I hope Daniel Hannan MEP can tell the difference between Sunder Katwala and I this time, as I’ll be debating him next week.

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The world of the media is changing as fast as everything else. A politician makes a speech ignored by the conventional media and it gets 1 million hits on utube. The world of Blogs forces a resignation of a chief government adviser before the daily newspapers know what is going on! The new social media is challenging the conventional news elites as never before.

Politicians and their established lobbies are running scared. The new social media has blown a hole through the existing elites. What does this mean for the future? Speakers include:
Daniel Hannan MEP
Carol Haslam – producer
Professor Barrie Axford is the author of the book “New Media and Politics”
Sunny Hundal (some blogger)

More about the event on this page. It looks pretty full but I think they still have a few spaces left (free).

The American Muslim Congress has launched a boycott of Nokia, because:

Nokia recently provided the Iranian regime with a “monitoring center” that enables security forces to tap cell phones, scramble text-messages, and interrupt calls. Nokia’s new surveillance system has enhanced the regime’s ability to crack down on dissent during recent protests. The monitoring technology is being deployed on a massive scale, with hundreds arrested thanks to Nokia’s technology.

Over 5000 people have already signed their petition. Please spread the word.

The BNP thrive off an anti-establishment and anti-politics fervour. They thrive on a victim mentality that is ingrained in their hardcore supporters and attract whites who buy into that victim mentality. I get that. And MaidMarian in the comments earlier made a good point about the BNP being more about getting their message to be common currency, with votes and political office only as a secondary concern.

But there is a danger of going the other way too far. I don’t think BNP affiliated teachers should be banned from the classroom, and Neil Robertson makes a good case here, but some seem to worry that we should avoid doing anything that helps Nick Griffin play the victim card.

Listen folks, if you want to stop the BNP then volunteer for the Hope Not Hate campaign, don’t become so afraid of stepping on the BNP’s toes. There is a need to continue delegitimising the BNP while not letting them paint themselves as victims. But I refuse to go so far that we have to accept the BNP as equal partners because the alternative is that we feed their sense of victimhood. When will people call them out for that?

Before I write a more important post, it’s time to chuck out a few links.

- BNP Wives, Sky Three – you can watch the whole thing on Google Video. (h/t: @poorva)

- Video shows surveillance protesters bundled to ground by police – this is big news. I need to write about how environmentalists now increasingly bear the brunt of our attack on civil liberties. And yet all those Tories and Libertarians who get so exercised by stuff like smoking bans don’t even bother saying anything about this.

- More strikes ahead at power plants as oil refinery row rumbles on, says the Guardian. I say bring it on – am fully behind the Lindsey Oil Strikes. There’s a better piece in the Indy titled: How the issue of foreign workers has poisoned industrial relations – need to come back to this.

- Spiked Online: don’t you just hate it? I do. Anyway, a good blog post by Naomi McAuliffe taking down its stupid misogyny. There’s also one by Gimpy challenging another Spiked article on passive smoking. But the most interesting is this one by Richard Wilson questioning the editorial bent behind Spiked and its funders.

- Interesting article in the Washington Post about Obama’s approach to the civil-war in Iran. Let’s be clear about this: I support the voting out of Ahmedinijad because he’s a repressive, Holocaust-denying, racist tyrant. I’m not enamoured with Moussavi but he’s better than the former. It’s also pretty obvious, except to the idiotic rag-tag of people who supported the war in Iraq or are Tory that Obama must do something, without taking into account how that plays into Ahmedinijad’s hand. When will these people learn?

- Also according to Richard Wilson, though Tory MEP Daniel Hannan loves talking about transparency etc, his voting record in fact betrays the exact opposite. Typical.

You may know that Barack Obama is giving a speech today in Cairo, addressed to the ‘Muslim world’. In an earlier statement he said:

And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.

Guess what Spectator Magazine’s Melanie Phillips had to say?

Just what planet is this US President on? Or is this not a statement but an aspiration?

Oh yeah, whoops! Barack Hussein Obama mistakenly blurts out his plan to convert America to Islam by stealth! Phillips is so absurd that even fellow blogger Alex Massie couldn’t help but mock her:

This is intriguing and I’d be interested to learn how the President might make the United States an islamic nation. Surely this was something he should have mentioned on the campaign trail? Clearly, his reticence about this confirms the seriousness of his intent. All the most dangerous plots are kept secret, dontcha know? Only the bravest and wisest can penetrate the conspiracy and sound the necessary alert.

