My ‘supporters’ and my enemies have one thing in common. Both want to believe I think things that I don’t think.

I am amazed at how many readers want me to endorse the absurd UKIP Dad’s Army, despite a dozen articles explaining why I can’t and won’t do this.



A few still believe I am a Tory. More long for me to rush into the futile Stalingrad of the ‘same-sex-marriage’ debate. Some wrongly expect me to be an enthusiast for Enoch Powell, or get angry with me when I object to the display of golliwogs or to the broadcast of the n-word as a dog’s name in the film of 'The Dambusters’. Thousands cannot cope with my repudiation of Sir Arthur Harris’s (and Winston Churchill’s) policy of deliberately bombing German civilians in their homes. Etc.

Likewise my enemies believe I am a nostalgist who believes the 1950s were a ‘golden age’, a view I very firmly do not hold, having experienced the 1950s. They think I support wars which I in fact oppose, and above all, they hope that I am a racial bigot, because that would allow them to dismiss everything else that I say. Many hope this so strongly that they believe it to be true.

My 4th October Mail on Sunday column, published here, included a short item to accompany an interesting picture, which had grabbed my attention during the week.

It read:

‘A hijab-wearing model, Mariah Idrissi, has been chosen for a new advertisement by the fashion chain H&M.

I think we will be amazed at how quickly this becomes normal. It won’t be long before we have veiled Muslim Cabinet Ministers, TV newsreaders and judges. It is all part of a slow but unstoppable adaptation of this country to Islam.

In my view it will eventually mean that non-Muslim women will come under pressure to conform.

If you doubt the power of this huge change, consider this. There are archive films available showing women in Afghanistan and the Arab Middle East dressed in Western styles. It has taken only 40 years for them to disappear beneath scarves and shrouds. The process may be quicker for us.’

While interesting, it was not in any way the major piece on the page, which was mostly taken up with a discussion of the alarming contradictions in our public policy in Syria, and our absurd attitude towards Russia’s intervention there.

There was also an all-too-brief review of an important new novel on the drugging of children to alter their behaviour, and a protest against the media’s failure to examine the Marxist pasts of Blairites, compared with their frenzied interest in the left-wing background of Jeremy Corbyn.

There was a little (far too little) response to my thoughts on the Syrian crisis. I am one of a very small number of British journalists who does not swallow the official line on this. I am painfully anxious that my dissent reaches beyond those who already know my views. I genuinely fear that we may be on the path to war, and for all the wrong reasons, and like to think that wider understanding of the problem might avoid this. Likewise, I long for a wider understanding of the dangers of drugging healthy children; and I have for years believed that the Marxist background and origins of Blairism, if understood, would change attitudes towards them. If I was hoping to influence anybody into action (or inaction), then my hopes were concentrated in these three pieces. My remarks on the hijab were just that, a commentary on an observable change in our society.

I have been saying for years now that this will eventually become an Islamic country, not to raise some kind of alarm, but because it seems to me to be the inevitable result of the policies we have been following for many decades. As one who prefers Christianity to Islam I regret this, but do not think it can be reversed. In particular, I mention this because I think those who have campaigned against the Christian religion are partly responsible for this direction in our national life, and this is a curious paradox. I have also repeatedly said that mass migration into this country has already reached such levels that all we can realistically hope to do is to find some way of living peacefully alongside our new neighbours.

Readers here will know that I abandoned the last scrap of active political engagement last May, when the Tory Party had the election bought for it by the hedge funds. This killed my last hope, that this ghastly, fraudulent party might be defeated so severely and so repeatedly that it would collapse and make way for a properly conservative party. I increasingly recognize this desire as having been a fantasy, far behind its rightful time. Anything of the kind would have had to have been achieved 30 years ago to have had any chance of success.

I still have one or two ameliorative projects whose achievement I think might be possible – the return of academic selection in state schools, inquiries into ‘ADHD’, ’Dyslexia’, ‘antidepressants’ and the correlation between cannabis and mental illness. I would dearly love to see the railways back in public ownership and restored to their pre-Marples extent before I die. I oppose foolish wars as and when others propose them. But that’s it.

I certainly have no policy on the hijab, and oppose all schemes to prevent Muslim women (or anyone else) wearing what they like. These are in my view totalitarian and wrong. The law can reasonably say whether we wear anything at all to cover our nakedness, because many, if not most, people are genuinely shocked and upset by public nudity.

