The new moon over Edinburgh, 1st March 2015. (Source: New Crescent Society).

The issue of when to start Ramadan and when to have Eid has been a bone of contention as long as I’ve been Muslim and probably for much longer. I was made aware of it during my first Ramadan, as the group I was staying with fasted what seemed to be an extra day and went from Harlesden to Dalston to offer our Eid prayers in the Suleymaniye mosque instead of our local one. The issue was that some of the local mosques were basing their decision off calendars, while the Turkish-run mosque was waiting for the moon to be sighted before declaring Ramadan over. Over the past few years there has been an uneasy truce; some mosques, including the so-called major mosques, follow the sightings reported from Saudi Arabia while others waited for more reliable sightings, usually a day later, from anywhere east of the UK but usually South Africa (which is slightly more easterly than the UK but a lot further south than east). There is a communal effort, organised through the New Crescent Society, to sight the new moon in the UK and the old perception that the moon could not be reliably sighted in the UK has been overturned and with it the reliance on South African sightings. This year, however, a Deobandi organisation broke with this tradition by announcing the start of Ramadan the same day as the Saudis did, on the basis of a single sighting through binoculars against a welter of negative sightings from around the UK, and the mosques that followed them relayed it to their followers. This was a great surprise to a lot of us: why was Croydon mosque starting their fasting on Saturday, despite so many negative sightings?

Why is there this disunity? The simple answer is that Saudi Arabia persists in announcing the sighting of the moon when it cannot possibly have been sighted, and their sightings are routinely accompanied by negative sightings from the same region and sometimes from Saudi Arabia itself. The pattern seems to be that they announce a sighting on the first day on which a sighting was possible anywhere in the world. On one occasion, scientific data showed that the new moon might be visible, albeit only with a telescope, in one corner of South America and nowhere else, which Muslim observation bore out, but the Saudis still claimed a sighting. Every year, following these announcements, Muslim satellite TV relays it and Muslim social media is full of of Ramadan or Eid greetings, and without bothering to verify the claim, governments across the Arab world and “major mosques” in the diaspora announce that the new moon has been sighted and it’s Ramadan or it’s Eid. There’s a lot of social pressure which seems mean to resist. Ramadan mubarak. Eid mubarak. Until now, there’s been a group of Muslims, and a network of mosques, which insist on waiting for a reliable sighting to declare the new month. Originally they relied on sightings from easterly countries; more recently, they have moved towards sighting it here. Sometimes the two camps start or finish the same day, but usually not. As I recall, the last time this happened was 2007, when Ramadan coincided with September and everyone started and finished the same day. Broken clocks tell the right time twice a day.

This year, however, Wifaq al-Ulama, a Deobandi body, announced that the moon had been sighted last Friday evening, and thus Ramadan began last Saturday. We first learned of this when Croydon mosque in south London announced that Ramadan had begun; it took a couple of hours for the organisations to clarify why. It seems one of their sighting experts had travelled from his home in Bolton near Manchester to Hope Cove in Devon (not Cornwall as they claimed), some 300 miles further south, and there saw it in his binoculars. They posted a video of him standing in front of his binoculars (mounted on a tripod) and exclaiming “W’Allahi I saw it!”. When questioned about why a sighting only available through binoculars was valid all of a sudden, they informed us they had received a “new fatwa” from Darul-Uloom Karachi, which (or an English translation of which) a related group called ICOUK posted on their website. The questions were not included in this posting; when asking a question of a mufti, one is required to state the relevant facts as the answer might be different otherwise, and the facts here include that the UK’s Muslim community is not a purely Hanafi community but a mixed-madhhab community which, apart from those who simply followed the Saudi announcements, had settled on a method of sighting the moon with the naked eye and sharing the sightings. Wifaq al-Ulama and ICOUK now tell us that they aligned with this position previously because of partial reliance on the Moroccan moonsighting establishment which relies on naked-eye sightings in accordance with the Maliki madhhab; they are Hanafis, and their fiqh accepts sightings through optical aids. However, some of the Muslims in the UK, both converts and migrants from Africa and descendants of both, also follow Maliki fiqh. There are also people such as Somalis and some Arabs who are Shafi’i. This is a mixed community and always has been.

A major criticism of those who insist on traditional moon-sighting methods is that we are causing dissension, or fitnah; yet in the past ten years or so, much of the Muslim community had settled on reliable easterly sightings and then more recently on local naked-eye sightings. There really was no fitnah. In any case, the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) said in a hadith narrated by Abdullah bin Umar (radhi Allahu ‘anhu), “Allah will not let my Ummah unite on misguidance”, so a group of Muslims calling for a return to the Sunnah cannot be called fitnah unless they use undue force or disrupt Muslims celebrating Eid or whatever; Allah knows best. Much as it is not a fitnah for people to call for Muslims to revive any other Sunnah as long as we refrain from using derogatory language about people slow to respond, especially when they are not things that are compulsory, or things where there is disagreement on whether they are or not. For example, while encouraging the wearing of niqab, we don’t abuse women who refuse to wear it, or their husbands, as I have seen people do. I have seen a few unacceptable comments under the announcements on Facebook by ICOUK and Wifaq al-Ulama, suggesting they had “gone rogue” or been ‘bought’ by the Saudis, but for the most part those of us advocating sticking to the Sunnah on this matter have shown good manners and patience. But it’s a mystery why reviving this particular Sunnah is so controversial; maybe because it’s not as convenient in modern times as a fixed calendar. But Islam has never used fixed calendars.