The kind of conspiracy loons that Melanie Phillips now attracts is evident by the comments. One says:

It’s because he is a Muslim.

Born as one, educated in early years at a maddrassa, pictured in muslim dress. Even, gasp named Hussein. What’s not Islamic about any of that?

Then the missing records. The birth certificate. The education records.

Not forgetting that grovelling bow.

I felt that the idea of a black potus was extremely laudable. However of all the suitable black people in the US they pick this marxist, racist and divisive product of the Chicago machine.

Nothing will surprise except for the fact that the US is still in thrall.

Pajamas Media, Atlas Shrugs and Family Security Matters are good places to start if anyone needs a little education outside the MSM.

It’s more amusing that the Spectator Magazine is happy to continue publishing such conspiracy loons.

Bear with me on this, however trivial it may sound. A couple of months ago the BBC announced that they were introducing a new character to Eastenders – 24 yr old Syed Mahmood, played by actor Marc Elliot.

A few people emailed me angrily asking why, given there were so few Asian actors on TV as it is, were the BBC was giving such a prominent part to a non-Asian actor. I think that’s a fair question. At the time no one at the BBC wanted to comment.

Now the BBC has told the Media Guardian that Syed Mahmood will share a gay kiss and find his “religion and sexual feelings in conflict”. It got me thinking – perhaps they avoided hiring someone Muslim for that part precisely because they were worried the actor may not be willing to act out a gay kiss. I’ve seen non-Muslim Asian actors do gay scenes on television / film (Jimi Mistry, famously) but not anyone Muslim.

So is religious baggage is holding back Muslim actors? I bet to a certain extent casting directors avoid Muslim actors for that reason.

Today I rang up local newspapers owner Newsquest to find out why they were happy to take money from neo-Nazis and racists for party political advertising. The BNP may be a legitimate political party but they are still a party of fascists and racists.

A salesman at Newsquest who said his name was James, said that Newsquest was obliged to carry advertising from the BNP as it was a “legitimate political party” and that not taking any money would be against “democratic rules of party political advertising” or some rubbish like that. He said, at any rate, that Newsquest was obliged to take money from the BNP and carry their ads because it was a political party. He referred me to the Advertising Standards Authority, who he said had codes that they had to follow.

I rang up the ASA who said that they had no such codes and that their codes specifically exempted the press from their codes. See this page. They said I should speak to the Electoral Commission.

So I rang up the Electoral Commission. They just called me back with a statement saying: “Under electoral law there is no obligation for a newspaper to carry any party political advertising. They are free to reject them if they wish to.”

Which means a representative from Newsquest either lied to me or didn’t know the rules. In other words – Newsquest and their stable of local newspapers can reject advertising from the BNP if they so wished. Would you take money from fascists? Looks like Newsquest is happy to since I haven’t found any code that obliges them to. Am going to chase up Newsquest tomorrow morning.

The NUJ have already condemned them.

Various people on Twitter and blogs are calling for a boycott of local newspapers taking BNP money for advertising. So I thought it would be a good idea to at least collate a list of all local newspapers supporting / taking money from the BNP

I’m told so far the Newsquest titles are:
The Herald (where?)
Bromsgrove Advertiser
Yorkshire Post
Evening Times
Northern Echo
Dudley News
The Echo (Basildon and Southend in Essex)
Stourbridge News
Colchester Gazette
Kidderminster Shuttle (via Tim Phillips-White)
Thurrock Gazette (via joe laking)

According to Jon Slattery, Newsquest,

took a moral stand last July by banning all adult sex advertisements, having been persuaded of the link between the ads and women being trafficked for sex

And yet when asked about the BNP advertising with them, they said:

I appreciate how strongly many people feel about the BNP, but it would be undemocratic and against the principle of free speech to refuse to accept any party’s advertising provided it falls within our guidelines.

Not really – a newspaper is welcome to write about whoever they want to, but it doesn’t have to take money from any organisation. Would their guidelines allow them to take money from the KKK? From the Aryan Brotherhood? Because those are Nick Griffin’s friends.

If you know of any other newspaper taking BNP ads – please let us know below. Also, anyone who are Newsquest’s biggest advertisers?

Here’s the BNP election poster, scanned front and back and emailed in by a reader.

An amusing fact of the poster is that the pictures aren’t real. The builders are American. Some of the other pictures are also stock images, and not real BNP voters. Most tellingly, the ‘normal’ white family pictured in the poster features this guy who has a Nazi symbol tattooed on his arm.

