Madeleine Bunting | ukwatch.net

Fair Wages are a Fantasy

Ellie Keen — Mon, 05 May 2008 21:55:41 +0000

... in the brutal underside of Cowboy Boss Britain

With Labour reeling from the worst electoral drubbing for four decades, you could argue that this week is not a good moment to bring out an exhaustively researched, carefully thought-out report on the blight of insecure, low-paid work in the UK, 18 months in the making. But this Wednesday was set for the date of the launch of the TUC’s Commission on Vulnerable Employment (of which I’ve been a member) many months back, and no one envisaged then that one of the biggest research initiatives of the TUC since 1997 would thump its catalogue of the inadequacies of Labour employment policy on Brown’s desk at such a point of desperate soul-searching. But I would argue that this investigative analysis is exactly what Brown needs if he is to understand what happened last Thursday.

Brown makes much of his commitment to poverty. Even his most grudging critics concede that some headway has been made on child poverty even if it has not been enough. But the headline figures obscure how stubbornly persistent the phenomenon of working poverty has been. Many poor families may now have an earner, but it has not got them out of poverty: the number of poor children living in working households is 1.4 million – exactly the same figure as it was in 1997. Half of all children living in poverty have a parent in work. The advances in child poverty have been among those on benefits, while the number of poor working households with children has actually increased by 200,000. Labour promised it would “make work pay”. It hasn’t.

Low pay is not just a problem of an extreme underclass or of migrants; it is endemic across the country. One in seven of all working households are poor; one fifth of all workers, 5.3 million people, are paid less than £6.67 an hour (two thirds of the median), the worst low-pay rate of any in Europe. It works out at less than a £12,000 salary. In some regions, the proportion of low-paid is well over 25%, while in some constituencies (in Wales, Birmingham, the West Midlands, even the rural West Country) it is comfortably over 40%. For those scratching their heads over the mystery of Labour losing Merthyr Tydfil, perhaps they should look at the pattern of low-paid, insecure work. This is the shocking record of a country after 11 years of Labour rule and economic boom. It explains why the 10p tax debacle caused such resentment: these are the “hard-working families” extolled in Brown’s speeches and yet they are scrabbling to make ends meet. The Brownite rhetoric of “unleashing potential” is a nonsense to those trapped in jobs that consign them to fall ever further behind.

This report challenges another of Brown’s much-used rhetorical flourishes: fairness. He talks of it as a national characteristic, but it’s not one that the 5 million-strong army of low-paid, insecure workers would recognise. This is the section of the labour market where regulations about the minimum wage, holiday pay and employment rights reach only intermittently or not at all. The chance of an employer being inspected on the minimum wage is once every 330 years. Given such odds, an unscrupulous employer takes the risk.

Labour has made much of bringing in the minimum wage and the working time directive (which gave many workers their first rights to paid holiday) but after these advances, the reality is that progress in tackling Britain’s chronic problem with low-paid, insecure work stalled. Increases in the minimum wage are not keeping pace with average earnings, and it is set at a considerably lower rate than in other countries. A combination of political cowardice (Brown didn’t want a fight with the CBI) and indifference – it earns no political capital with middle England – ensured that Labour has repeatedly prevaricated in tackling this brutal underside of Britain’s economic boom. It has fudged crucial issues such as equal treatment for agency workers or the much-needed clarification on worker status, a legal loophole which makes a mockery of employment rights – both were manifesto commitments.

The months of sitting on the commission listening to people’s accounts of their working lives and to those who tried to offer advice when things went wrong provided a glimpse of what an obstacle course it is when you’re poor. It’s not always the lack of material resources that cuts deepest, but the lack of power and the absence of options. When you’re sacked or when you don’t get the sick pay or holiday pay you are owed, how do you fight back? How do you find the employment adviser to help or the courage to stand up to an employer and the sheer guts to take a case to an employment tribunal with no legal aid or a lawyer to help you? The answer is that more often you don’t, you can’t – and that’s how you get trapped in bad jobs.

Poor pay is inextricably bound up with a culture of institutional negligence: no one ensures workers know their rights or how to find out about them; a myriad of enforcement agencies with tiny budgets confuse everyone, and the legal system to arbitrate on abuse is slow and inaccessible. While the government has consulted and dithered, low-paid, insecure work has flourished like some rapacious mould. The face-to-face legal advisers (which the most vulnerable are known to find easier to deal with) have been axed and replaced with cheap websites and telephone helplines (but how do you know about them?). English language lessons have been cut. While millions of pounds are devoted to advertising for benefit fraud, the amount allocated to advertise the national minimum wage was, until a recent increase, a sixth of that spent on a government campaign urging people to use tissues when they sneeze.