Over the years I’ve developed a lot of respect for the Deobandis; they maintain some of the best Islamic teaching institutes in the western world and they have stood firm on the Sunnah over the years, including outward aspects of the Sunnah such as the beard, turban and hijab. Sometimes they are too harsh, with the result that ordinary Muslims think ill of other Muslims who have never heard of their scholars, but nonetheless, as a result of their initiatives we have access to reliable sources of halal meat and there are places in British towns and cities where people are unafraid to dress according to Islam. Still, their action last weekend let the community down; they acted as if they were the community rather than being part of one, and threw a long-standing effort to revive the Sunnah into disarray.

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Vishal Mehrotra

A couple of weeks ago I got a comment asking if one James Russell had applied for any job at Kesgrave Hall, a boarding school I attended from 1989 to 1993 (ages 12 to 16). Russell had been the focus of a BBC podcast investigating his links to the murder of a young boy, Vishal Mehrotra, who was abducted from Putney, south-west London, the day of the royal wedding in 1981 and subsequently found murdered in a wood near Midhurst, West Sussex. James Russell was part of a group of paedophiles who abused boys at a school near Horsham, Muntham House, which took boys with behavioural problems and/or troubled family backgrounds, many of them from Ealing, a borough in West London. In the podcast it was mentioned that he had applied for a job at a school in or near Maidstone, which may well have been the former Redhill school, a boys’ boarding school with a similar pupil base to Kesgrave and to which Kesgrave stood in self-conscious ideological opposition.

As to the question of whether Russell ever applied to work at Kesgrave, as a pupil I would not have known that even if it happened when I was there. We did not know who had applied; we only found out when someone started, much as we only found out someone was leaving when we came back from a holiday and they were not there anymore. Russell was not an ordinary care worker; he was a house parent at Muntham House and was studying to be a social worker. There was no such thing as a house parent at Kesgrave, but there was a head of care and for most of the 80s this job was held by Alan Kenworthy. It’s no credit to Kesgrave Hall’s management’s diligence in recruiting care workers (they did recruit some sexual abusers and, more generally, some downright thugs), but the job was probably taken. I asked someone I knew who worked in the Croydon education department in the 1980s whether they had used that school; they had. I didn’t ask why it wasn’t considered for me; in any other context, having heard about this school, I would have wanted to know why not as it was fairly close to home, but in this context, it appeared I may have had a lucky escape. (There were cases of sexual abuse at Kesgrave, but with one exception they were years before I started. I wasn’t one of the victims; most of the abuse during my time there was physical.)

A couple of weeks ago, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a series on the Paedophile Information Exchange, a “rights group” that operated in the 1970s and early 80s, which attached itself to civil liberties and gay rights groups and demanded the effective abolition of age of consent laws, claiming that adult/child sexual relationships were normal and healthy but also, through its magazine, offered personal ads through which paedophiles could hook up and manufacture opportunities to abuse children. Its members included Peter Righton, a major contributor to social work theory at the time who made his predilections clear in articles he wrote for social work publications. According to presenter Alex Renton (whose previous series was about sexual abuse at elite boarding schools), PIE’s fortunes waned after a campaign by Mary Whitehouse, a public morality campaigner, and was shut down in the early 1980s. It was noted that paedophiles who were powerful enough, including a senior diplomat, were investigated less eagerly and punished less severely than less powerful offenders.

However, the low status of the victims — boys from “broken homes” or with poor school records, often Black or Asian — also meant that police did not do much to protect them or to bring their abusers to justice. One of the victims of the Muntham House abuse told the BBC reporter that they had approached police and told them they were being abused, but were dismissed as “little coloured boys” and sent back. The police were incurious about potential links between the abusers and the murder of Vishal Mehrotra; they assumed that as “contact offenders” who abused boys in their care, they had no need to pick boys up from the streets, and thus ignored the links the men had to both the place Vishal was buried and to south-west London itself. Anything they could dismiss as coincidental or insignificant, they did. They knew that one of the abusers who had fled while on bail was in Sri Lanka, having travelled the world and taught in numerous countries in Asia and Africa, and the pensions department knew what address they were paying his pension to, but made no attempt to recapture him; he was finally deported as a visa overstayer after the BBC tracked him down. He died weeks later in Tonbridge.

Was PIE behind some of the incidents of institutional paedophilia in the early 1980s? Were any of the Muntham House abusers members? Were any of those jailed for such abuse at Kesgrave Hall, or any of the other schools they worked at around the UK, members? Did such abuse get less prevalent as time elapsed after PIE’s dissolution and the networks built up through it were disrupted by its members being arrested, or simply falling apart for other reasons? Renton’s radio series was based on his having obtained a copy of the organisation’s membership list; of those who were not famous or influential, where were they situated and did they have caring resonsibilities at the time? It is probably too late to make these connections now; it is more than 40 years on and many of those who were in such positions in the early 1980s are now very old or dead, even though the children from then are only middle-aged now. As one of the two journalists on the Vishal podcast lamented, looking for evidence now is like chasing ghosts. 

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Yesterday we heard that various minor British Muslim leaders had presented an ‘accord’ to the king that they had agreed with the leaders of British Judaism, including the Chief Rabbi, a major rabbi from Scotland, and leaders of other branches of Judaism such as Reform and Masorti; these are being called “a pathway away from playground bullying, toxic university campus culture, and rising discrimination faced by both faith groups amid a politically unstable world” according to the Jewish Chronicle. The ‘Muslim’ leaders included two representatives of the Ismaili community, which mainstream Islam regards as outside of Islam altogether. While the mainstream and Jewish media both trumpet the ‘unprecedented’ accords, signed after a year of negotiations and a three-day retreat at Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire, home of the dukes of Buccleugh and Queensberry and hosted by the current duke. The effort seems to have no website at all, however, and it took a while to find the accord online, but the Westminster Catholic diocese’s website has a PDF here.