Which brings me to my final point. Tory Troll / Adam is outraged that Newsquest, which owns several local newspapers, are carrying ads by the BNP. Meanwhile, some Royal Mail workers are refusing to deliver BNP leaflets.

It is abhorrent that a newspaper group is willing to take money from a group with openly Nazi sympathies and links. Remember, Nick Griffin was only recently exposed as sharing a platform with a guy from the KKK and another from Stormfront.

The Communication Workers Union meanwhile has won concessions for its workers so they don’t have to deliver mail they personally find objectionable. If you were a black postwoman, would you be happy delivering leaflets calling for Nazis? Probably not. No doubt many right-whingers will object to this as political correctness gone mad anyway.

The appointment of Aaqil Ahmed as the BBC’s head of religion and ethics, led to 115 complaints, most of them to do with his religion. As the Daily Quail put it:

“The appointment of bearded Aaqil Ahmed comes at a time of deepening worries among Christian leaders that their faith is being sidelined and downgraded by brown people.

Last year the BBC gave the job of producing its most popular and longrunning religious programme, Songs of Praise, to a Sikh, Tommy Nagra. Although we don’t watch Songs of Praise, we are willing to bet that traditional English Christian verse has been replaced with Bollywood style love songs and choir boys are forced to dance around turbans.”

A guest post by Nindy, who blogs here.

As much as I despise overpaid politicians who abuse their democratic powers for their own benefit, I equally deplore overpaid members of the media circuit whose attacks on public figures for their incompetence and lack of good character, whilst being unable to legitimately justify their grossly disproportionate salaries, is just outright hypocritical.

Even more so, when so many journalists – especially at local level – are paid exploitive wages, if that at all, it would make sense for a greater investment in new talent and a redistribution of the wealth across all echelons of media organizations.

Is the BBC Asian Network doing enough to feature mixed (i.e. on the basis of ethnicity and/or religion) couples and persons? MixTogether asks the question after Vijay Sharma, head of the BBC Asian Network, rejected the idea for a show (summary here):

“The central plank of their argument- that they do not wish to place Asians into boxes based on ethnicity, religion or language- is nonsense. There is an established precedent for the station to broadcast to specific Asian sub-groups.

Their weekly schedule includes separate shows for Mirpuri, Bengali, Gujurati and Punjabi listeners, along with a two separate Hindi/Urdu shows. There are separate devotional sounds programmes for Islam, Sikhism and Hinduism, plus another mixed devotional sounds programme that includes Christian music. There could easily be a show for mixed families.”

Now, the rejection of the proposal doesn’t prove that there is a problem. After all, plenty of proposals are rejected. But there is a real problem with the lack of similar programming it seems (I don’t listen to the wireless much). Given that the Asian Network is supposed to focus on ‘Asian’ culture, the head of the network can hardly claim that she wants to avoid a “niche programming approach”. It is a niche channel by definition, and given that 10% of all married Asians had a spouse from a different ethnic group, they are hardly a irrelevance.

Last week the Daily Mail splashed on a big story about a how a Muslim politician in Birmingham allegedly said another female candidate was “too white and Jewish” to be selected. The alleged point is important because nothing has actually been proven – but pretty much everyone thinks all Muslims must be anti-semitic so its taken as gospel. I’ve been emailed more about the behind-the-scenes shenanigans over this saga but for legal reasons I can’t publish any of that. If the guy did say that obviously he is a racist idiot. Anyway – the story is all over the press and blogs – OMG didn’t I tell you all these nasty Muslims are evilllll and racist!?

A couple of years ago, when the Conservative candidate Ali Miraj, was doing the rounds trying to get selected by a seat, he was told by senior Tories: “Good luck Ali, but I would be shocked if they didn’t pick a White middle-class male.” — at the time of course he was told off for embarrassing his own party by bringing up allegations of racism. Neither the blogosphere nor the media was that upset by the saga.

More recently, when the Telegraph ran a hatchet job on Channel 4’s Aaqil Ahmed because he is seen as a “front-runner” for the religion job at the BBC, the Daily Mail followed it up with an even nastier story implying he was only getting it because of his colour and that he would end up marginalising Christians. Wait, I thought the Daily Mail was against such racism?

