Chris Blackburn over at The Spittoon has a piece up on Bob Lambert, the renegade ex-copper, and his recent political activity. It is amusingly entitled “The Wrath of Plod“.
Chris says:
“Lambert thinks he’s a realist and a good attentive listener: a new breed of copper for a new way of policing. When he worked for the Metropolitan Police he was not the, “lock-them-up-throw-away-the-key” type of law enforcement official.”
I don’t know much about Bob Lambert’s own personal moral or political views, outside of Islamism. However I do wonder, sometimes, whether the attraction of Islamism to some of its supporter, is that they find aspects of its politics attractive. Islamism is strongly communitarian, and so fills a gap left by liberals who are essentially individualists, and see community through that prism.
More obviously, Islamists are floggers-and-hangers, authoritarians. That is an option which is just not offered by any contemporary British political party.
Here’s Callmedave, for example:
“We’re consulting on legalising gay marriage. To anyone who has reservations, I say: Yes, it’s about equality, but it’s also about something else: commitment. Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us; that society is stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other. So I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative.”
Now, if you were a Monday Club type of Tory, where would you go for a politics which rejects that sort of namby pamby liberal flimflam? Well, if you didn’t have a problem with what Sunny calls “brown people”, wouldn’t the East London Mosque look quite an attractive ally?
Here, for example, is Tim Parsons, commenting on a Lambert piece on The New Statesman:
I can personally testify to the value of the advice and guidance provided to the police by the MAB.It is perhaps unfortunate that Mr Clegg and his eccentric party are neither credible inside government nor outside it. There is a simple and straight forward conflict here between the atheistic secular liberals who dominate our governing elite and major news organisations, and the religious majority who are appalled at the decadence and decline in Western society.
Now, I don’t want to seem to be taking the piss, here, but isn’t this the sort of thing that Graham Chapman’s Monty Python characters would say? Or Reggie Perrin’s brother in law?
These are amusing attitudes, and you might be forgiven for thinking that they had disappeared in the early 1980s. But they haven’t. They’re just not considered socially acceptable these days. Not, perhaps, you express them as some form of great multicultural enterprise.
Oh we can laugh about it, but Tim Parsons is an academic at the John Grieve Centre for Policing and Community Safety, at London Metropolitan University. Here is his biography:
Senior Lecturer in Policing and Criminology
Tim Parsons is a former Chief Inspector in the City of London Police where he held the post of Head of Equality, Diversity and Human Rights. He retired from the police service in August this year having completed 30 years service and took up his current post in the Faculty of Applied Social Science.
Tim has a MEd from the University of Hull and is currently writing a doctoral thesis for an EdD at King’s College London. For his thesis he is analysing Edward Said’s discourse on Western Orientalism and comparing it to contemporary UK policy towards Islam and Muslim societies, both in the UK and abroad.
He has taught and lectured on policing and security issues in 16 countries, mainly in Eastern and Central Europe and the Balkans. Tim is a member of the Advisory Board for the new European Muslim Research Centre at the University of Exeter and has an ongoing research interest in Islam and Islamophobia, and the securitization of Muslim society in Europe. He also has a wider research interest in religion, faith communities and the treatment of religion and faith in criminal justice policy.
And, apparently, his considered view is that:
There is a simple and straight forward conflict here between the atheistic secular liberals who dominate our governing elite and major news organisations, and the religious majority who are appalled at the decadence and decline in Western society.
I hope you’ll forgive me, but how does this differ from Melanie Phillips?