Here is a compelling moral purpose on which that famous Brown compass could take its bearings. I haven’t a clue if it will restore his electoral fortunes, and frankly that’s not the point. This is an issue that any Labour government worthy of its name should have sorted out by now and yet it has devoted a fraction of the effort and energy required. If Labour cannot ensure that at the end of a hard week’s work, someone has earned enough to keep themselves and their children out of poverty, then it doesn’t deserve power.

Tony Blair boasted that Britain was the “most lightly regulated labour market in the world”. The OECD puts Britain second only to the US for the lowest levels of employment protection in the developed world. This is Cowboy Boss Britain and it leaves a long trail of anger and resentment – the Citizens Advice Bureau alone deals with over half a million employment problems a year.

The most frustrating aspect of these meetings, though, was with the representatives from the political parties. Labour’s was doggedly complacent; the Conservative’s, all charm, finally admitted he knew nothing; the Liberal Democrat’s didn’t seem to have quite worked out which meeting they were in. It was a deeply depressing demonstration of how detached the political process has become from issues which are absolutely basic to the lives of millions of people.

Eat, Drink and be Miserable

Tim Holmes — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 11:46:35 +0000

There’s a pamphlet scudding around my kitchen; it has accumulated coffee rings and fingerprints, but I keep rescuing it from the recycling bin with the good intention of signing up to a green tariff on electricity again. (I can’t quite understand why the deal I signed up to years ago ever ended.) A good intention that has a 50-50 chance of fulfilment.

According to all the research, there are a lot of people like me: full of good intentions, deeply concerned about climate change and yet ineffective at translating that into their behaviour. Why? A mixture of information overload, time poverty (a much overlooked aspect of environmental sustainability is how much time it requires) and utter confusion about what “doing one’s bit” entails. Plus the killer equation: what sacrifices is one prepared to tolerate when they are pathetically insignificant compared with Chinese power stations going up at the rate of two a week?

Is it enough to have halved family meat consumption, have foregone flights for several sun-starved years and arranged a life in which habits of cycling to work and walking to school are routine? No, it’s just scratching at the surface. If the developed world is to implement the 80% cuts in carbon emissions the UN demands as part of the talks beginning in Bali today, the lives of our children will have to be dramatically different from everything we are currently bringing them up to expect.

In 2006, each person in the UK produced 9.6 tonnes of C02, and that needs to come down to less than three tonnes by 2050. That is the non-negotiable on which there is widespread consensus among environmental scientists and economists. The much more controversial issue is whether that means consuming less or just consuming differently. In other words, does sustainability require an entire recasting of the good life, or can we continue on our way, our aspirations to comfortable homes, nice cars and fancy holidays unchecked, delivered by green techno-wizardry?

Government environmental policy is entirely built around the latter. But the problem is that there is no evidence that techno-wizardry can deliver the cuts in carbon emissions needed. In the past increased energy efficiency has only driven up aspirations: “If my fridge is more energy efficient and thus cheaper to run, perhaps I’ll now buy that air conditioning unit for these new hot summers.” Technological innovation is an important part of the solution, but it won’t be enough. Wizardry it is rightly nicknamed: there is an irrational faith at the heart of government thinking.

But the alternative of lower consumption is something no politician is prepared to consider. In one policy discussion on the subject, Treasury officials responded with contempt, and referred to it as tantamount to “going back to living in caves”. We have a political system built on economic growth as measured by gross domestic product, and that is driven by ever-rising consumer spending. Economic growth is needed to service public debt and pay for the welfare state. If people stopped shopping, the economy would ultimately collapse. No wonder, then, that one of the politicians’ tasks after a terrorist outrage is to reassure the public and urge them to keep shopping (as both George Bush and Ken Livingstone did). Advertising and marketing, huge sectors of the economy, are entirely devoted to ensuring that we keep shopping and that our children follow in our footsteps.

But there is a madness at the heart of this economic model with its terrible environmental costs. It’s best illustrated by a graph used by the US psychologist Tim Kasser at a Whitehall seminar last week. One line, representing personal income, has soared over the past 40 years; the other line marks those who describe themselves as “very happy”, and has remained the same. The gap between the two yawns ever wider. All this consumption is not necessary to our happiness.

