Thought To Link Back

There is nothing in today’s report from the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society that was not always known to those of us who followed certain left-wing Labour MPs (one of whom has lately become a bit famous), who read the small-circulation newspapers with whom they were associated, and who read certain more or less paleoconservative columnists elsewhere.

But still, at least now everyone else knows it, too. 

That Saudi Arabia has spent at least £67 billion promoting Wahhabi ideology abroad in the past 30 years.

That, “A number of Britain’s most serious Islamist hate preachers sit within the Salafi-Wahhabi ideology,” have studied in Saudi Arabia, or have been provided with extreme literature and material within the United Kingdom.

That in 2014, it was estimated that Britain’s Salafi Mosques had a collective capacity for an oddly precise membership of 44,994.

That Saudi Arabia directly runs a minority of British institutions that receive Saudi funding.

That Saudi textbooks are used in a number of this country’s independent Islamic schools.

And that there have also been “numerous cases of British individuals who have joined jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria whose radicalisation is thought to link back to foreign funded institutions and preachers.” 

I understand why, at Prime Minister’s Questions, Jeremy Corbyn went with the NHS, and thus with the pay cap, on this, the former’s sixty-ninth birthday.

But a little bit of “I told you so” on Saudi Arabia would not have gone amiss, including a demand that Theresa May publish the report that she is suppressing, into foreign funding of terrorism.

Over to the Question Time audience tomorrow.