First of all let me disappoint one or two of you. We are not suddenly going to get rid of our Muslims, we are not going to have mass round-ups and incarcerate them inside, er, 'concentration' camps, and we are not going to ship them all back to 'where they belong' (assuming you could work that out given how many of them were born in this country), and finally, we are not going to liquidate them. Why? Because in this country we just don't do that sort of thing any more, although I cannot speak for some of our European neighbours. So, get used to the idea. They're here, they're staying and there's an end on't!
However, there is no doubt that the Muslim population inside the UK is host to some deadly and malignant groupuscules who must be pursued with vigor by the appointed forces of law and order. This sort of thing is not unusual here, we had exactly the same problem during the Ulster travails when the indigent Irish population provided cover for some equally mad, bad people intent on killing as many of us as possible. Did that make the entire UK-based Irish population enemies of the realm? Of course not, a tiny minority were, a fairly large but inactive swathe was generally sympathetic for the usual reasons of soppy 'Oirish' sentimentality and the remainder ignored it all because they simply wanted to get on with their lives. Thus it is, in my opinion, with our Muslim population.
And it's no good moaning and groaning about the political class and their mistakes of the past in letting all these people in - you voted for 'em! And anyway, whatever our politicians would or should have done, the immigrants would have come in by hook or by crook - because that's the way the world is today. Sometimes I imagine you 'little Englanders' gazing fondly at your old atlases, like the ones I had at primary school in the '40s, and admiring the great swathes of red that covered the globe which indicated the reach and spread of the British empire. Of course, that was 'immigration', too, when you think about it - but of the right sort, doncha' know, old boy!
Immigrants from whatever ethnicity will always have their fair share of rogues and vagabonds and will certainly arrive with cultural, political and religious baggage but the majority of them have taken a very risky leap into an unknown in the hope of making a better life for themselves. As such, they are usually diligent, hard workers who add to the wealth and well-being of their host nation. The problem starts with their off-spring born inside this country, some of whom lose the virtues of their parents and, alas, take up the very worst characteristics of their hosts - and, boy, do we have some awful characteristics as any Friday or Saturday night on a High Street will confirm! They are mostly male and young and they are imbued with what I call the 'warrior instinct', in other words, they want to go and prove themselves in battle - exactly the same motives I had when, young and daft, I volunteered for the army in 1959!
So, our security services need to cut out the cancer inside our Muslim population but whilst they need to do it with ruthless diligence they must also do it with intelligent care, just as a surgeon slicing into a cancerous area must be careful how he wields his scalpel lest he kill the patient! So far, it seems to me, our security services have done an excellent job but of course, as the old saying has it, the terrorists only have to get lucky once!
There is, however, one other crucial activity that needs to be pursued with vigor and this is one that must take place at the local rather than the national level. There are people, many of them, who are imbued with what I will call 'community spirit'. (I am not one of them, the very word 'community' makes me shudder but then I'm just a grumpy, old loner slumped in front of a computer!) At the local level, every club, every organisation, every association of any sort should make a determined effort to make contact with their local immigrant community of whatever sort. I would even be in favour of government grants to clubs and societies who can prove that they have made positive moves towards their local immigrants. I urge this not because I have suddenly become 'Mr. Sociable' (no chance!) but because it is essential that every effort is made to seperate the 'goodies' from the 'baddies', or to use the old tactical jargon, it is necessary to 'drain the swamp'.
In the meantime, we must all uphold the right of people to be rude about other people whilst at the same time urging them not to be! Good manners makes for a civil society, bad mannes produces the sort of yobbery that is commonplace today. There are two adjuncts to that, however. If your rudeness is linked in anyway to urging or provoking violence against an individual or an entity then the existing law should be used with full effect. Secondly, there must, in future, be no limits on who or what can be the subject of rudery. From pictures of Mohammed to the mob at Hillsborough who crushed 'footie' fans to death, nothing and no-one is exempt. And that includes all those 'precious' icons so dearly beloved by the Left!
