Douglas Murray said what?
Douglas Murray, a regular on the BBC, was invited on to Question Time last week. One of the questions was:
'Was David Cameron's 'Broken Society' claim in the wake of the Edlington case a sign of blatant electioneering?'
This is about the case of two young children who had subjected two other young children to an extremely violent attack. Douglas Murray gave the following response:
'I think the swift answer to the question is of course he is electioneering that is his job this year and we have got to be very careful as a public not to fall for the kind of procedural issues which the government and the press very often make these things into. Will the report be leaked? Will it come out? Will it not? That's actually not the issue and as so often we're being shunted into a cul-de-sac when there is a much bigger issue. We're not just a broken society, we're a society in Britain that has been assaulted for decades now. We've been assaulted in our sense apart from anything else of who we are, what we are, whether we have a right to be as a nation, we've been subjected to decades of intense immigration which has brought many benefits and many negatives... many benefits and many negatives. But one of the other things it has done is to assault Britain and the British people as an identity. If you look back four or five decades now what was it that Britain was signified by, what was it that epitomised Britian? It was institutions, the monarchy, parliament, the armed forces, all of these things have been assaulted and brought down one by one in recent years by government after government and elite after elite. What we see now in this society which is just starting to wake up to this fact is a government and others who are saying 'We have pulled it down, can anyone help us put it back together?' and what they will realise is what every small c not big C conservative realises which is that it is a lot easier to pull things down than it is to build them up. This is going to take a long time, it isn't about one press release, it isn't even going to be about one term of a conservative government, and it certainly isn't going to be about tinkering round the edges. We are going to need a revolutionary government to sort this out and there are none on the horizon'.
In an ideal world David Dimbleby would have then asked Douglas Murray 'Didn't you say in your speech in 2006 on Islam in Europe that Islam is an opportunistic infection in Europe? Why did you call it opportunistic?'
'Was David Cameron's 'Broken Society' claim in the wake of the Edlington case a sign of blatant electioneering?'
This is about the case of two young children who had subjected two other young children to an extremely violent attack. Douglas Murray gave the following response:
'I think the swift answer to the question is of course he is electioneering that is his job this year and we have got to be very careful as a public not to fall for the kind of procedural issues which the government and the press very often make these things into. Will the report be leaked? Will it come out? Will it not? That's actually not the issue and as so often we're being shunted into a cul-de-sac when there is a much bigger issue. We're not just a broken society, we're a society in Britain that has been assaulted for decades now. We've been assaulted in our sense apart from anything else of who we are, what we are, whether we have a right to be as a nation, we've been subjected to decades of intense immigration which has brought many benefits and many negatives... many benefits and many negatives. But one of the other things it has done is to assault Britain and the British people as an identity. If you look back four or five decades now what was it that Britain was signified by, what was it that epitomised Britian? It was institutions, the monarchy, parliament, the armed forces, all of these things have been assaulted and brought down one by one in recent years by government after government and elite after elite. What we see now in this society which is just starting to wake up to this fact is a government and others who are saying 'We have pulled it down, can anyone help us put it back together?' and what they will realise is what every small c not big C conservative realises which is that it is a lot easier to pull things down than it is to build them up. This is going to take a long time, it isn't about one press release, it isn't even going to be about one term of a conservative government, and it certainly isn't going to be about tinkering round the edges. We are going to need a revolutionary government to sort this out and there are none on the horizon'.
In an ideal world David Dimbleby would have then asked Douglas Murray 'Didn't you say in your speech in 2006 on Islam in Europe that Islam is an opportunistic infection in Europe? Why did you call it opportunistic?'
posted by Atif Imtiaz at Wednesday, February 03, 2010