Kasser’s graph has both hopeful and disturbing implications. On the hopeful side, this is good news: a low-consumption economy wouldn’t mean misery. But what’s disturbing is how we continue to shop when it doesn’t make us happier. He argues that our hyperconsumerism is a response to insecurity, a maladaptive type of coping mechanism. Over the past few decades, the sources of insecurity have multiplied: in addition to the manipulation long practised by advertising, there are new sources of insecurity in highly competitive market economies, ranging from identity (who am I and where do I belong?) to basics (who will look after me in my old age?). This relationship between materialism and insecurity helps explain why countries as diverse as the US and China are deeply materialistic; they are places of endemic insecurity.

The brilliance of this economic system built on insecurity is that it is self-reinforcing. The more insecure you are, the more materialistic; the more materialistic, the more insecure. As Kasser has shown, materialistic values (which are on the increase among teenagers on both sides of the Atlantic) make you more anxious, more vulnerable to depression and less cooperative. Studies show that people know what the real sources of lasting human fulfilment are – good relationships, self-acceptance, community feeling – but they face a formidable alliance of political and economic interests that have a vested interest in distracting them from that insight to ensure they work longer hours and spend more money.

The task of turning this around is enormous, and the transition to a low-consumption economy has to be carefully managed to ensure a soft landing. The greatest dilemma is that the shift could produce a damaging feedback loop – this is Kasser’s anxiety. Lower consumption could lead to economic instability and increased insecurity; plus climate change makes people insecure. The response might be to reinforce our current frantic hyperconsumerism: an attitude of “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”; or a lunge after as much as possible to insulate yourself against the impacts of climate change.

But equally possible is a win-win scenario; a low-consumption economy oriented towards facilitating the real sources of human fulfilment. Most of us dimly recognise that huge lifestyle changes are necessary, but we’re waiting for someone else to initiate the process. It’s a question of “I will if you will” – the title of a thoughtful report last year from the government’s Sustainable Development Commission.

Hearteningly, we know it can be done – our parents and grandparents managed it in the second world war. This useful analogy, explored by Andrew Simms in his book Ecological Debt, demonstrates the critical role of government. In the early 1940s, a dramatic drop in household consumption was achieved – not by relying on the good intentions of individuals (and their ability to act on that coffee-stained pamphlet), but by the government orchestrating a massive propaganda exercise combined with a rationing system and a luxury tax. This will be the stuff of 21st-century politics – something that, right now, all the main political parties are much too scared to admit.

m.bunting@guardian.co.uk

The Iraq war has become a disaster that we have chosen to forget

JamieSW — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:01:56 +0000

‘You think you are innocent, but you’re not,” said the British Muslim suicide bomber in the Channel 4 television drama Britz last week. As the compelling actor Manjinder Virk recited her suicide statement to camera, she went on: thousands of women and children are dying every day in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet the governments responsible have been returned to power.

Her assertion sticks in the mind because it goes straight to the heart of how we choose to forget, choose not to understand; and how from such choices it becomes possible to imagine our innocence.

That’s not to say that her own moral choices were defensible – she blew up herself, her beloved brother, fellow Muslims and plenty of women in the crowd – but the challenge even from such a morally flawed character persists. Can we claim innocence of the chaotic violence of Iraq now normalised into the background of our lives? Suicide bombs have long since become routine radio noise. We’re numbed to the atrocities; except for some stalwarts, the initial anti-war activism has been crowded out by other responsibilities. Life goes on, even if in Baghdad it frequently doesn’t.

And to accompany the indifference is the creeping denial of responsibility. Government ministers now talk of Iraq as a tragedy, as if it was a natural disaster and they had no hand in its making. There’s a public revulsion at the violent sectarian struggles best summed up as “a plague on all their houses”, as even the horror gives way to exhaustion.

The irony is that in this great age of communications and saturation media, this is perhaps the most important war to become nigh on impossible to report. Unless the reporter is embedded with the occupation forces, it takes either terrifying courage or extraordinary ingenuity to bring images to our screens of those caught up in the awful maelstrom of this imploded country. Without the human stories that bring people and their suffering so vividly to life, there is little chance of public opinion re-engaging with the biggest political calamity of our time.

The Iraq war represents the end of the media as a major actor in war. In Bosnia journalists stirred western Europe’s conscience with their vivid accounts; these were people we came to understand, recognise and empathise with, and public opinion forced recalcitrant governments to take note and act. It was a lesson not lost on the Kosovans: they ensured the media saw every atrocity, and the coverage was used to secure a comparable outcome to Bosnia – western governments were forced to act. But in Iraq the number of journalists killed (now at least 138) means that this war is near private – the images and people who might make the horror of this war real don’t reach our screens. It’s no longer a war that is accessible to public scrutiny or to democratic engagement.

