This is a guest post by CSC Research intern, Richard Billinge.
At daybreak yesterday French police moved
to dismantle a shanty town of tents in Calais. Until recently it had been home
to some 800-1500 would-be immigrants to Britain (depending on the newspaper you
read), a great number of them Afghans.
Reproduced below is my latest blog for Standpoint.
The
recent emergence of the English Defence League (EDL) is the inevitable outcome
of the failure of a government to properly address Islamic extremism topped off
with good old fashioned British hooliganism and bigotry. The involvement of groups like the EDL in
working against Islamic extremism serves to give ammunition to those who
already claim that all anti-Islamists are racists at heart.
The Tax
Payer's Alliance (TPA) has released
figures today on every local authority that has received Preventing
Violent Extremism (PVE) funding and what organisations have benefited from
it. The PVE fund has so far given out £12 million in tax payer money to
projects aimed at preventing radicalisation.
Readers may remember that back in April, counter
terrorism officers arrested
12 students in the North West of England as part of Operation Pathway. The government has now released an update
about the arrests and subsequent detentions, which have caused much consternation
among some British Muslims, who (in some cases justifiably) saw the arrests as another
example of the increased suspicion and victimisation of Muslims in the UK.
