Monday, September 11, 2006

An Interview with Michael Gove

Michael Gove is a brilliant British first-term Conservative MP  and author of the important new book, Celsius 7/7. 

I interviewed him by email just before 9/11.

Q: Have this summer’s terror revelations introduced any new realism to the British response to domestic terrorism?

A: British public opinion is readier to contemplate robust measures at home than at any time in a long time.

British attitudes toward foreign policy, however, are less encouraging.The experience in Iraq – and what’s currently going on in Afghanistan – have led British people to believe that Prime Minister Blair and President Bush misled them. The British have come to believe that their leaders entered dangerous situations without adequate care, thought, and preparation; they believe their leaders rattled cages full of dangerous creatures without possessing enough firepower to finish off the creatures in those cages.
So while the British public has become more clear-eyed about the Islamist threat at home, it has also become more resistant to principled interventions abroad. You might say that Britain is becoming more like France: more robust at home; less robust abroad.

Q: What are the principal mistakes, as you see them, of British policy to date?

A: We have allowed certain unelected community leaders to acquire power by permitting them to act as intermediaries between British Muslim people and the British government elected by all its citizens, including Muslims. Ironically, you could say that our progressive elite has conspired to maintain the same power relationship between Muslims and the state that used to exist in the old British empire: The sheikh delivers the support of his people to the British state; the state in turn confirms the privileges of the sheikh.

If you look at the non-Muslim South Asian population of Britain, you see tremendous success. Non-Muslim South Asians are highly represented in the professions, in business, in the civil service: Their immigrant experience looks very like something you would see in the United States. We have very specific problems with the integration of Muslim South Asian immigrants. These are problems you’d want to tackle even if there were no terror threat.

But instead of tackling these problems directly – healthcare, education, economic opportunity – we allow them to be pushed to the margins. And instead we grant legitimacy to groups that claim to speak for all British Muslims – everyone from Algerian-origin professors of engineering to Bangladeshi textile workers. These groups insist on defining every issue as an “ummah” issue. If you want to interact with us, they say, we want to talk about Guantanamo, Kashmir, Chechnya, and above all Palestine. And even when they are directed to domestic issues, they define those as meaning halal, prayer rooms, easier immigration for foreign imams.

Can you imagine a British government deciding that to deal with any other distressed subgroup within the population, it must first find the most theologically reactionary elements of that group to negotiate with? We’ve created a situation where any British Muslim who needs support for any community project finds it more useful to go to the local Islamic center than to his MP – it’s faith first, Britishness second.

Q: Why are British political and opinion elites so reluctant to face up to the horrible internal security problem you describe in Celsius 7/7?

A: It is hard to face any problem of such a magnitude. But I think we have reached the stage where British people are beginning to come to terms with it. In the past, we always told ourselves that the number of people willing to commit terrorist acts was tiny – and that was true. But we’re now waking up to the fact that the numbers who share the ideology of the terrorists is very significantly larger.

Q: Seen from this side of the Atlantic, your party – the Conservatives – often seems softer on terrorism than the Labour government.

A: The most important differences on these issues are found within the parties rather than between them. The leadership of the Conservative party has been very clear-sighted about the security problem for a very long time. However, it’s sort of a rule of politics that the party out of power tends to become the party of civil liberties. And unlike US Republicans, the Conservatives have historically been the party of trial lawyers and the legal establishment – which tempts many Conservatives to lose sight of the difference between criminal justice and national security.

Yet there is a consensus within the Conservative party in favor of demanding clearer allegiance to British values, of reconciling migration policy and security issues, of taking seriously cultural integration and social cohesion, of supporting the intelligence and security services in the work that they do.
 
In Labour, beyond Tony Blair and his cabinet, lots of people still prefer the old-fashioned model of multiculturalism and moral relativism and are not prepared to demand allegiance to a shared set of values.

Q: What does the looming end of the Blair premiership mean for the US-UK relationship? How far left will Labour now go?

A: Labour has already shifted far to the left in foreign affairs. The next Labour leader will come under tremendous pressure from his own party to shift away from America, not just Bush, but America. For Labour especially, America’s support for Israel during the Lebanon law was the final straw.

And regardless of party, Blair’s successor will not be as anxious or determined to align themselves as closely with the White House. Even though I find it a great pity, for any British Prime Minister too obvious an association with the policy of White House will act as a brake on his capacity to act. Perhaps when there is a new president following new policies that he describes as new, the relationship can resume. I have sympathy for what Bush and Blair have sought to do – but for the vast majority of the British electorate, Bush is a busted flush, and anything associated with him – or anything that can be described as Bushite – is electoral kryptonite.

Q: Why was the British establishment so fiercely hostile to the Lebanon war – much more so, it seems even than to Iraq?

A: In the 1990s, there was a significant section of left opinion – not numerous, but influential – that believed in liberal interventionism. These people regarded the Kosovo war as a great success. That success put great credit in Tony Blair’s account, credit he used to justify Iraq. Because Iraq is seen as not having worked as it should have done, any military action in the Middle East faces a much higher hurdle.

Beyond that, it is difficult for anyone not in Britain to appreciate how hostile elite opinion has grown to Israel has grown since the collapse of the Barak government. Hostility to Israel has become a touchstone issue around which the European left has coalesced. Without socialism, the proletarian can no longer be the poster boy of the left; the guerilla has taken his place. And Israel has become for the European left the archetype of the settler/colonial/bourgeois regime. The Palestinian is the archetype of the noble guerilla.

At a deep level in the European psyche, there flows an underground river of anti-semitism that anti-Zionism can tap into. But ultimately, anti-Israel feeling in Britain owes more to anti-westernism than to anti-semitism.

Q: You have talked a lot about cohesion – but the minority groups on the receiving end of this pressure to cohere seem to prefer their own often repressive values to the tolerance demanded by the British majority. How do you persuade the intolerant to accept the importance of toleration?

A: Places like Britain and America are attractive precisely because we have a culture of liberty. Our insistence on toleration is the best protection for all minorities: It is only a state strong enough to protect gay pride marches that is strong enough to protect mosques. And if that spirit of tolerance as undermined, it is minority groups who will be the first to find that things become grimmer. Minorities that demand freedom to practice their faith have to accept that the freedom they demand will inevitably also throw up challenges to their faith.

09/11 08:55 PM