Then, I also wrote an article for Guardian CIF pointing out that the group Christian Concern For Our Nation had actually sent out a blatantly bigoted alert to its readers and subscribers. Bizarrely, no one picked that up. CCFON isn’t an obscure Christian group – it funded and supported the campaign by high-flying Tory MP Nadine Dorries to reduce abortion limits. Complete silence from the mainstream press and other blogs.
Have a good weekend amigos!

The Islam Channel is the largest satellite channel aimed specifically at British and European Muslims. The Islam Channel says it is committed to giving a platform to a range of views from across Britain’s Muslim and non-Muslim communities. This is a complete fiction.

What it is has done is to give an un-due prominence to Islamist voices that represent only a small minority of British Muslims. This over-representation has also led to other voices – for instance from the UK’s Shia community or from non-Islamist Muslim groups – being under-represented on the channel.

Many of its speakers are Islamist extremists from organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir who use the channel to promote intolerant and bigoted interpretations of Islam. Others are Wahhabi graduates of Saudi universities who have denied the Holocaust and promoted hatred of Shia Muslims. Other presenters are Islamists who have been suspended from their jobs in government due to their extremist statements or who are from organisations that the government has broken ties with due to their leading members’ alleged support for terrorism.

One of the most worrying aspects of Islam Channel is the promotion of its extremist agenda via the views and politics of its presenters. Amongst these have been the Wahhabi cleric and anti-semite Yasir Qadhi, and Azad Ali of the Islamic Forum Europe (IFE), who was suspended from his position of civil servant earlier this year, following the publication of extremist jihadi literature on the IFE blog.

This article was published this morning on Comment is Free

A couple of weeks ago, the Sunday Telegraph ran a front-page story alleging that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was worried the appointment of a Muslim as head of religion at the BBC would “sideline” the “Christian voice”. Coincidentally, the Sunday Times ran a remarkably similar story the same day, as did the Daily Mail the following day.

It smacked of a classic media hit-job and I decided to dig deeper. Rowan Williams had met the BBC director-general at a lunch that was nothing out of the ordinary. According to a source at his office, there was no official agenda or any leaks about what was discussed. Since his office is very non-confrontational about such matters, and because nothing is ever denied or confirmed, it presents a perfect opportunity for others to use for their own agenda.

Andy Newman highlights something I wrote late last night, which I sort of scribbled quickly while half-asleep. But I think its worth repeating here:

The thing is this: all the bloggers mentioned above [Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes, Conservative Home], Derek Draper, and the Westminster journos who buy into the rubbish that these are the only blogs worth mentioning, are part of the Westminster bubble culture that makes politicians so aloof from the rest of the country. They think the world revolves around Westminster, which is why they exclude anyone who doesn’t write about the same as ‘boring’ and bereft of any readership.

I’d go as far as saying that left-wing blogs have more diverse and wider audiences because they cover a whole range of different issues and topics, rather than being part of a circle-jerk where the same people read Guido, Dale and CH, and occasionally pop over to other rightwing blogs those three link to.

Andy ends by saying: “It is time to rebuild trust based upon ideological conviction and honesty, a project that the likes of Derek Draper have no place in.” — as pretty much everyone, including the formidable Sunder Katwala of the Fabians has said, Derek Draper’s time as the online saviour of New Labour is up. He’s just delaying the inevitable.

Added: And you know what is among Derek Draper’s biggest crime? Re-habilitating and making Nadine Dorries MP respectable again! Argh!

I’ll come back to this theme later, but first I want to highlight a post on ConservativeHome which publishes this BNP poster:

The comments underneath the article betray typical Tory thinking on the issue.

maybe the Conservative party should plainly announce it’s views on Europe,immigration etc and reconnect with it’s core voters.
Posted by: R.Rowan | April 10, 2009 at 18:28
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How about a policy on immigration and overcrowding.
Posted by: erica | April 10, 2009 at 19:15
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This is not really worrying. Let’s please not exaggerate the ‘threat’ posed by the BNP. The will not win any parliamentary seats, they will not control any councils. If they win a seat at the European Elections it will be because of the absurdity of the electoral system not because of their popularity.
If we want to fight the BNP effectively then we need to have a coherent,effective policy on immigration which we can sell to all reasonable people.
Posted by: Malcolm Dunn | April 10, 2009 at 19:27
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I heartily agree with most of the posts here. You can’t defeat the BNP by calling them rude names, however well deserved.
The only way to beat them is to fight them on their own ground. But we are failing to do this. They have policies on immigration – where are our policies? They have policies on multiculturalism. We mouth PC platitudes…. I could go on.
Posted by: Country Mouse | April 10, 2009 at 20:15
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When all three establishment parties more or less agree when it comes to issues like immigration, crime, MPs expenses etc, it’s no surprise people are looking for answers elsewhere. As poll after poll tells us, people care about these issues, and are unhappy with the Labour-Tory-Lib-Dim line.
Posted by: James | April 11, 2009 at 12:34

A few points. First, the BNP poster doesn’t even talk about immigration – rather about corruption, and yet it’s the first issue many raise.

