A Genuine, Inclusive Force

Like Adnan Hussain, Iqbal Mohamed has left Your Party. We have seen them speaking in front of the Union Flag and the Palestinian flag hung side by side. That is as it should be. Remember the British military veterans James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman, who were unarmed aid workers in Gaza until 1 April 2024, when the IDF bombed them three times to make sure that they were dead.

In England, where Saint George is the Patron Saint as he also is of Palestine, his flag should be hung, flown or borne between the two. In that case, why not hang fly or bear the flag of Scotland or Wales between them, too? And Northern Ireland? The Unionist member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for South Down, Brigadier Ronald Broadhurst, had been Assistant Chief of Staff of the Arab Legion during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. Of course. The late Queen Elizabeth II, who visited almost every country in the world including Ireland, never went to Israel because of its anti-British terrorist origins. Of course.

Let us see seas of them, waving in our hands and from our homes as we stood against Shabana Mahmood and her measures that, being in force in Denmark, were clearly compatible with what were therefore the overrated and overpraised European Convention on Human Rights and United Nations Refugee Convention. Everyone who might be affected should engage in industrial action, peaceful protest, and peaceful civil disobedience. It is Mahmood’s ghetto that is the parallel society, incapable of the integration that in any case it did not want.

Those waving the flags should include the whole of the white working class. Race is not the primary indicator in an industrial or postindustrial country such as Britain. In Denmark, the first criterion for a “parallel society” is that more than 50 per cent of the inhabitants originated or “descended” from “non-Western countries”, defined as everywhere apart from “all 27 EU countries, the United Kingdom, Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, Vatican City, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand”. But the other four are socioeconomic.

Once it had met the racist first one, then a community has to meet only two of those four to have all of its children from the age of one upwards required to undergo 25 hours per week of instruction in “Danish culture”, and to be declared liable to mass eviction and demolition in the manner of Sharpeville, District Six, or the West Bank. After a few years, Britain would drop the whitelist and just ghettoise everywhere with two or more of unemployment at 40 per cent or above, criminal convictions more than three times the national average (as if the criminal justice system were class-neutral), 50 per cent or more of over-30s without tertiary qualifications, and an average gross income below 55 per cent of the national average. Adjusting for different education systems, Denmark and elsewhere would follow suit.

Not that the change would be that enormous. It was Durham County Council, then the jewel in the right-wing Labour crown, that imposed Category D status. Even if not in detail, everyone in these parts has always known about Medomsley Detention Centre; we are shocked but not surprised. Parallel societies are nothing new to us. The British State inflicts sexual violence on working-class, predominantly white males as the American State inflicts sexual violence on African-American and Hispanic males, and as the Israeli State inflicts sexual violence on Palestinian males. That, and false allegations of sexual violence.