Muslims and Jews do have a history of collaboration on matters we have in common as we both have book-based religions with actual laws; in terms of religious obligations, these include slaughtering without stunning and circumcision of boys, both of which as I have mentioned here before have vocal opposing lobbies in this country. Right now, neither of these things is under serious threat, however. The issue facing us now is that the majority of the religious Jewish community here, and its leadership, support the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives since October 2023, while the majority of Muslims stand with the people of Gaza. British Jews, including leaders of campus Jewish societies, have in fact fought for the Israeli army during this period. On previous occasions, Muslim leaders have been called upon to condemn terrorism unequivocally, with a few rushing to do so and being praised for “historic fatwas” that are in fact recognised only by their own flock and aimed at others across sectarian divides. There is none of that here; it’s a five-page document about setting up various joint committees accompanied by some boilerplate about shared values and concepts.

However, the Muslim ‘leaders’, many of them from the same communities who have been forthcoming with anti-terrorist fatwas in the past, should have made it clear that there were obligations on the Jewish side to even sit across the same table from them when the matter was nothing we have in common with them. These should have included admitting that the Israelis’ actions were genocide and condemning it outright; they should have included condemning any British Jew who went to Israel to serve it in the army while it was carrying out this genocide and both supporting their prosecution on return and dispensing with their services as chaplains. They should have included condemning the Jewish settlers who harass and abuse (and kill) Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, and the army who back them up — and again, any of their flock who go to Israel and assist in that. They should have included calling for Palestinians jailed for trivial acts of resistance, such as throwing stones at soldiers occupying their towns and villages, to be released, especially if they were children when arrested. They should have included condemnation of any abuses of Palestinian prisoners, such as torture or rape, known to be going on in Israel’s prisons. Finally, they should have been expected to condemn spurious accusations of antisemitism against people in the UK and other western countries who call out Israel’s atrocities, which has included even calling them that.

Without all of these things, there should have been no negotiations and certainly no ‘retreat’ at that Scottish castle. Doubtless an opportunity to hobnob with members of the upper class in a posh stately home in beautiful surroundings is a temptation, but that isn’t the only way to enjoy the scenery; you can just go with your family, or maybe arrange a conference or three-day study retreat or something similar. Sitting with men who cheer on the massacre of their brothers in Palestine, writing bland ‘accords’ with them about reconciliation and love of humanity, without expecting any moderation in their position, really does nothing for the Muslims here nor for our brothers and sisters there. It’s just a jolly and a lot of pointless talk.

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A 1980s TV detector van.

Late last month it was reported on Bloomberg (archived copy here) that the government were considering making it compulsory to pay the TV licence fee to watch streamed on-demand entertainment online from providers such as Netflix and Disney+. Until a few years ago, it was legal to watch BBC content after the fact on iPlayer; this was changed when the government realised that too many people were freeloading BBC content. The TV licensing website makes it clear that the licence fee, currently required to watch any live-streamed content from whatever provider (as opposed to on-demand content), is used to fund the BBC; people also pay for subscription to these other services as well as for the Internet access they use to access them. Over the last few years, I have seen many people announce on social media that they are boycotting the licence fee, and in the panic to ensure the future of the BBC, the government seem blind to why this is. The reason is BBC News and its increasingly obvious bias.

George Monbiot observed in the Guardian a while ago that the BBC tends to be biased in favour of the government of the day, and when Labour in power were generally favourable towards them and gave Tory criticisms short shrift; Roger Harrabin, a former BBC correspondent, observed that its coverage took a rightward turn in 2001, when Jeff Randall (formerly of the Sunday Telegraph) was appointed business editor. In the 1990s, when John Birt had just been appointed director-general, I recall an incident where the BBC advertised on Ceefax for people to contribute to a programme supporting the John Major government’s Child Support Agency: “surely it is just making sure parents pay for the upkeep of their children”, it opined. I was shocked; weren’t they supposed to be impartial? I noticed the bias in favour of the government quite distinctly when covering the austerity policies of the Coalition government; the BBC ran programmes on “benefit dependency” and attacking ‘scroungers’, while the word ‘sensible’ was used quite often to mean supporting their “deficit reduction” policies on air. Since the genocide in Gaza began, a resistance to using that word has been widely noticed, with presenters interrupting anyone who uses it, whether they be a caller to a local phone-in or an official interviewee on a news programme; the presenter will tell the interviewee and the listeners that Israel “has a right to defend itself” and denies that this is what is going on.

Over recent years, the BBC has developed an approach to balance that means that every point of view and every claim has to be countered. They have started peppering their documentary programming with statements from people or institutions being accused of malpractice. In one case, a File on 4 programme about abusive practices in British ballet schools, it seemed that the report was interrupted every few minutes to read out a statement which seemed to last several minutes each, in one case implying that a former student was lying. But more generally on the BBC, it seems to be the policy that everything has to be a debate, even when people are pleading to be able to live their lives. A heated debate is entertaining in a way that a more straightforward, calm documentary sometimes is not. Some of this twitchy, compulsive balancing may stem from fear of litigation; the UK’s Victorian libel laws favour the plaintiff, requiring the defendant to prove the truth of their claims rather than the plaintiff to prove their untruth, something the government should make a priority to reverse. But, as Roger Harrabin noted, the BBC is “generally susceptible to bullying through attrition”, with certain lobby groups (he mentioned the HS2 company) being able to make life difficult for the Corporation’s editors, who “simply [don’t] have the time to deal with it”.

Sometimes complaints of bias come from people who actually want the news to be biased in their favour and to give opposing views to theirs the contempt they believe they deserve. There are several whole organisations dedicated to demanding ‘accuracy’ in coverage of the situation in Palestine, both in the media and in academia, which are actually Israeli lobby fronts. Some of these are also notorious for mass complaint campaigns, some of which are mistaken for being representative of widespread outrage at their coverage. Some people have a conspiracy mindset and would regard anything that fell outside it as representative of one of the conspiracies they believe in. That said, sometimes ‘objectivity’ means someone’s own subjectivity, and if enough powerful people hold the same view, a news outlet can fall into bias in favour of the views of the powerful and privileged. I have heard feminists say “objectivity is male subjectivity”, and the same could be said of ‘objectivity’ as dictated by middle-class white people, or any number of other privileged groups. In my experience, a lot of those who see the BBC as biased see it as promoting a pro-establishment and pro-British (and pro-western) view of the world, where British and American power is seen as a force for good; many people who are not white do not share this view, because this has not been their experience.

