Sunak's Desperate Defence of Liberalism

This evening, Rishi Sunak emerged from Downing Street around 5:45pm to give a special speech, ostensibly on the dangers of Islamic extremism. 

Better late than never, some might say.

Yet it turned out to be just another infuriating indictment of the utterly failed project known as the Conservative Party. 

Sunak’s speech amounted to a cowardly, anti-conservative, arguably anti-white celebration of hyper-liberalism.

Empathy was extended, perfectly reasonably, to “Jewish children” and “Muslim women”, but there was no mention of the longstanding suffering of the average Brit.

Nothing about the wider context of attacks like Manchester Arena, or even Sir David Amess. Yet the prime minister was happy to expand the scope of his speech when, for example, taking a bizarre pop at the irrelevant Nick Griffin, who had praised George Galloway on X.

With embarrassing transparency, each time Sunak mentioned Islamic extremism he coupled it with the (largely imaginary) threat of the ‘far right’, for instance stating that: “Islamist extremists and far right groups are spreading a poison…that poison is extremism” (an oddly tautologous line that could have benefitted from a rewrite).

He also made a point of saying: “I stand here as our country’s first non-white prime minister, leading the most diverse government in our country’s history”, an emphasis that went beyond the liberal and veered into pure woke territory.

The PM was attempting to sell us on the colour-blind dream of liberalism, yet all he did was sell us out, with his clear implication that “non-white” and “diverse” are values in and of themselves. A truly colour-bind speech would have simply eschewed these woke (and, yes, anti-white) virtue baubles.

There was also anti-conservative sentiment in his downplaying of religious traditions and rejection of the Scrutonian primacy of place, as Sunak claimed that it is not “the God you believe in, or where you were born that will determine your success”, citing instead the industrious anywhere man, presumably a managerial manlet in an undersized suit.

The Christian church was praised, but only for its political liberalism, as Britain’s multi-faith society was said to be “all underpinned by the tolerance of our established Christian church”. The image of the Christian church as some kind of bloated bureaucracy—there solely to uphold every faith but its own—is bizarre and disturbing, yet sadly not inaccurate.

All in all, it was a horrible speech that demonstrated everything wrong with the Conservative Party.

Clearly, the chaos of the recent protests and intimidation of MPs had to be addressed. Yet Sunak could only do it by pandering to the worldview that has created these problems in the first place, whilst invoking standard liberal and even leftist scapegoats due to his fear of focusing plainly on the real issue.

You can watch the whole speech here: