Enough

 I wake up once more to find that there has been a terrorist attack in Britain. It’s the second in a few days. Is it the third or the fourth this year? How many such attacks have taken place in Europe in the past two or three years? I’ve lost count. Events are unfolding. Perhaps I should say nothing. But now is not the time for silence. Now is the time for some clear thinking.

This is not acceptable. The timing of these attacks is not accidental. They are an attack on our democracy. I have no idea what is going to happen next with our election, but I know what should happen. We should keep on campaigning and we should hold it on June the 8th.

We must not accept these attacks as an inevitable part of modern life that we just have to get used to. We must do whatever it takes to stop them.

Do not try to justify terrorism. The people who hate us do not need any more justification than that they hate us.

It is vital that we start calling a thing what it is. It’s no good calling the same action terrorism if it happens in London or Manchester, but the actions of “militants” if it happens elsewhere in the world. The people who hate us have the same ideology whether the attack is in Syria, Iraq, Israel or France.

Don’t side with people who hate us. The battle is the same battle everywhere. The terrorist who blows himself up in Jerusalem agrees with the terrorist who blows himself up in Manchester. The cause is the same. If you agree with either you are part of the same problem.

We must invest more money in our armed forces and in our security services. The threat to the West is at least as great as the one we faced in the 1940s and during the Cold War. It is a different kind of threat, of course, but it must be treated just as seriously. It may require a combined and concerted effort by all countries which are threatened in order to defeat an ideology that wants to destroy our way of life.

In the 1940s our fight was against Nazism, during the Cold War our fight was against communism. Our fight was not against the populations living under these ideologies, but against those who believed in them. We must make the same distinction today. Ordinary Germans were victims of Nazism. More ordinary Muslims have been killed by radical Islam than anyone else in the world. We share the same cause then and the same enemy.

We must never support any form of terrorism. I don’t care what your cause is. I don’t care how just you think it is. If you blow yourself up or commit other acts of terrorism I oppose both you and your cause.  

Terrorism breeds terrorism and it’s getting worse. While in the 1970s terrorists would hijack planes, now they seek to blow them up mid-air.  Where once terrorist groups took hostages, now they cut their heads off on YouTube. There is an escalation of depravity. If we don’t stop this soon, who knows to what levels these people will stoop?   

At the moment the terrorists kill tens or hundreds and sometimes even thousands as was the case on 9/11. But in time they will want to kill still more than this. What if they used chemical or biological weapons? Could we stop such an attack? Can we stop one indefinitely if we keep on as we are?

The nature of our response must change. We cannot keep going through the same old sequence of lighting up buildings with a flag, making up sympathetic hash tags on Twitter. People who normally never pray are too quick to offer meaningless prayers for Manchester, London, Paris, Nice, Berlin or wherever next. We need no more shrines with cuddly toys, nor do we need pop concerts. Above all else we need no more virtue signally where everyone falls over themselves to demonstrate how caring and liberal they are. If we keep on responding in this way the problem will just continue and get worse. We need to act.

Above all this needs clear, logical thinking that is not clouded by the modern obsession of not telling the truth. Someone shouts “Allahu Akbar” and blows himself up and then everyone tells us that this has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. Sorry folks, this is self-evidently false. The terrorist may have a distorted view of Islam, he may be a perversion of Islam, but he thinks that he is acting in the name of Islam. Until and unless we tell the truth about a problem we have no means of solving it.

Ordinary Muslims however, do not follow this radical form of Islam. We must make a clear distinction. Ordinary Muslims who live peaceful lives going about their business causing no problems to anyone share a religion with the fanatics, but they don’t share an ideology. Germans who hated Nazism and Russians who hated Communism shared a nationality with the fanatics, but they didn’t share an ideology. They were as likely as not to be the victims of that ideology as anyone else.

I strongly suspect that Muslims in the UK have been responsible for thwarting more terrorist attacks in the past few years than everyone else put together. This makes them a crucial part of the solution. Islamic fanaticism is an attack on ordinary Muslims just as much as it is an attack on every other British citizen. We must find ways of identifying the fanatics and distinguishing them from everyone else.

The fight is against fanaticism. It isn’t a fight against religion and it isn’t against religious people. Moderate Muslims are no more likely to be terrorists than any other person. So let us invest in ways to identify those who hate us. When we have identified them let us do what is necessary to stop them making attacks.