While it’s right that people who use infrastructure such as TV transmission facilities and the Internet should pay for them, it’s not right that people who do not watch BBC TV and do not feel well-served by BBC News (or who have no interest in other BBC programming) should have to pay for it just to watch programmes streamed live or on demand on other channels which they do separately pay for. I do watch a lot of BBC programming, including on iPlayer, local radio and Radio 4, but I find the subservience to the demands of Israel’s supporters nauseating: that Israel’s actions in Gaza are genocide are obvious enough from their own words and deeds not to merit countering every time a member of the public, who pays the licence fee, states it. For many people I know, this issue alone has made withdrawing the licence fee a more urgent matter than it previously was. If the government wants us to willingly pay, they need to redress the often obvious pro-government bias and get rid of the Tory hirelings that maintain this policy.

Image source: Mike Peel, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike UK licence, version 2.0.

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Classified documents found during a search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in Florida (Source: Wikipedia)

Since Donald Trump won a second term as US president last year and, with the help of Elon Musk, set about slashing the American federal government and sacking officials on the basis of personal enmity, I have seen columnists and social media personalities associated with the Democrats pick over why Kamala Harris, the former vice president, failed so spectacularly in her bid to succeed Joe Biden last year. One of the people I follow on X (Twitter) is Brianna Wu, previously best known for her contribution to the “GamerGate” controversy of the mid-2010s, who has distinguished herself by cheering on Israel during its genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, stridently denying that the onslaught is genocide, insisting it’s all Hamas’s fault, parroting any atrocity propaganda she finds being spewed out by pro-Israel fanatics while studiously ignoring ample evidence of actual atrocities by violent fanatics both in the West Bank and in Gaza, and accusing anyone who protests against the genocide of being an antisemite, a Hamas supporter or both. The other day she shared a Substack piece by Matthew Yglesias which tore into Biden’s record and his decision-making, including his decisions up until he stepped aside, opining that “Biden alienated an entire cohort of young people, along with many of the leaders of the most important companies in America” while failing to mention Gaza, Israel or Palestine anywhere.

Wu, who is a trans woman, puts Harris’s loss squarely down to the liberal entanglement with the transgender community. Until fairly recently, Americans knew about transsexuals, people who went through a medical and surgical process to change from one sex to a semblance of the other, and for the most part were OK with them. The new transgender movement requires people to accept novel claims, such as that the sex binary is a “social construct”; moreover, it requires them to accept that someone’s gender is however they identify, regardless of physical facts. Someone who “identifies as a woman” is a woman, even if they are in fact an intact male; anyone who denies this is accused of transphobia. Somebody can be ‘transgender’ and have no intention of changing their body surgically, and the new “free gender” ideology holds that this person is no less a woman than one who was born female and has gone through the normal life experiences of a woman. These notions have become the accepted doctrine of much of the Left in the UK since about 2010, even though they were unheard of outside of a few small communities before then — in other words, the last time we had a semblance of progressive government in the UK. This has certainly turned many people away from the Left, but they were also issues in the US in past elections where Democrats won.

The numbers aren’t as stark as they appeared in the weeks following the election, where it seemed that Trump’s vote tally had fallen compared to 2020 (when he lost) and Kamala Harris had polled tens of millions of votes fewer than Biden had. Trump’s tally increased by just over 3 million; Harris’s fell, compared to Biden’s, by well over 6.2 million. This was not against a run-of-the mill Republican but a convicted felon whose presidency was chaotic, marked by continual changes in his cabinet as he fell out with one appointee after another, and who allowed a cult to be built up around him (which arose out of the flattery that was needed to make him look presidential when in fact he is graceless, incompetent and out of his depth) and whose followers attempted a violent coup when they lost the previous election. People were elated when Biden won, and when this coup was defeated and he was confirmed as president, and believed they had put the Trump nightmare behind them. How, then, did he manage to return to the White House just four years later?

What no mainstream white Democrat seems to be admitting is that the complicity of their party with the Gaza genocide is a large part of what alienated those young voters Matthew Yglesias referred to. The party has always relied on persuading a large number of idealistic, often young, left-wing voters to “hold their nose” while voting for a less than ideal (in their view) Democratic candidate: Biden or Clinton as opposed to Bernie Sanders, say. By and large, these voters are often pro-Palestinian, regardless of their religion (or lack thereof), and have become more so as they have become more and more aware of the increasingly oppressive nature of the occupation. There are also, of course, Arab and Muslim voters who largely switched to the Democrats after being kicked in the teeth by the Bush administration after 9/11. When Israel responded to the October 2023 attacks (which they claimed, and the western media accepted without question, as a massacre of 1,200 civilians and supposedly the biggest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, though the death toll is disputed, as are the numbers of casualties who were civilians as opposed to soldiers, and the details of how some of the deaths occurred) with an onslaught against Gaza’s civilian population, Democratic politicians at federal, state and local levels proclaimed that these actions were self-defence, that this was war and the casualties were “collateral damage”, regardless of both Israeli rhetoric that clearly indicated that the intent was genocide and the very obvious targeting of hospitals, schools, homes and actual civilians. Congress continued to approve billions of dollars of military aid to Israel while protests on campus were branded antisemitic and participants sometimes suspended or expelled.

