In fear for the future of Britain

WRITER Melanie Phillips gets called many things: Islamophobe, voice of right-wing moral outrage, scourge of Britain's Guardian-reading liberals, a doom merchant, a fearless prophet whose moment has come. But one thing the award-winning tabloid columnist and author of the controversial Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within rarely gets called these days — not convincingly, anyway — is irrelevant.

Phillips, who believes Britain has fallen victim to a moral and cultural malaise that has turned London into "the epicentre of Islamic militancy in Europe", is currently visiting Australia. She comes amid raging controversy, here and in Britain, about national identity. Britain's likely next prime minister, Gordon Brown, on Thursday suggested new migrants should be denied citizenship unless they agreed to do voluntary community work, claiming the recent imposition of citizenship and language tests did not go far enough. Migrant groups, and some Opposition MPs, slammed the idea as divisive, with one communal leader complaining Brown was lumping immigrants in with criminals.

In Australia, emotions are still raw after visiting Israeli academic Raphael Israeli said Australia should cap Muslim immigration to avoid some of the problems facing France, where the Muslim population had reached a "critical mass". The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, which dumped Israeli in protest against his comments, now hosts Phillips a little tentatively.

Phillips does not advocate Muslim immigration quotas. Muslims, she says, should be welcome to set up faith-based communities in Britain provided they "subscribe to an overarching notion of national identity". But Phillips' idea of national identity, with its rejection of "multiculturalism" and call to re-embrace "British values", shares an obvious affinity with the Howard Government's own, highly contentious, agenda.

Britain, Phillips writes, "is currently locked into such a spiral of decadence, self-loathing and sentimentality that it is incapable of seeing that it is setting itself up for cultural immolation". The nation is in denial about the threat of home-grown Islamism, she says. The British, inculcated with the idea all cultures are equal, now struggle to confront their enemy. Britain has become not only al-Qaeda's chief target, Phillips says, but also the terror group's chief recruiting ground.

Before September 11 and especially the London bombings, Phillips — a former Guardian staff member before defecting to what her colleagues regard as the dark side — had little influence beyond conservative ranks. Now "Londonistan", a term coined by French and Algerian authorities to describe the city's harbouring of terrorists in the 1980s and '90s, is part of the general lexicon and people such as Phillips are loud voices in the national conversation.

Says Phillips: "People not only appease (Islamic extremism) but have come to absorb the state of mind of the people who are trying to destroy them. There is a state of confusion where people come to mistake their friends for enemies. And they see their enemies, if not quite as friends, then at least as people who need to be protected from their friends."

There are continuing symptoms of this underlying disease, Phillips says. At marches against Israel's bombardment of Lebanon last year, white middle-class women carried banners reading: "We are all Hezbollah now." Anti-semitic conspiracy theories about Jews running world affairs are openly discussed. People excuse would-be terrorists as victims of discrimination, segregation or Islamophobia, against all evidence.

She mentions how the police, casting a typically wide net, arrested suspects in relation to an alleged plot to blow up trans-Atlantic flights and, more recently, behead a British Muslim soldier. When some of those arrested were later released, the case provoked claims of an Islamophobic conspiracy.

Many would agree such trends are worrying. But Phillips goes further still, insisting the problem isn't confined to the extreme left. She talks about a "mainstream consensus" that sees Israel and the United States as mainly responsible for global instability.

"It's a pathology that's taken over public debate; there's not a cigarette paper (of difference) between right and left on this," she says. "The possibility of George W. Bush attacking Iran to stop it from getting the bomb is seen as a bigger threat to world security than Iran actually getting the bomb. I mean, to me, that's just irrational."

She accepts some of this might simply reflect disenchantment and apprehension about the Bush agenda. But she then veers into a discussion about Britain's snobbery towards the US and lingering resentment over America's late entry into World War II. In Phillips' world, such national quirks can take on an unexpectedly sinister character.

A profile of Phillips last year in the Guardian observed: "Though she accuses the BBC of having a default left-wing position that produces a closed belief system, Phillips' own system now seems tightly closed — immaculate, airless, finished … Pressed on this, she denies it: 'I'm very aware all the time that I may be wrong. There is not a day that goes past when I don't think, "Am I wrong?" ' Yet reading her book and listening to her argue, the overwhelming impression is of steely self-certainty."

A more concrete criticism of Phillips is that she places undue focus on Islamic extremists in a way that tars all Muslims with the same brush. She rejects this: "I say in my book that there are many, many truly moderate Muslims in Britain, in the West and around the world … people who simply draw spiritual sustenance from their faith." Muslims, after all, are the main victims of global jihad.

When it comes to identifying moderates, the devil is in the definition, she says. Many in Britain think a moderate is someone who condemns suicide bombings in Britain but justifies them in Israel or against US forces in Iraq. Such people aren't moderate, in her view. Nor are people who renounce violence but wish to thrust sharia law on the majority.

Phillips points out that the Muslim Council of Britain, a mainstream umbrella group the Government funds and helped establish, last month called for all state schools to effectively scrap "un-Islamic" activities such as dancing and mixed-sex excursions. Its head has openly expressed his desire for Britain to become more Islamic, claiming the country might even benefit from more arranged marriages.

But Phillips is heartened by recent signs of Britain's moderate Muslims fighting back. A new communal organisation, the Sufi Muslim Council, has been set up in opposition to the Muslim Council of Britain, which it brands as too extreme and unrepresentative. And last month the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford vowed to help a Buckinghamshire school legally defend its decision not to let a female pupil wear the niqab, a garment covering the face.

"We trust that you will continue to resist any move to implement this kind of minority ethnic obsession," the organisation said, in a letter to the school. The local authority, "those nice white liberals," as Phillips describes them, had refused to intervene on the school's behalf. "You see, new migrants come here wanting to integrate into the majority, only to find there's nothing to integrate into," Phillips says.

People of various politics (although Phillips rejects the "right-wing" tag) are wondering about this now. Writer Martin Amis, commenting on the rise in anti-Muslim victimisation, recently suggested Britain needed "to become what America has always been— an immigrant society. "A Pakistani immigrant, in Boston, can say 'I am an American,' and all he is doing is stating the obvious. Can his equivalent, in Bradford, say the equivalent thing in the equivalent way?"

Phillips, instead, believes mass immigration, along with multiculturalism "and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country's Judeo-Christian values", have "hollowed out" Britain. She writes of "a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets."

She admits a Muslim fundamentalist, inclined to cast the West as decadent, might draw some comfort from her views. "I agree the West is decadent … and, yes, so do many Muslims, but the world view that propels us in this direction is radically different." Her guiding light is liberty — for individual and nation.

But these days universities teach children there is no such thing as "truth", teachers (apparently) resist teaching British history because they are ashamed of it, the European Union sets too much of Britain's agenda. Is Phillips afflicted by nostalgia for a Britain that no longer exists?

Yes, nation's evolve, she says. "But I believe people are entitled to cultural self-expression. You can't call yourself a democrat if you don't believe in nations. This means you believe in tyranny."

Londonistan, by Melanie Phillips, published by (Gibson Square, can be ordered through bookstores. RRP $49.95).

http://www.melaniephillips.com