It may have been Iraqi suspicion of western media that ensured this outcome, but it’s one that serves US interests nicely. The indifference, the exhaustion and the difficulty of reporting leaves the US forces with arguably a freer hand than they have had in any field of operations for decades. While the Americans and the British keep trying to persuade their public that the war is over – a habit initiated by George Bush himself when he announced his pyrrhic victory on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf in May 2003 – they can carry on fighting it. And there are plenty of people only too eager to hope their political leaders are right and that the whole problem of a country they never knew much about just goes away.

All of which makes the achievement of the few who do break through this news blackout all the more remarkable – Ghaith Abdul-Ahad on this paper, and the Guardian’s Emmy-winning film made by an Iraqi doctor on his Baghdad hospital, for example. This week a book is published by another: Dahr Jamail was a mountain guide in Alaska in 2003 who began to take an interest in US foreign policy and ended up picking up his backpack and swapping American mountains for Baghdad and Falluja, driven by a fierce moral imperative that “as a US citizen he was complicit in the devastation of Iraq”. After more than three years of reporting he has post-traumatic stress disorder, but has not lost his conviction that “if the people of the United States had the real story about what their government has done in Iraq, the occupation would already have ended”.

What is chilling about Jamail’s accounts is the routine destructiveness of the US forces; how they demolish nearby homes after a roadside bomb, leave unexploded munitions in the fields of farmers who don’t give information, bulldoze orchards. Livelihoods destroyed, families displaced every day, incubating hatred. One of the worst episodes occurred when Jamail’s friend was caught by chance at prayer time in a mosque when worshippers were shot dead, with children trapped in the mayhem: a holy place desecrated in a US operation. We may know nothing of such routine details of the prosecution of this war, but these are the stories filling the Arabic media. Across the Muslim world they are taken as irrefutable evidence of the humiliation and persecution of their Islamic faith. We can only pretend we don’t understand.

In the meantime, the biggest human displacement crisis in the Middle East for 60 years is unfolding, the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world. One in six Iraqis has now been displaced, 60,000 a month are leaving the country, spilling into Syria (1.4 million) and Jordan (750,000). In an uncanny magnification of our own anxieties about migration and the strain on public services, the capacities of these two Middle Eastern countries to educate thousands of traumatised children or provide basic healthcare have been swamped. The UN’s budget for refugees in Syria for 2007 is $700,000 – less than a dollar per person. But this crisis offers no telegenic vistas – people are crammed into the apartments of friends rather than tents on a windy African plain. So it gets even less attention.

Of these millions, Britain confirmed last week that it will take just 500 refugees with a record of having worked for British forces. It drags its feet over offering any more assistance for dispersal, despite requests from the UN; of 123 from Jordan whom the UN have allocated to Britain on tight criteria of having relatives in this country to provide for them, we have so far accepted only three. Britain washes its hands of the consequences of its invasion with the US. There’s a horrible contradiction here: those in power accept no responsibility. Those who might have a sense of responsibility feel utterly powerless.

It can take a generation or more for people to grasp the significance and magnitude of historical events. Facts that are infinitely more bizarre and awful than fiction – as Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine documents – take a long time to be fully absorbed. The Iraq war has been about the abject failure of democracy: governments have not been held to account for a war that has squandered lives, billions in public money and the stability of an entire region with reckless criminality.

- Dahr Jamail speaks at War, Truth and the Media, a conference at the London School of Economics, on November 17

Fear and Loathing

eddie — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 14:53:58 +0000

Anxiety about terrorism is now shaping all of Britain’s political debate and redefining allegiances

One of the most powerful currencies in political life is fear. Whether it is avian flu or terrorism, when we are fearful we listen more closely to politicians. We expect them to reassure us. In this respect we are still deeply dependent on politicians, despite our cynicism towards political life.
In the seven weeks since the London bombings, we can trace how fear is shaping our political culture – and distorting it. The danger is that the imperative to satisfy the emotional needs posed by fear and its close associate, anger, will end up crippling our capacity to respond effectively to the threat of Islamist terrorism. The “what works” British pragmatism is in danger of being junked for emotionally satisfying but irrelevant symbolism – a few individuals are banned or deported but the websites they run will penetrate just as deeply into the hearts and minds of some British Muslims.