The party, in short, threw its moral compass into the ocean, and did so eagerly. Two wrongs don’t make a right and one atrocity does not justify another; “but 7th October” ceased to be an excuse after a while. When faced with a choice of voting between two candidates who both supported whatever Israel would do and would write them a blank cheque, millions of voters could not justify voting for either, hence the 2.7% drop in turnout compared to 2020. The fact that Harris is a woman, or Biden’s senility and poor decisions, or the intransigence of sections of the trans community do not account for Harris losing so badly against such a dreadful opponent; the Biden administration’s decision to stand four-square behind one of the most viciously racist regimes in the world as it pummelled a long-suffering civilian population for more than a year, at the time of the election, better accounts for the drastic drop in both turnout and the Democrats’ share of it. It remains to be seen whether party strategists and their allied blogs and media will ever face up to their failure.

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An aerial view of Stansted Airport

This week the Labour government announced that it supported the plan to expand Heathrow airport with a third runway as well as to build the East Thames crossing, an additional road tunnel (or two) between Essex and Kent, east of London. The former in particular had been shelved by the former Tory government which had originally supported it, as a result of the contraction of air travel during the Covid pandemic. However, they’re both insane, wasteful, destructive projects which will cause huge amounts of disruption for years to come, and in the case of Heathrow, be bad for the planet at a time when the climate is already starting to collapse faster than the forecasts of 20 years ago said it would. George Monbiot tackles the issue in today’s Guardian; he accuses the new government of behaving like Liz Truss when she was PM, using insults such as “time-wasting nimbys”. In opposition, Starmer congratulated climate campaigners who won a legal victory against Heathrow’s expansion, proclaiming that “there is no more important challenge than the climate emergency” in a tweet from February 2020. Today, his chancellor Rachel Reeves tells us that growth trumps other things.

The air travel lobby has been pushing hard for the expansion of Heathrow for decades; they tell us we risk losing out to Paris, Amsterdam or Frankfurt because our sole hub airport is at full capacity. The upshot, they tell us, is that planes are circulating in the air waiting for a runway slot, producing more pollution, and a third runway will enable them to land more quickly. That sounds convincing, until you hear the government telling us that this is all about growth. The way growth works is that flights will increase, until that new runway is full to capacity as well and the owners will be demanding more of west London to bulldoze for yet another new runway (Heathrow’s own website tells us that the plans make way for another 260,000 flights annually). We do have other airports, of course, notably Stansted which is in the middle of the countryside with fairly good road links which are not full of local traffic as a result of being within, or right on the edge of, a big city. The region around London has three other airports with a full-size runway each; two of these overwhelmingly offer flights to Europe, while Heathrow largely offers long-haul flights. Connecting these up better would enable people to fly into Heathrow, take a train to Luton and then another plane to a smaller European destination while Heathrow concentrated on the long haul flights; right now there is no direct link between any of London’s airports except between Gatwick and Luton. But really, we should not be building opportunities for more air travel when the planet needs us to be flying a lot less.

Having worked in air cargo, I know that the cargo infrastructure there is bursting at the seams; it long ago outgrew the actual cargo area inside the airport estate, much of it now being based outside it on the Stanwell Road. Facilities are miserly, with two toilets between all the truck drivers, some of whom (at least before Brexit) had travelled from Europe. Much of the cargo that formerly went on passenger planes out of Heathrow is now going on dedicated cargo planes from Stansted (where facilities for drivers are equally dire, though waiting times are usually much shorter). The new runway would be located over part of the M25, with other local roads ripped up or rerouted; that stretch of the M25 is the widest (six lanes each way) and probably busiest with local traffic, airport traffic and long-distance traffic all in competition. The western route around London is preferred by some drivers as it avoids the toll at the Dartford crossing on the other side; the government has no plans to remove this. The expansion will require the destruction of an entire village (Longford) and large parts of other neighbouring villages, such as Colnbrook, Harmondsworth and Sipson, and the new flight paths will blight other areas currently unaffected by aircraft noise, such as Harlington, Cranford and Heston; some of these areas also contain a lot of airport-related industries, such as hotels and distribution depots. Two main roads will have to be rerouted, with the new arrangement providing a short cut across Colnbrook between the M25 and M4, something the current arrangement prevents, freeing up local roads for local traffic.

As for the east Thames crossing, I have not yet heard an answer as to how they plan to improve links between the A2 and A20 corridors east of the M25. Currently, there are two dual carriageways (the A229 and A249) with complicated, slow, roundabout-based interchanges and there seem to be no plans to change that. The main route to the port of Dover and the Channel Tunnel nowadays is the M20, not the M2, and cross-channel freight has to go via Maidstone to queue for customs clearance on the M20; the A2 is mostly used by local traffic to north Kent. The danger of building another crossing east of Dartford is that people going to Dover, the Channel Tunnel and elsewhere in south Kent will use it to avoid congestion at Dartford, causing more congestion at these junctions (and along other local roads, such as the A227 and A228) while seeking to reach the M20. The major cause of congestion at Dartford is the intermittent closure of one of the tunnels to escort petrol tankers; all that is needed is an extra tunnel so that this can be carried out without disrupting normal traffic. This will have the added benefit of permitting three lanes in each direction when the bridge is closed because of the weather or maintenance.

Finally, we have to address the London-centricity of these plans. A major and increasing source of discontent for people in the north of England is that infrastructure investment always goes to London and the surrounding area; transport links between the two groups of cities on either side of the Pennines consists of one motorway, one unelectrified double-track rail line and a selection of two-lane mountain roads, one of the better used of which is in danger of falling down a hillside. Northerners often say that you can tell which trains are going to London as they are the modern electric ones with more carriages. By throwing yet more money at infrastructure in the wealthy south while continuing to neglect the north, Labour risks losing the voters it won back from the Tories in 2024 to Reform come the next election, as opinion polls published this week suggest they might. We cannot have growth solely based on endless roadbuilding and airport expansion; we need industries which can sustain themselves and there’s a limit to how much productive land we can spare, but if Labour are going to invest in infrastructure, it should be in parts of the UK that aren’t already smothered with it.