The sight of the naked human body is, for reasons we can never fully fathom, a hugely powerful thing (all painters and sculptors know this) and forms a crucial part of the Garden of Eden myth for that reason. So the law can say that the body shall have a covering. It cannot prescribe what this covering is, a wholly different question. We can ask a woman to lift her veil where we have good reason to do so, just as we can ask motorcyclists to remove their helmets for the same reason. But that’s it.

Even so, late on Sunday I began to hear the low, menacing whine of a gathering Twitter Storm, growing slowly into a growl of intolerant rage. There is a curious alliance between Islam and the liberal left in this country which makes no sense at all, given Islam’s pretty stern strictures on many of the things the liberal left holds dear. But in left-liberal-world things don’t need to make sense.

And it was mobilizing against me. I was accused of bigotry, racism etc etc, though when I asked for quotations to back these claims, none came.

One of my critics was a person named Nesrine Malik, who wrote on Twitter as follows on Sunday evening (I have cleaned up the Tweet by asterisking a lavatory-wall word):





‘Nesrine Malik ‏ Oct 4

Look at how acceptable it is so say clearly rabidly anti-Muslim s*** like you just don't want to see hijabs anywhere’

I rebutted this, but as is so often the case with such attackers, could not get her either to substantiate or clarify her charge.

She then began to question me on what appeared to be the assumption that I was in fact concealing some sort of hidden message in what I had written. I pointed out that I had written exactly what I meant, and meant exactly what I had written.

For example, she wrote:

‘ok - so please - spell it out for me as I clearly cannot read - what is your objection to the hijab advert?’

I replied, noting the inquisitorial, sarcastic tone: ‘Who says I have any objection to it? I simply observe that this has taken place, and is significant.’

She responded :‘so you're saying that 'a slow but unstoppable adaptation to Islam' is a statement completely shorn of any opinion or judgement?’

I responded: ‘It is my judgement that it is significant an[d] interesting. What opinion does it express?’

And so it went on. I can now recognise a People’s Court when I see one, and also an obvious attempt to put words in my mouth. Later on we got on to the point about women eventually being compelled to take the veil against their will.

I was urged by her to condemn this. This seemed odd to me. Does anyone defend it? I had begun to wonder. I thought the matter had gone far enough and so asked Ms Malik what her opinion was on people being told how to dress. Well, she was against that, though she quickly said it was rare. Well, so it may well be, thoigh that doesn't seem to have any bearing on whether one is against it or not. I can’t see how we could easily find out how rare or common it is in the rather unfree countries where it is most widespread. I have made no claims about how often compulsion happens now or how often it will happen in the future. I just think that it will do so here, if things continue as they are now.

The matter dragged on, eventually involving the Great British Bake-Off, an event which I have managed to ignore completely, and a film-maker called David Baddiel, one of whose films I once slighted. It turns out that he still resents this, though as he is so modish I should have thought he would have regarded my disapproval as an endorsement.

While this was going on, I ranged the country from Oxford to London, where I took part in the ‘Daily Politics’ which discussed the Tory conference, a sample here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gg_VksiEd4

(I expect the whole thing can still be found on iplayer),

...and then to York, where I had a pleasant evening haranguing a group of Politics and Philosophy students, studying very roughly the same course I (sort of) pursued at that University more than 40 years ago, though really I studied Marxism-Leninism, in its strictly practical form.



The subject was the incompatibility of multiculturalism with Britain, and once again I had to explain that I am an obituarist of Britain, not a resurrection man trying to dig up a dead country and revive it. Then I took a complicated train journey to Beverley and its glorious undiscovered Minster, one of the loveliest great churches in Europe in a largely unspoilt East Riding town. During this railway Odyssey I was asked by Channel Four news to appear on their programme to discuss the hijab issue.

Oh, all right, I said, suspecting that it might not work out well. I did the usual thing of explaining my opinions to an intelligent and receptive researcher, all too aware that when it reached the studio, the debate would be less satisfying(this is almost always so) . I think the researcher was a bit surprised when I said clearly and emphatically that I opposed any legal restrictions on the wearing of the veil. But I may be mistaken about that.

As you may see here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnlyL5yMTnk

…the actual exchange wasn’t very enlightening.

A few hours beforehand I had learned that my opponent would be Nesrine Malik.

Who is she, by the way?

Well, here’s an interesting and relevant article about her.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/7896536/Burka-ban-Why-must-I-cast-off-the-veil.html

Now, a few things about the Channel Four occasion struck me rather strongly.

