Big Brother: Live Eviction – If Only Our Government Could Show Equal Resolve

Civitas, 14 July 2006

Every night at this time of year, Channel Four broadcasts an episode of its seemingly interminable and tedious Big Brother programme. Friday night episodes reveal the identity of whichever housemate viewers have voted to be evicted that week from the house in which they are incarcerated together for the duration of the series.
At 7.30pm tonight, an hour before the screening of that weekly episode, Channel Four is due to broadcast a current affairs programme that promises to be of far greater public interest and importance.
Paradoxically, and regrettably, rather than about an eviction carried out by an authority resembling far more closely than Channel Four’s reality-tv series that for which George Orwell famously coined that programme’s title, tonight’s Channel Four current affairs programme, which goes out as part of its 30 Minutes series of documentaries, tells of the failure of our own government to act against a clear and present threat to the safety of the realm.

Entitled ‘Who Speaks for Muslims?’ and presented by Martin Bright, Political Editor of the New Statesman, tonight’s documentary will argue, to use the words of Channel Four’s own website, ‘that the government is failing the people of Britain and ignoring the vast majority of the moderate Muslim community’.
The way in which the programme will accuse the government of being guilty of what, if its claims are correct, amounts to a massive dereliction of its duty towards the public is by its pursuing a policy of appeasement towards radical Islamists and their sympathisers here at the cost of its ignoring the views and often physical safety of the vast majority of moderate and peace-loving British Muslims.
Based on documents leaked by a whistle-blower at the Foreign Office concerned at the government’s policy of appeasement towards such radical Islamists as it has, without warrant, elevated into serving as representatives and spokesmen for the entire British Muslim community, the programme will expose how moderate majority Muslim opinion in Britain has been side-lined and silenced, and the country’s safety thereby imperilled, by the government having come to rely for advice on Muslim-related issues on the opinions of those extremists and their sympathisers to whose extreme views it has given the mantle of legitimacy by appointing as its advisers on such issues.
To coincide with the broadcast of tonight’s Channel Four programme, the independent think-tank Policy Exchange has just published a 75 page pamphlet on the subject of it written by Martin Bright, entitled When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: The British State’s flirtation with radical Islamism, which contains copies of all the leaked Foreign Office documents on which tonight’s tv programme is based. There is also a very informative news report on the subject in today’s Times.
Without at the time knowing about tonight’s tv programme, it seems to bear out fully the concerns I raised about the manner of the government’s current dealings with the British Muslim community in the blog that I posted here yesterday.
Wishing readers of the Civitas blog happy, if uncomfortable, viewing tonight!