Latest Bill on extremism rules, not

Many of my friends, especially my young friends, still imagine that the Occupy movement will spread across the country like wildfire. They think it will be like the Green Revolution in Tehran a few years back, or the Arab Spring – peace, love and understanding will break out and the UK will be radically different overnight. When I was 21 I thought the same.

I don’t want to sound like the patronising old git I am, but my worries are that if we have any change across Europe it might be a lurch to extremism. Look what happened after the 1930’s recession. As Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish prisoner in Auschwitz, forced to carry out the Nazis’ dirty work on pain of death, writes in his famous story This Way For The Gas, Ladies And Gentlemen: “Damn all these people, I feel no pity… Everyone relieves their hate by turning on the weak”. I have to say he was a great and compassionate man, in case you’re thinking otherwise, but sadly astute when it comes to human nature in extremis.

Maajid Nawaz, the author of Radical: My Journey From Islamist Extremism To A Democratic Awakening wrote in The Times last month: “Something very worrying is spreading across Europe. Fascists and Islamist extremists alike are copying what Hitler’s Brownshirts excelled at – enforcing with threats and violence their version of the law in neighbourhoods. And the moderate middle is left gawping.”

Nawaz goes on: “In Britain, the group ‘Muslims Against Crusaders’ have recently declared an Islamic Emirates Project. They are seeking to enforce their brand of sharia in 12 British cities, naming the two London boroughs of Waltham Forest and Tower Hamlets among their targets. Little surprise then that in these two boroughs [patrols] have taken to the streets and begun enforcing a narrow view of sharia over unsuspecting locals.

“I’m a libertarian, so if you don’t harm anyone or hurt anyone it’s fine by me to do what you please”

“Petrified Saturday-night revellers have been stopped by hooded thugs in these areas, who warn them that alcohol, ‘immodest’ dress or homosexuality are now banned. To add to the humiliation of being threatened. All this is filmed and uploaded onto the internet. Now some shops in East London no longer feel free to employ uncovered women or sell alcohol without fear of violent reprisals.”

And it’s not just extreme Islamists. In France, right-wing vigilantes ran Roma families out of a Marseilles estate and burnt down their camp. And in Brighton we are not immune. It can happen here.

William Butler Yeats said: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. Bertrand Russell echoed the sentiment in ‘The Second Coming’ which was about the rise of the Nazis: “In the modern world the stupid are cock-sure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

I am not cock-sure but what I am sure of is that we can’t bury our heads in the sand. As Majiid Nawaz says: “Very little has actually happened at the grass roots. I struggle to see initiatives that innoculate young Britons against extremist-messaging. The longer we stand by and watch the [extremists] impose their dogma on our streets, the more the extremes will become mainstream for a rising new generation.” Anyone remember 1933?

I’m a libertarian. I believe in live and let live. I’m a free liver, so if you don’t harm anyone or hurt anyone it’s fine by me to do what you please. Don’t stop me having a JD and coke or wearing a short skirt if I want (OK, that might hurt your eyes).

I’m going to stop being frivolous now and go back to where I started: we have fought over centuries for our freedoms. I applaud the young people on the streets in Occupy. We need to be vigilant that our streets remain free.

The pictures are from This Way For The Gas Ladies and Gentlemen, a people’s opera I wrote and composed with Bim Sinclair. The Life & Death Orchestra have performed this work many times, most recently at the University of Essex for Holocaust Memorial Day 2013