This then suggests that rather than saying ‘we should never have our policy dictated by fascists‘, or saying ‘we shouldn’t be fighting them on their ground because they’re racists/fascists‘ – these Tory supporters actually want to reclaim the ground from the BNP.

Not everyone says that on the thread of course. But my point is – no one actually challenges the view that the Conservative Party should not have its views dictated to by the BNP, and that the party should take a different stance. And actually, I don’t find this altogether very surprising.

Daniel Hannan MEP says on this blog:

The Draper-McBride affair is the latest demonstration of one of this blog’s long-standing contentions, viz that free-marketeers take more naturally to the possibilities of the internet than Lefties. Lefties tend to believe in control (or, as they prefer to put it, “collective action”). They don’t understand that the web is the enemy of regulation. Instead, they struggle to press the internet into their existing systems, treating it as just one more way to get their message across.

Oh right. That must be why in the United States it’s the left-wing blogs that dominate in politics. And which left-wing British blog wants ‘regulation’ anyway?? I would really, really, really like to see Hannan get far in the Conservative party – he would be so much fun to ridicule constantly. Too bad he’s such a fringe figure, fit only for regular appearances on Faux News.

This is a guest post by Yousuf Hamid, as part of Speakers Corner Sundays

The bitter battle between the local Labour party and their NEC to try and replace John Reid as an MP in Airdrie using an all woman shortlists has ignited the debate in Scotland about the role of under-represented groups in politics.

The case is always made that a Parliament must represent its people but what is not clear is why a parliament must look like its country to represent.

I am represented by a white female MP, a white male MSP and 3 white male councillors and they all represent me to varying degrees. Some work exceptionally hard and send me letters telling me their positions on what is going on in the Gaza strip; one even sent me an Eid card this year!

Yesterday I looked at David Starkey’s condescending attitudes towards female historians and historical females. I attempted to disprove his assertions, and now I want to examine why he made them. Most people at this point would attempt to dissect Starkey’s personal life in order to show why he behaved the way he did. Such approaches always make me feel uncomfortable, and besides I believe that the answer lies not in who he is, but what he does.

Starkey is a TV historian. Thanks to the media, he has become arguably the most prominent historian in contemporary Britain. Some might argue that he believes that prominent=best (as a comparison, imagine if the contestants on the ‘Apprentice’, an allegedly popular reality television show, believed themselves to be the best simply because they were on TV). Thus, he feels free to pontificate on many matters. This is not a bad thing per se. The problem is the way he does it.

Let’s start from the beginning of this saga. A few years ago the columnist Nick Cohen wrote a book titled ‘What’s Left’ that poured scorn on elements of the left who ended up siding with Islamist groups because they wrongly believed this was the more progressive option over the ‘imperialists’. Cohen, it must be remembered, was for the invasion of Iraq and wanted to find excuses to justify his ideological position. And there were examples of far-lefties from the SWP etc taking stupid positions (what else do we expect from Trots?), but the key criticism of the book was: why are you paying so much attention to the politically irrelevant?

With the SWP and Respect party in shambles, Nick Cohen ran out of enemies and has since focused his energies on the mainstream liberal-left. Except he’s on even thinner ground here. So a few weeks ago he wrote a column for the Observer saying the mainstream liberal-left wasn’t supporting “liberal Muslims” enough and took potshots at the Fabian Society and IPPR among others. Sunder Katwala and I hit back separately, to which Cohen came back with the response that “noted lefties such as the Queen” were examples supporting his case. Seriously, he wasn’t joking around. Anyway, we sent in a letter to the Observer protesting, and even the Observer’s Readers’ editor queried Nick Cohen’s attention to facts and his previous record of fawning over people like Hassan Butt, who later turned out to be a fraud.

Then Martin Bright, former political editor at New Statesman, joined the fray.
[updated with image]

The national media may have completely ignored the story of Neil MacGregor threatening to blow up Glasgow Central Mosque and behead a Muslim every week, but at least some Scottish MPs have not.