Image source: Danielson8181, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) 4.0 licence.

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Elsie Dot Stancombe and Bebe King, two of the girls killed in the July 2024 Southport massacre

Last week Axel Rudakubana, an 18-year-old man born in Cardiff of Rwandan parentage, pled guilty to three murders and multiple counts of attempted murder and carrying a knife in connection with last August’s Southport massacre in which three young girls were stabbed to death at a dance class in the town near Liverpool. The crime led to rumours being spread that the attacker was an immigrant, which was a pretext for racist riots in cities across the country. Rudakubana was sentenced to detention “at Her Majesty’s pleasure”, the juvenile equivalent of a life sentence, with a minimum ‘tariff’ of 52 years, which means he will not be considered for parole until he is 70. (A juvenile, as he was a few days shy of his 18th birthday at the time of the attack, cannot be sentenced to a whole-life sentence.) Much has been revealed about Rudakubana’s violent past and his obsession with violence, but the same people who cheered on the summer riots last year have still not let go of their belief that Rudakubana was a Muslim, or motivated by “Islamist ideology” (when he was brought up Christian and no evidence exists that he converted), or that the incident has something to do with immigration because his father was a Rwandan refugee in the mid-1990s. The prime minister, meanwhile, has responded with the promise of a public inquiry and that nothing will stand in the way of making sure such a crime cannot happen again; in other words, he will surely find something to ban or some obstacle put in the way of people living their lives to make sure that particular horse cannot bolt again.

It has been reported that Rudakubana was referred to Prevent, the scheme for intercepting and diverting people who have (or appear to have) started on a path which may lead to involvement in terrorism, several times since age 13, when he was expelled from his secondary school after declaring his intention to take a knife to school to attack an alleged bully, and each time declared unsuitable for their intervention because he appeared to be motivated by no particular ideology. It’s no secret that Prevent was first aimed at Muslims, and it’s well-known that Muslim parents fear their children being referred to it on the basis of a political opinion they have expressed in class about something like Palestine. It’s also a fact that right-wing securocrats have poured scorn on the suggestion that anyone but Muslims poses a major threat, dismissing it as wokery or “political correctness gone mad”, despite the declining influence of groups like Al-Qa’ida and then ISIS and the decreasing potency of the actual terrorist attacks inspired by them (stabbings and vehicle rammings rather than shootings and bombings, which suggests the lack of both know-how and access to materials) and the increasing frequency of incidents associated with extreme misogyny and the “Incel” subculture. Prevent had not been allowed to keep itself up to date since the “war on terror” years in which it was set up, thus it had no means of diverting people driven by more straightforward hatred than ideology.

Some of the same people who hyped the “rape gang” controversy out of nowhere two weeks ago have clung to the lies they spun during the riots last summer. Axel Rudakubana is Black, therefore it’s about immigration, as they see no difference between immigrants and their descendants born here (some of whom are of mixed parentage). If his father had not been granted asylum quite legitimately more than ten years before he was born, this atrocity would not have happened; the idiot logic on which so much anti-immigrant policymaking is based. They tell us over and over again that these things happen because we “allow people to immigrate who do not share our values”, regardless of whether the perpetrator was ever able to immigrate or ever had a choice about being born here, let alone where their parents or even grandparents had been born, or whether that hostility was born from the violent racism Black and Asian people suffered for much of the three decades after they began settling here. The simple fact is that school shootings have become a routine fact of life in the USA where guns are readily available and some young people will be living in homes where there are automatic weapons. That is not true in the UK, but everyone is aware of them and when people know that is one way of expressing their anger, the likelihood that someone will do it increases. It is a case of the “genie being out of the bottle” which cannot be shoved back in again.

Some more mainstream figures have been making some equally ridiculous suggestions. On Tuesday, the home secretary Yvette Cooper promised a public inquiry into, among other things, “how Axel Rudakubana was able to murder three girls at dance class despite being on the authorities’ radar” according to the Guardian’s Pippa Crerar. The answer is that up until the day of the crime, he had not committed any crime serious enough to merit restricting his access to children; all his violence had been directed at adults or his own schoolmates, not children much younger than himself. We put those sorts of restrictions on known child molesters, not tearaways with morbid obsessions. The government complain that a video of a bishop being stabbed in Sydney last year was still available on Twitter everywhere except Australia; the video would have been copied numerous times making banning every copy of it impossible, and his being able to view it before setting off probably was not the reason he did the murders anyway. The previous government has already legislated onerous requirements for operators of “social media” websites to ensure the safety of teenagers who might use them, resulting in a number of forums either blocking British users or shutting down, as they cannot afford to comply (of course, the major players such as Facebook can and the unscrupulous will not); it has been observed that the government reacts to every such incident by looking for ways to control the Internet rather than to improve the services which might have been able to help Rudakubana well before he committed these murders. That, of course, would cost money.

Alice Dasilva Aguiar, aged nine, murdered by Axel Rudakubana

In her interview with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC1 yesterday, the Tory opposition leader Kemi Badenoch blamed the attack on people who “despite being here from childhood or born here, they’re not integrating into the rest of their society; they hate their country, and they’re being told that everything about the UK is terrible”. Kuenssberg pointed to the Rudakubanas’ involvement in the church and their son’s Christian upbringing and asked Badenoch what her evidence was that the crimes were anything to do with lack of integration; she responded with an irrelevant aside about rape gangs, and by claiming that it was a ‘problem’ that every time ‘we’ try to “have these conversations”, they were shut down by demands for evidence. The BBC noted that the judge who sentenced Rudakubana did not mention his supposed lack of integration. Rather, this was a loner who had developed obsessions and fascinations with violence and such people exist among many other ethnic groups as well. Kuenssberg, despite asking her for evidence, did not make that point at all, nor did she reinforce the point that claims need evidence.