There are three key ways in which fear shapes politics. The first is that politicians provide a narrative structure that can satisfy the “why” question: why us, why now and why here? That involves a clear plot and a plausible cast of goodies and baddies. The scale of the plot must be big enough to provide a large enough description of our fear, which usually means the threat is greatly inflated. And the goodies, of course, must win. The aim of the narrative is to offer emotional reassurance on several levels. It has to say it’s understandable you’re so afraid; we’re on the side of good against evil; we will vanquish our enemies.

Last week, it was the turn of David Cameron, the shadow education secretary and prospective Tory leader, to demonstrate how he has mastered the new orthodoxy – the politics of fear – in a widely reported speech in London. Like many others on both sides of the Atlantic, Cameron had been rummaging for props in 20th-century history to find familiar analogies that can meet all of the above criteria. For a growing number in the Anglo-American political establishment, Nazism fits the bill best. Here was an epic struggle of Britain and America against an evil system in which we were victorious – our proudest hour and all that. So Cameron duly framed his understanding of Islamist terrorism within the context of Nazism. He mentioned two points they have in common: their use of violence and their hatred of cosmopolitan influences.

What he overlooks, along with many others who use the term Islamo-fascism, is how little relevance these mass political movements and their capture of the state have to Islamist terrorism – let alone the enormous exaggeration required to liken the threat of a few hundred potential terrorists in the UK with a sustained world war in which hundreds of thousands of Britons died fighting a hugely powerful, highly organised nation state.

The real beauty of the Nazi analogy is that it provides a valuable political opportunity to define yourself and ensure a damaging definition of your opponent. Positioning in an argument is key, and the Islamo-fascism analogy enables the appeasement slur to be used against any “who try to explain jihadist violence”, as Cameron put it.

Fear is now shaping all political debate and redefining political allegiances. Throughout the British media, such references to appeasement, and similarly to the wilful blindness of the “Auden generation” towards the atrocities of Stalin, have become common over the summer. On the right, it’s now an unquestioned chorus; on the left, the self-styled “hard” liberals have declared civil war on their former fellow political travellers. Classics in this latter genre have been penned repeatedly in the past few weeks. For example, the author Tim Lott recently wrote of how enraged he was not just by “passive Muslims” but by the “self-hating, intellectually and morally moribund response of the British liberal left”. Columnist John Rentoul talked last week of the “ideological succour” provided by “half-apologists” on the left.

This reflects the second way fear shapes political life: the desire for uncompromising clarity. When people are fearful, they want to know who’s on their side and who’s not – everyone has to be assigned as goodies or baddies, good or evil. Anyone who introduces complexity or context blurs that clarity and must be bullied into silence. So there is now a growing constituency that no longer distinguishes between the analysis and the justification of an atrocity. The result is a willed ignorance – people don’t want to understand. There’s a blanket rejection of how understanding is the crucial underpinning for effective policy. They want only a politics of symbolism to meet their emotional responses of fear and anger.

Finally, the third impact of fear is that it, understandably, prompts a great desire for solidarity. There has been much talk of standing together and uniting around shared values. But the quest for a meaningful national identity around which we can all rally is at risk of buckling under the weight of its contradictions. For example, there have been two parallel debates about national identity this summer. One has talked patriotically of British values of tolerance and fair play (values of recent coinage, incidentally, which weren’t much in evidence in either the acquisition or disposal of our empire). The other, based on the insight of our holiday comparative study in national behaviours, is full of self-loathing due to our propensity for binge drinking and sexual debauchery – as appalled Greeks were pointing out last week. How do we convince sceptical Muslims that signing up to the first doesn’t involve the second? How do we explain which bit of “our way of life” we want everyone to rally around?

“Pulling together” is emotionally reassuring, but it is the most contested territory in this new politics of fear. For example, what does loyalty or patriotism mean when an increasing number of people across the globe live where they don’t want to belong? In a thought- provoking article in this month’s Prospect, the philosopher Bhikhu Parekh says it is incumbent on migrants to develop an emotional and moral commitment to their host country. But if they don’t, how is such a thing to be engineered? The politics of fear will drive a frenzied policy spree on community cohesion in coming months.

The most troubling aspect of how fear is distorting our political life is that it is crippling our grasp of two crucial truths: Islamist terrorism is vicious but it will not destroy our country – it can kill hundreds but it will not take over our government and impose sharia law. We need to be much calmer about the nature of the threat, and more sophisticated about the scale of risk. What’s happened to that British virtue of prosaic good sense so much in evidence on the evening of July 7 and so little in evidence since?