S3M-03856 Frank McAveety (Glasgow Shettleston) (Scottish Labour): Glasgow Central Mosque Terrorist Threat— That the Parliament condemns any threat to personal liberty or a person’s place of worship; recognises that it is a duty of the free press and media in Scotland to be even-handed when reporting issues of terrorism and threats; expresses disappointment that recent threats to Glasgow Central Mosque and threats to behead one Muslim a week have been under-reported, and calls for the media to ensure that abhorrent acts of terrorism are covered regardless of the perpetrators.
Supported by: Jamie Hepburn, David Whitton

via Next Left blog.

I see that in today’s Independent Stephen Glover has written that our letter in the Observer against Nick Cohen was attempt to get him chucked off the newspaper.

The letter did not challenge Mr Cohen’s characterisation of Jamaat-e-Islami as extremist, but it did take issue with his assertion that “the liberal-left has failed to engage or support liberal Muslims” or that it had refused “to challenge Islamist extremism”. Mr Cohen may well have been too sweeping in his condemnation of the Left; he is a pretty sweeping sort of fellow. There is, nonetheless, a disturbing tone in the letter’s first line, “Nick Cohen needs to find a new column to write”. This could suggest either that he would be better advised to write about other subjects in The Observer, or even that he should be columnising elsewhere.

So in the absence of finding anything to actually disagree with what we said – Glover is trying to echo the narrative pushed by Martin Bright last week that this was an attempt to silence Nick Cohen. This is pretty pathetic, given Sunder Katwala already clarified our position below Martin Bright’s original query, but not surprising from someone who thought there was nothing offensive about using the word Golliwog.

Frankly, I’d question why anyone who spends most of his time criticising the liberal-left, without actually trying to find out what the organisations he criticises are actually doing, to be writing for a liberal newspaper. Nick Cohen thinks there’s a grand conspiracy among the Guardian and the BBC to shut down any debate. He comes to debates drunk, then rants and raves about even more conspiracies. Even the Observer’s own Readers’ Editor had to put him straight.

But trying to equate “Nick Cohen needs a new column to write” with “Nick Cohen should be chucked off the Observer” belongs to the same realm of conspiracy theory that Cohen himself was pushing when he said Gordon Brown fired Martin Bright. In the absence of any real riposte to what we said, it’s perhaps best not to say anything at all.

Yousaf Hamid wrote last week:

One story you probably won’t have heard recently is the attempted terrorist attack on Glasgow Central Mosque. Neil MacGregor has pleaded guilty to not only trying to blow up Scotland’s biggest Mosque but also to threatening to behead one Muslim a week until there are no more Mosques in Scotland.

It’s a shocking attack with extremely sinister objectives. Surely if anything is newsworthy then this is it? Yet there’s been barely a peep from any media outlets. I wonder why there has been no press coverage on this at all. Would it be different if it was a Muslim extremist trying to blow up a church or synagogue? The sentencing will be tomorrow morning.

He’s right – there has been zilch coverage in the MSM. Bit strange that eh? Or perhaps not. There’s also a campaigning Facebook group to raise this issue.

The Observer’s readers’ editor Stephen Pritchard steps into the recent row between Nick Cohen and Sunder Katwala:

It’s tempting to dismiss all this as just so much scrapping by a small clique, but let’s look a little closer at the detail. Shiraz Maher, Cohen’s “Muslim liberal”, is a former Islamist activist who associated with Glasgow bomber Bilal Abdulla, recently jailed for at least 32 years. Readers should have been told that.

Maher wrote in the Mail on Sunday last month about government ministers being unwilling to promote the idea of Britishness, yet the concept of what it is to be British is central to Gordon Brown’s government and has been a major Fabian theme. If Maher really is this out of touch with democratic public debate, it calls into question his credibility on the subject of think-tanks.

Katwala told me that Maher had never had any contact with the Fabians or the IPPR, but “his co-authored paper is quite good; it contains nothing we could not have published”, so it would appear that Maher and Cohen’s accusation of censorship is without foundation in this case.

No doubt Nick Cohen will see this as example of the ‘vast leftwing conspiracy’ in action. Nevertheless, it is a shame Nick cannot engage in a proper debate other than accuse the left of being blind just because “noted lefties” such as the Queen apparently appease Islamists, and then saying everyone is trying to censor him.