Others have picked up on this one, but I really cannot let it pass without comment. Yes, I detest Islam with every fibre of my being. It is a vile, debased belief system that is deeply misanthropic. However, none are so misanthropic as those who would fight it by removing our basic liberties – and kidnapping children and holding them a prisoner of the state is pretty illiberal, but that is what Boris is suggesting here.
The law should obviously treat radicalisation as a form of child abuse. It is the strong view of many of those involved in counter-terrorism that there should be a clearer legal position, so that those children who are being turned into potential killers or suicide bombers can be removed into care – for their own safety and for the safety of the public.
That must surely be right.
No, it is not right. Boris talks of liberalism being inverted – here it is he who is engaging in inversion. We have a basic principle in English law; innocent until proven guilty. If those people break the law, then prosecute them. Otherwise, leave them alone. “Public Safety” (how Robespierreian) does not justify intervention, seizure of children nor a presumption of guilt.
Boris has let slip his illiberal soul before – when proposing a drinking ban on the Underground, for example – but this really takes the biscuit. He wants social services to take children away from their parents in case they are radicalised – pre-crime and thought-crime rolled into one neat package. Those dystopian novels and films were supposed to be warnings, not instruction manuals.
The Conservatives are supposed to be liberal leaning – at least compared with the vile, illiberal cunts on the opposition benches – and having had thirteen years of totalitarian leaning Labour in power, some of us had hoped for a more liberty driven agenda. Instead, we got more of the same and Boris has just put the hundreds and thousands on top of the fairy cake. This really is the most vile, illiberal and totalitarian idea I’ve heard recently. However, as we have come to realise, scratch a politician and you get a nasty little dictator underneath, so next week, one of the bastards will top it.
So, yes, LibLabCon are all the same. They are all the enemies of liberty.
Yes you are right – Boris has let the mask slip before so now we know for sure what’s behind it. Maybe with this one people will sit up and take notice, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Great post Longrider.
This is possibly the worst in a continuing recent train of idiotic illiberalism coming from Johnson. I won’t be voting for him if he stands again for London Mayor.
Boris lost me when he wrote that piece in the Telegraph recently supporting the ban on smoking in cars with children. Surprisingly, he hadn’t even looked at his homework, and instead trotted out all those soundbites so beloved of the anti-smoking industry. And this is out of the same playbook. It is as bad as those puckered mouth harridans in Social Services who advocate taking children away from parents who smoke.
Boris is becoming increasingly authoritarian; it must be all that mayoring getting to him. Whatever, he should stick to his newts. Oh no, that was the other grotesque leftard incumbent. They’re all starting to sound the same…
So what other sorts of “Radicalisation” would Boris believe warrants the intervention of the Social Workers then? (an empoverishment of the soul in itself).
I went to school in South Wales in the fifties and sixties with kids whose parents were Marxist trade union officials, and no-one batted an eyelid. One was called Maxim and that wasn’t short for Maximilian, it stood alone. Another used to spend his summer holidays at Black Sea resorts thanks to the kickbacks from Moscow for the sterling work his parents were doing destroying the British economy. We all thought it terribly exotic, until he explained it was like Butlins but with machine-gun towers and barbed wire, with wall to wall Russian drunks in string vests getting very uneven tans.
My schoolfriends did what every generation does… Totally rebels against their parents constraints, restrictions and moral certainties.