Finally the same people looking to blame immigrants are also casting blame at Axel Rudakabana’s family (with one racist numbskull on Twitter drawing attention to how his innocent brother’s wheelchair was funded by public donations); there is an assumption that they must have known and said nothing over the five supposed years between his expulsion from his first secondary school and the July 2024 murders. They are actually facing a police investigation for failing to report one of the later incidents; what we do know is that his father had intervened to prevent him going off armed in a taxi to carry out another violent attack. If he gave up reporting, it’s because he had given up expecting any results. Peter Hitchens tells us he has a “sneaking suspicion” that Rudakubana’s sudden change of personality at age 13 was due to marijuana use, but offers absolutely no evidence; given that he has been arrested numerous times since age 13, he would have had at least one drug test, so surely the police will know if he had used cannabis or even if he was acquainted with any dealer, since you can’t simply buy the drug at the corner shop.

But ultimately, the Southport massacre was one person’s idea from beginning to end and that person is Axel Rudakubana, and he is now in prison where he is no danger to society. It’s not his family’s fault, it’s not his school’s fault, nor the fault of other Black people, or Rwandans, let alone asylum seekers, Channel boat migrants or Muslims, none of which he was. By the same token, the fault for the August riots lie with none of those people either, nor even with Keir Starmer who followed legal protocol by refusing to divulge more information than was appropriate, but with those who participated, those who spread the misinformation that fed them and those who made excuses. If it’s a time to face up to anything, it’s the destruction of the services which might have guided him away from his fascination with destruction, and maybe kept him off the streets and safe while doing so. If our government want to honour the three girls who were murdered and make it less likely that such an atrocity might ever happen again, they might like to put some of those things back in place and reconfigure Prevent to tackle the growing tendency of extreme online misogyny. To people like Matt Goodwin, Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, it’s an opportunity to talk about the same things they’ve been talking about for years, diverting everything onto. Rudukabana was Black, therefore it’s a race issue and by extension an immigration issue rather than an issue of misogyny and our broken education and mental health systems. One can be reacted to with violence; the other will take time and money.

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Lucy Lowe, a 16-year-old girl murdered in 2000 by an abusive older boyfriend and pimp in Telford

The past week or so we’ve seen the incoming American presidency flex its muscles by threatening countries hitherto thought to be their allies, with Donald Trump proposing the annexation of Greenland, a country that is a self-governing territory of NATO member Denmark, and Elon Musk shooting off his mouth about the British political system which he clearly knows nothing about; he tells us that Reform will form the next government, while also telling that party that Nigel Farage is not the leader he wants (if it is to have millions of pounds of his money) because he refuses to entertain the football hooligan “Tommy Robinson”. Musk has also called for the ‘liberation’ of this country from its ‘tyrannical’ government, while both Reform and Tory politicians have taken the opportunity to reopen the issue of the “grooming gangs”, groups of mostly Pakistani criminals who lured young teenage girls, mostly from poor white families in provincial towns, with sweets, drinks, rides in fast cars and promises of love and then raped them, and allowed their friends to do the same. The agenda of Reform and other ‘populist’ Right politicians here has been to portray these men not just as the criminal scum they are, and as most people including most Pakistanis and most Muslims consider them to be, but as typical Pakistanis, acting out of prejudices that all Pakistanis and most Muslims share.

To answer some of Musk’s claims first: we have a political system here, a democratic process, which is the focus of much criticism but we have elections and indeed we had one last July. It was widely discussed on his ‘X’ social media platform (i.e. Twitter) so I’m sure he heard about it. Reform gained five MPs from nothing. Labour won a parliamentary majority and the majority of the popular vote went to progressive parties, including Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists. Reform and the Tories, combined, lost. Farage’s parties have never gained as much as 15% of the popular vote, not least because Farage is a one-trick pony who diverts every discussion onto immigration. As in most democratic countries, we have elections every few years. In the US’s case, it’s four; in ours, it’s usually five. As for our system being ‘tyrannical’, our system has benefits the US’s does not, chiefly that outside Scotland and Wales, there is one law for everyone and laws do not change when you go from town to town and there are fewer opportunities than in the US for people to make a living telling others what to do. We do have local councils, of course, but they are circumscribed in what they can do; they cannot make laws as such, only administrative decisions. They don’t tell people what they can and can’t grow in their own backyard, for example, and we do not have “homeowners’ associations” doing the same. The US’s constitution has a poor history of supporting ordinary people’s rights and freedoms; it defends the right of those with power and wealth to use them, and the judges Republicans have recently stacked the Supreme Court with have heightened that tendency.

Musk also fails to understand why Nigel Farage did not want to allow “Tommy Robinson” anywhere near his party, let alone have influence over it. The answer is that Robinson is a thug with a substantial criminal record, and a history of self-serving, counterproductive publicity stunts which on one occasion nearly caused the collapse of an actual trial of a grooming gang. His fans, including some in the “Reform” party, portray him as a political prisoner; he is in prison currently because of having been held in contempt for persistently repeating disproven claims about a child, putting the child and his family in danger. Political parties need to be respectable to get votes from people who are not thugs and have a modicum of intelligence and education; allowing “Tommy Robinson” in would have the opposite effect.

