Welcome to this week’s Britain’s favourite Sunday sermon.
Now, you may recall last week I spoke about British culture. I spoke about population growth and that we should be discussing this, debating this, as is the way in a proper democracy and I also then went on a program midweek on the BBC talking about immigration and the British culture.
Fascinating, someone kindly sent me an email as well saying, “when you define the British culture what do you mean by that?” And this person said well actually it’s simple, it’s law, it’s language, it’s queuing! I thought there was something rather fun about that, but let me tell you what the British culture is not. It’s not the experience that I had as I arrived on Wednesday evening at the BBC where there was a pro Palestine demonstration.
Very noisy, very loud about 30 people there and I thought well I’ll just pop along and have a chat. I was a few minutes early and I often do this with people from the other side of the debate, whether it’s picket lines, I often go and have a chat whether it’s Steve Bray and his anti- Brexit campaigning in Parliament Square, I’ll occasionally pop along we’ll have a chat, sometimes shake hands and we respectfully agree to disagree so I thought I’d ask these pro Palestine people just a couple of simple questions and in a democracy that’s what you do you, you debate, but you listen, you have a sense of tolerance of listening to the other side.
So the questions I asked were fairly simple I said; “Do you agree that Hamas should release the hostages that they’re holding in Gaza, the Israeli hostages, well over a hundred of them still there?” and then I said; “Do you condemn Hamas for the attacks on October the 7th?”
Wow, I mean you could not believe the response. Instead of talking to me, they had been playing drums and they’d been talking through their megaphone, what do they do? They increased the volume and the tempo of the drums, they wouldn’t answer a single question, they were shouting and yelling on the megaphone, they were wagging their fingers at me.
I asked 10 different people in this crowd the same questions; “would they free the hostages?” “Did they condemn Hamas for the October 7th attack” and, “Should Hamas a terror group continue to govern Gaza?”
These people are supposedly pro ceasefire, pro Palestinians and all I got was shouting, yelling megaphones and then it started, the pushing the shoving and I half expected a punch, yes, I’ve got to be honest, it was one of the probably the most scary times I’ve actually ever experienced in politics and I tell you what that is not the British culture, that is not the British way.
I don’t know who these people were with their masks, their faces covered, their hoods. I could see a few of the faces but I spoke last week about being a sort of Everest Base Camp of sectarian politics and that was it. Live in Central London outside the BBC these people don’t want to engage in any form of democratic debate, they want a one-sided ceasefire by Israel, which basically means they want surrender and of course they have their genocidal chants from “The River To The Sea” and “Yemen, Yemen” you know, to try and turn another ship around.
These people don’t believe in democracy, not at all, they’re bullies, they’re thugs, they’re vile, they have absolutely no place in the United Kingdom, the democratic nation that we love. Frankly they don’t subscribe or empathise with British culture.
I think they want to bring a completely different culture to our way of life and that’s not who we are, it’s not what we want to be, it’s not what we should be. Frankly, if that’s what these people want, please go and live somewhere else where they practice your type of politics, brutality, division & violence. People do that elsewhere, we don’t do that in the United Kingdom.
That was the moment when I realised just how serious this has become, I knew it was bad. I was the first to call for the marches to be banned, these “pro Palestine marchers”, I call for them to be banned and the week after October the 7th I said they would insight hatred, violence and anti-Semitism.
I was right then and I’m right now, that’s who these people are, they’re hateful, they are violent, they are deeply anti-semitic, they didn’t want to engage in any debate, they didn’t want to free the hostages at all, this isn’t a pro Palestine demonstration. 100% of those people on that demo, some 30 people were pro Hamas. So, all of those people out there who say the vast majority of people on these marches are peace loving and just want peace and a sustainable ceasefire, sorry I’m not buying it at all, because actually when you go and question people that’s the reaction you get, it’s not good, it’s not who we are, it’s not our British culture.
But, if a government doesn’t have the guts to recognise this and to ban these anti-semitic hateful marches which we should have done, you get a vacuum and evil fills a vacuum and that’s what sadly we’re now seeing on our streets up and down the country.
If we allow our population to increase by over a million people a year coming from all over the world, different faiths, different religions, different cultures, different Creeds or indeed no faith but just a different way of life, a different understanding of how you treat people, how you respect people, how you have tolerance for different views, then we’re going to end up in serious deep trouble, even more division and more trouble than we’ve already got.
It requires leadership, it requires the courage to say that’s not who we are, that’s not our way of life, that’s not our culture, that’s not how we do things.
That’s why I believe absolutely that smart immigration works when people integrate, when they’re absorbed in sensible numbers, that can work with communities, that can actually empathise with and sign up to our British culture and what’s quite clear is that way too many of those coming into the United Kingdom have no interest in that and therefore we’ve got these silos completely isolated.
Different cultures just living alongside each other when you get a bit of tension this is what happens, it’s not the way to go, we’ve got to be honest about it because if not we’ve got a general election coming up later this year.
This has the potential, I regret to say, to be the first sectarian election in a sense that we really experienced in the UK you could have extreme islamist candidates beating Labour party candidates in certain constituencies and you have to ask yourself, “is that really going to help unify people under a British culture?”
If we don’t address this, if we don’t have this debate now we are sleepwalking into disaster. I have a very clear picture of where this is potentially going and I think we’ve just got to be honest about it and say actually that’s not where we want to go thank you very much, we don’t want Sharia law in any part part of our society, our communities, our legal system.
We rely 100% exclusively on our English legal system because actually that’s part of the bedrock of why people love and admire the British culture from all over the world, it’s why we’re so respected all over the world because of that fairness, that tolerance, that compassion, that understanding of different points of view.
This is serious folks we’ve got to address it now, don’t wait until it’s too late, and with that here endeth my Sunday sermon.