Matt Frei introduced the item by rhapsodising about the victory of a hijab-wearing woman in a baking contest, saying approvingly this was an ‘extraordinary celebration of multicuturalism’ . No doubt he was being a devil’s advocate at the time, but at the BBC and C4 news, they do always seem to be advocating the same devil. Many people, even in the Liberal Elite, nowadays disapprove of multiculturalism and say it was a mistake which they now oppose. David Cameron is, or says he is, one of them. See this 2011 speech

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12371994

Ms Malik began her contribution by asserting: ‘It shouldn’t even be something to comment on in any way other than “This is really cool. It is representing a significant swing of Muslim British people and it’s something we should celebrate.” ’

I thought and still think this was an astonishing attitude to take. She appeared to me to be saying (‘It shouldn’t even be something to comment on in any way other than….’) that only one opinion on the matter was permissible. So I responded by saying that other views were permissible. She took this an expression of opinion about the wearing of hijabs, on my part, which it wasn’t. It was an expression of opinion on free thought and speech. I was now quite sure that this, not a discussion about headwear, was my main aim



Later on she began her inquisitorial, nay prosecutorial attempt to establish what I was ‘really saying’. The clear implication *here* is that I had some hidden message that I was concealing, presumably for reasons of shame.

Seizing on the words ‘gradual and unstoppable adaptation’ she described this wording as ‘alarmist’. I have to say that in my dictionary the word ‘gradual’ doesn’t really go together with alarm, but that’s just an opinion.

This was somehow a ‘warning shot’ (shot?) and the words ‘gradual and unstoppable’ were by clear implication a condemnation. Actually this isn’t so. People often describe their own movements and causes, or those of which they approve, as unstoppable. The left-liberal anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’, with its uncompromising use of the verb ‘shall’, is a declaration of unstoppabilty, in my view, and has turned out to be much more right about that than it sounded when I first heard it in about 1966.

She again suggested that I had said this was something to be ‘alarmed’ or ‘worried’ about it. I had not done so. And under this repeated pressure to be confess to having opinions different from those I had actually expressed, I found it necessary to harden my heart. I wasn’t going to give such inquisitorial behaviour, redolent of people’s courts and Stasi interrogations, any victories.

I was then told I should forgive people for readng things that were not there into what I had written. I declined to do so. First, they hadn’t asked for my forgiveness or admitted to doing anything wrong, the absolute requirements for forgiveness; secondly, these attempts to make windows into people’s souls are plain wrong and must be resisted in a free society or it won’t stay free for long.

Channel Four News’s Matt Frei, a civilised and travelled man, was even so seemingly under the bizarre impression that I am a Tory. Apparently believing that this might wring my withers, he brought David Cameron (‘railing against racism’ – but who until then had mentioned race or ‘racism’? Not I for certain) into the argument, and made the usual liberal error of assuming that opposition to multicuturalism had racial implications. Culture and race are not merely not the same, but the opposite of each other (See Thomas Sowell’s fine book ‘Race and Culture’). Indeed, I would say that the best way to achieve a harmonious multiracial society is to ensure that it is monocultural.

Ms Malik could not understand or really register my use of the past tense to describe the long-ago death of British culture (Good heavens, I described this back in 1999 in my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’ which as it happens makes no mention of race or immigration as contributors that abolition, though it briefly notes the existence of the change) . She seized on it as my longed-for confession of Crimethink.





She then said : ‘The motif of the hijab makes people like Peter uncomfortable because it implies that the sort of rosy white homogenous culture of British society is now on the wane. That’s what it’s what its all about…

'…It’s a figleaf for a dying gasp of monoculturalism in the UK’ .

Now, there were two key words in this passage.

That word, smuggled quickly in at the last moment, is ‘white’. Without it, the statement is quite harmless, apart form the word 'figleaf, which suggests concealment, which indeed has no other purpose outside botany than to suggest concealment.



Note that both Mr Frei and Ms Malik both introduced the question of skin-colour or 'race' into the matter. Yet it was not there until they put it there.

In fact the spread of the hijab, niqab and burqa throughout the Islamic world is a matter of controversy among Muslims, some of whom resist it and some of whom welcome it. And it is a religious, not an ethnic matter. And, as I so often find I need to say, religions (including my own) are matters of opinion, with which people may legitimately disagree. Islam is a religion, not an ethnicity. A woman with a pinko-grey skin (what Ms Malik describes as ‘white’) can wear the hijab, indeed there are some such whom I occasionally see in Kensington High Street in London, where I work. Pinko-grey British men can and do embrace Islam.

Women with other skin colours can, even if Muslim, decide not to wear hijab or niqab. The matter, in short, has nothing to do with skin colour or ‘race’. So why did Mr Frei mention 'race' and why did she introduce the word ‘white’.



Your guess is as good as mine.