Musk’s claims have resulted in the “grooming gang” issue exploding out of nowhere this week; there has not been a new case nor any other reason why it should be in the news. There was actually an inquiry into various kinds of sexual abuse ten years ago; its findings were not acted upon by the former government, which now accuses Labour of complicity, while populists claim it was not good enough because it did not treat the Pakistani gang angle as some sort of issue unto itself nor reach the racist conclusion they wanted. We now have Reform MPs with a private school education and a background in finance posing as champions of the working class, yet they rarely if ever use that phrase without putting ‘white’ in front. They weren’t doing so when Thatcher was destroying the industries that fed those communities forty years ago; Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage were both adults during the miners’ and steelworkers’ strikes of the 1980s. Were they on the picket lines? Of course not; Farage, after leaving Dulwich College in 1982, was in a cushy job trading metals for Drexel Burnham Lambert, while Rupert Lowe was working with his buddy Nick Leeson at Barings Bank. The only connection they have with the working class is a fondness for pitting some working-class people against others by exploiting resentment and prejudice.

Rupert Lowe last week stood up in the Commons and put a litany of loaded questions (which he said had also been submitted in writing) to the government, among them demands that any relatives of members of the gangs who he presumed were complicit because they knew should also be deported. Obviously he’s a banker, not a lawyer, but in this country you cannot presume guilt by association; you have to prove that someone knew or was complicit beyond reasonable doubt, and besides, mandatory reporting for professionals — not ordinary people — was proposed in Alexis Jay’s report ten years ago, and not delivered. He demanded that visas for Pakistanis and aid to Pakistan be paused until the government there agrees to accept the deportees; the fact is that the gangs were formed here, largely by people born here, whose parents or grandparents (not all of whom are still alive) were innocent of any such wrongdoing when they left Pakistan, that many of the original migrants from Pakistan were Pakistani for fewer than 20 years between independence (at which point they may have only just moved to Pakistan from elsewhere in former British India) and moving to the UK (indeed, many never relinquished their British citizenship), so their connection to Pakistan is tenuous, and that British aid to Pakistan is largely aimed at assisting minority communities, including Christians. As demonstrated in the case of Shamima Begum, a theoretical and unclaimed right to nationality of any country is not the same as actual nationality, something British politicians are well aware of.

These people also respond with contempt to any mention of racism in regard to their sudden ‘concern’ for rape victims. Well, if you are only interested in this issue when the perpetrators appear to be Pakistanis, or as a pretext to shout about “mass immigration”, it’s reasonable to presume that your motive is racism. Abuse of all sorts has been exposed in a variety of settings, including institutional, from time to time over many years and the same people now frothing about “Pakistani gangs raping our white working-class girls” were nowhere to be seen or heard when previous cases of organised abuse were uncovered. Their demand that we withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights will make some of these abuses more difficult to escape, because those rights safeguard everyone’s right to a family life, to dignity, to freedom, which includes the disabled people, the children and others most likely to find themselves institutionalised. They accuse Pakistanis of looking down on “our girls” and allege that the police and social services failed to act “because they feared being called racist”; any member of any visible minority who has had dealings with the police will know how absurd this claim is, while those who supported the victims will tell you that police and other professionals harboured the same views and believed the same myths as the offenders, and were liable to blame victims and their families.

The members of the grooming gangs, or rape gangs, whatever we call them, were criminals. Many of them had prior criminal records and were involved in other criminal activities at the same time as they carried out their sexual exploitation. They are not the only organised crime outfits to also abuse and exploit women and girls; the difference with some of the others is that the exploitation is inter-racial rather than intra-racial (i.e. of girls and women of their own background). Statistics on sexual crime show that in fact Asian men’s representation among sexual offenders is proportional to their share of the general population, if not lower (bear in mind that sexual assault generally is underreported); it is not sexual abuse per se but this particular modus operandi that is peculiar to them. While some of them may have appeared respectable, all of their activities are contrary to Islamic law on numerous levels. It’s against Islam to deceive people (such as by posing as a lover or friend to ensnare someone in order to harm them), to separate a child from their family without reason, to supply or traffic alcohol, to supply or traffic any other narcotic for recreational use, to kidnap or assault anyone, to have sex or sexual contact outside marriage, to rape anyone, to organise the rape of anyone. These are all crimes, and criminals and criminal gangs exist in a variety of communities, some of which abide by religious laws that explicitly or implicitly forbid such behaviour. It does not make the whole community guilty, nor does it put any onus on the other members of that community to somehow prove their opposition.

Finally, one of the most odious of those making political capital of the grooming gang situation is the academic turned demagogue Matthew Goodwin. In his speech to the Reform party conference posted as a video on Twitter, he claimed that the British people had had “a new religion” shoved down their throats whereby people were required to accept that the majority was bad and the minority good, but that “this time it’s a little different; it’s the Pakistani Muslim minority that has been abusing the majority”, offering examples of three young girls who were killed by men linked to such gangs, including Lucy Lowe (pictured above) whose older ‘boyfriend’, although he behaved in similar ways, was not part of a gang, and Charlene Downs whose two abusers, although from Muslim backgrounds, were not Pakistanis. So this is open racism, the stereotyping of a whole community according to a small number of its worst members and lumping in all Muslims with Pakistanis, being delivered at Reform’s conference, without interruption from party officials and applauded by his audience. As for why the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK and George Floyd in the US got more press coverage, it is because the police who killed George Floyd and failed to bring Steven Lawrence’s murderers to justice for decades or ever are paid for by the public to protect all of us. It was demonstrations by the Black community that brought these issues to public consciousness; are they supposed to sit quietly because their long-standing oppression is less important than the abuse of white girls in other parts of the country, or the world?

So no, it’s not racist to be concerned, outraged even, about the existence of gangs grooming and sexually abusing girls. However, if you are only interested in the matter when the girls are your colour and the perpetrators not, and you talk in a way that suggests that this is all there is to the matter when it is not, when you conflate a crime with one specific modus operandi in order to incriminate and foment hostility to the ethnic group associated with it, and you refer to white women and girls but nobody else as “our girls”, that suggests that your motive is racism rather than any sincere concern for victims of sexual abuse.

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