everyone together in this fight.
