11mo ago

Opinion: There is a far bigger threat to Britain than fringe extremists: Tory radicalisation | Rafael Behr

www.theguardian.com There is a far bigger threat to Britain than fringe extremists: Tory radicalisation | Rafael Behr

If Michael Gove really wants to root out the forces threatening British society, perhaps his party should look in the mirror, says Guardian columnist Rafael Behr

"If Michael Gove really wants to root out the forces threatening British society, perhaps his party should look in the mirror"

2 comments

Just call an election and put us out of our misery.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
The hard part is policing ideas that tend away from democracy; identifying movements that have hatred so embedded in their core that no public manifestation can come to any good.
In December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch shot up a Washington DC pizzeria because he believed it was the hub of a vast paedophile ring connected to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
With the right combination of social dislocation, communal segregation and a plausible foe, pretty much any set of beliefs can be refined into a fundamentalist cult of redemption through violence.
In theory, the benefits of mutual tolerance are appreciated widely enough to generate a kind of herd immunity against the politics of division and hate.
A prime minister who deferred to the unwritten codes of British democracy would never have dissolved parliament on a whim, as Boris Johnson did when his Brexit plans were thwarted.
When the set task is defining the kind of extremism that marauds on the fringe, there is no incentive to diagnose the more subtle debilitation of democratic spirit at the centre.
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