We want to live in a free society where everyone is equal before the law and where we have rights. But there is a balance. I have a right to life. But it might be taken away if someone else is given the right to return to Britain after fighting for ISIS in Syria. Why should my right to life be compromised by his right to return because he has a British passport? We must make following Islamic fanaticism a crime that puts a person in prison for as long as he remains one. Islamic fanaticism must exclude a person from ordinary British life whether that fanatic at present lives here or elsewhere.

We believe that we have a duty to help unfortunate people in the world. But their right to asylum should be balanced with our right to live in safety. We should let no-one come to our country who is a threat to our safety and our way of life. We must therefore investigate each person who comes from a country where there is a prevalence of terrorist activity and attempt to determine if they are a risk or not. By all means let everyone come who can show that they are not a threat. But if they cannot, it would be far better to help them where they are than to potentially import someone who hates us.

It is necessary for the Government to introduce fair visa and asylum policies that put British security at the heart of the process. We must balance our right to live peacefully with someone else’s right to asylum and their right to travel here.

It is time to think clearly and to act. The problem is Islamic fanaticism, not Islam in general. We must make a clear distinction between the one and the other. In this way we can make our country safer for all its inhabitants.  In this way we can eventually wake up without having to worry about such headlines.

How Donald Trump could limit migration more fairly

Most people in modern Britain have little or no experience of visas. Either we don’t need a visa or else it’s straightforward to obtain one by spending a few minutes on a computer.  Most people don’t want to go to the places, like Russia or China, which require visas you have to send away for, but with a little trouble, expense and form filling it’s not that difficult to go to Moscow, Beijing or even Minsk. There are some places that are genuinely tough to visit. Bhutan in the Himalayas makes you pay a $250 tax per day just to go there. They have only relatively recently opened their country to the world at all. They don’t want to be overwhelmed by the modern world and its people. Still with a few exceptions if we have enough money we can visit almost any country in the world. Money opens doors.

What we frequently forget in Britain is that huge numbers of people in the world cannot travel where they please for the simple reason that they don’t have enough money to do so. It’s difficult if not impossible for all but the wealthiest Russians to come to the UK. In order to obtain a tourist visa to visit the UK you have to demonstrate that you have enough money to take care of yourself and stay in hotels for the duration of your stay. You have to show that you have a job and property in Russia and that it is likely that you will return. It is easier if you have a UK resident who can sponsor your trip, but the process of obtaining a visa is still expensive, time consuming and far from guaranteed. For the most part it is practically speaking impossible for the average Russian citizen to come to live and work in the UK unless they marry a Brit.

Are we then discriminating against Russians? Yes we are. Someone who was born in a part of the Soviet Union that is now Latvia has the right to live and work in the UK by virtue of Latvia being in the EU. Another person who was born a Soviet citizen doesn’t have that right. This might seem unfair, but this is the nature of the world. We don’t allow everyone from the world even to visit the UK because we think that if we did a proportion would overstay or in some other way abuse their visas  

We make a distinction between people from some countries who find it easy to visit Britain and people from other countries who find it hard or even impossible to visit. On what basis do we do this? Well generally we favour people from friendly nations and allies. We also favour people from countries with standards of living which are similar to ours. Few Japanese people would want to work illegally in the UK, but lots of Russians would. This is because the standard of living in Japan is similar to the UK, while in Russia it is much lower. The likelihood of someone abusing the visa granted to them is a key part of the calculation of whether the visa is granted or not.

We are then already discriminating against the vast majority of citizens in the world. Every Western country does the same. Unless you favour a world without borders, which is very noble of you, but not very practical, then it is necessary to accept that we have to limit the right of most people in the world to travel to the UK.  

The Conservative Party for some years has wished to limit immigration to the tens of thousands per year. One of the reasons why the British people voted to leave the EU is that it became obvious that the only way to limit immigration was to leave. You might disagree with attempts to limit immigration, but this in effect is to get rid of borders. Campaign for that if you will, but you will find that the majority disagree with you, not least because our health and welfare systems would collapse.

It is practically speaking much easier for someone from the First World to visit countries like the UK, Canada and the USA. Every First World country discriminates against people from other parts of the world. We also have for many years made it more difficult for people from some countries that are considered to be dangerous to come to here. It may be difficult for a Russian to gain a visa to travel to the UK, but it is still more difficult for someone from Afghanistan. We discriminate against the citizens of certain countries still more than we discriminate against others. There comes a point when practically speaking it is almost impossible for the average citizen of some countries to come here legally.

The principle of preventing people from one or more country travelling is not new. There are a number of countries that have travel bans against citizens of other countries. People from parts of West Africa were banned from travelling during the Ebola epidemic. Israeli citizens are banned from going to many countries.

In times of war it has sometimes been felt necessary to arrest citizens of other countries and intern them. No doubt this was unjust to many innocent people. But the fear of allowing a few spies to live at large meant that both the innocent and the guilty were punished.

We must accept then that the process of allowing people to visit our country involves discrimination. Why then has the action of the United States President caused such uproar? The reason is that Trump implemented his policy in the worst possible way.  

It was unjust to detain visa holders and people with Green cards. If you apply for such a visa and it has been granted then you should be allowed to proceed about your business unless there is a good reason to prevent you doing so.

There was no need whatsoever for Donald Trump to provide a blanket ban on travel for people from certain countries. All he needed to do was to advise the embassies in these countries that they should make it more difficult for people to obtain visas. We already accept the principle that it is more difficult for citizens of some countries to travel to the UK or the USA than certain other countries. The reason for this discrimination is based on the policies of the Government of each country. They don’t have to justify their reasons.

At various points in the past decades a US President has made it difficult if not impossible for citizens of Iran and Iraq to obtain visas to go the USA. The problem then with Trump is that we went about his attempt to limit the travel rights of people from various countries in a way that was arbitrary, unjust and contrary to the normal rules by which Western countries act.

The problem with Donald Trump is that he wants to shout from the roof tops something that would be far better to be implemented quietly and without fuss. He could have made it practically much more difficult for the vast majority of the citizens of the countries he wished to exclude simply by setting conditions for their visa applications that they would be unlikely to be able to fulfil. The United Kingdom already does this with regard to citizens of Russia and many other countries. The United States clearly would have the same right to do likewise. We are allowed to discriminate on the grounds of wealth. If this were not the case we could not even ask a visa applicant if they had enough money for their trip. All President Trump then needed to do was to set the financial requirement for obtaining a visa high enough that it would achieve the limitation he was looking for. This need not only have applied to countries from one region of the world, such as the Middle East but could have applied to a number of others. In this way there would be no question of discrimination apart from financial discrimination.

Trump’s blanket ban was foolish also because it did not take into account other circumstances. There ought to have been exceptions for people who were highly skilled and had job offers or university places. People with family members in the United States ought also to have been given preferential treatment.

It is not wrong to wish to limit immigration. It is also not wrong to wish to limit immigration from certain countries. If this were not the case it would be wrong for us to have visas at all. We are after all limiting the rights of Russians to come to Britain, while not limiting the rights of people from the Republic of Ireland. We accepted that it was right to limit the freedom of Germans in the UK in 1939, because we could not tell who was dangerous and who was not. For the same reason it is not unreasonable to limit the rights to travel of people who come from countries which at present are full of violence and terrorism. We cannot tell who is innocent and who is guilty.

But in trying to protect ourselves we ought not to behave in a way that is arbitrary and unjust. We should be open and we should also welcome people from all countries, cultures and faiths. But we do have the right to limit who can come. By setting the requirement for obtaining a visa high enough such that we favour those who can invest in the UK, have family members here, or are highly skilled we will be not be discriminating against anyone. The reason someone cannot obtain a visa will be objective. It will be because they do not meet the conditions we have chosen to set. In this way we will succeed in limiting immigration, while minimising the risks of allowing people to arrive here who may pose a threat to our security.

Donald Trump has a right to do what he thinks is necessary to protect the United States. We have the same right here in the UK. But the way in which this is done must not be perceived to be grounded in prejudice. A heightened level of security can be obtained without causing resentment and anger simply by quietly changing the rules by which visas are granted. Trump could have achieved exactly the same result without any demonstrations if he had just acted in a way that was more subtle and if he had thought through his actions more carefully. This unfortunately is not his nature.

It would be wrong to discriminate against people who follow the Russian Orthodox faith, but in practice we do make it very difficult for them to visit the UK. We do this because the UK doesn’t have very friendly relations with Russia and because Russians are poor. If a large number of Russian citizens came to Britain and poisoned our tea with polonium or carried out other terrorist acts we might make it still harder for Russians to travel here. We would be doing so however not because they were Orthodox, but because a proportion of Russian citizens were dangerous and we couldn’t tell who was innocent and who was guilty. There would be nothing unjust about making it much more difficult for Russians to obtain visas. Indeed it would be prudent.