Second, our biggest ally in tracking down the perpetrators and our only chance of defeating Islamist terrorism is the Muslim community itself. That’s why the willed ignorance is so dangerous. A sophisticated understanding is vital if we are to identify and nurture the processes of development and thinking among Muslims that are already struggling to defeat Islamist extremism and chart another future for the faith.

Throwing Mud at Muslims

jo — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 11:03:24 +0000

A campaign is being orchestrated through the media to destroy the credibility of many of the most important Muslim institutions in Britain, including the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). The impact of this campaign – in the Observer and particularly in John Ware’s Panorama documentary last night – will be a powerful boost for the increasingly widespread view that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim: underneath, “they” are all extremists who are racist, contemptuous of the west, and intent on a political agenda.

A legitimate and much-needed debate among British Muslims about a distinctive expression of Islam in a non-Muslim country has been hijacked and poisonously distorted. Journalists need to be very careful: we are entering a new era of McCarthyism and, if we are not to be complicit, we need to be scrupulously responsible and conscientious in unravelling the complexity of Islam in its many spiritual and political interpretations in recent decades.
The central charge of the campaign is that the MCB, its secretary general, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, and some of its most important affiliates – such as the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, the Muslim Association of Britain and the East London Mosque – condone or even actively promote ideas which, as Ware claimed in Panorama, “feed extremism”; such ideas are a “slippery slope”, which “people who become extremists start to go down”.

This reflects a growing paranoia evident on the pages of tabloids and in government about “preachers of hate” and “hate literature”. It’s a paranoia which chooses to ignore that the main inspiration for British Muslim extremists is not their local mosques but television footage of Palestine and Iraq.

So what are those ideas that feed extremism? Ware veered erratically from the McCarthyite absurd to some legitimate accusations. First on the charge sheet were examples of the former: the “conviction that Islam is a superior faith and culture which Christians and Jews in the west are conspiring to undermine”, and a “distaste for western secular culture”. This is ridiculous; I’ve yet to meet a member of any faith who doesn’t believe in the superiority of their beliefs, while fear of being undermined is similarly common. Since when has “distaste” become a cause for suspicion?

On the other hand, where the campaign makes a legitimate accusation is that there is a virulent strain of anti-semitism and anti-Christian sentiment that appears in some Saudi-influenced strands of Islam. Ware points out that a Saudi imam invited to the East London Mosque had preached in just such terms in Saudi Arabia in sermons subsequently published on the web.

But alongside such troubling points, Ware launched an attack on the influential Pakistani political philosopher Mawlana Mawdudi with some sly editing of quotes. A key figure in the 50s, Mawdudi advocated that Muslims look to Islam, not the west, to build their post-colonial nations. He used anti-western, revolutionary language (but never advocated violence) and was a quintessential product of his time. A younger generation of British-born Muslim thinkers find his ideas less relevant for a minority in the west.

But Ware is not interested in that kind of context or in the process by which a distinctively British Islam is evolving from this legacy. The Leicester-based thinktank Islamic Foundation, founded in the 70s by a close associate of Mawdudi, and Sacranie, who openly acknowledges his huge debt to Mawdudi, are smeared by association.

Ware is at his most McCarthyite when he challenges Sacranie to account for an imam in Leeds who is preaching that the war on terror is really a war on Islam. Ware insists that it is Sacranie’s job to “disabuse” British Muslims of this view and put this imam “right”. Ware laid down his own opinion and, with extraordinary presumption, demanded that Sacranie impose it on the Muslim community.

In that short exchange, Ware revealed his lack of comprehension of the Muslim community. Sacranie only has as much power as the MCB affiliate organisations allow him – the idea of him putting an imam right is ridiculous. The tiny, volunteer-run MCB doesn’t have the power to police the views of its disparate membership. Sacranie and the MCB have a tightrope to walk. On the one hand, the government and non-Muslim Britain are piling on the pressure that they deliver a law-abiding, loyal ethnic minority. On the other, an increasingly restless younger generation of Muslims criticise the MCB as far too moderate, a sell-out establishment stooge cosying up to Tony Blair.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to make of the MCB and Sacranie – and Ware details some of them – such as Sacranie’s reprehensible refusal to attend the Holocaust memorial service last January and his decision to attend a memorial service for the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin. The MCB bears all the characteristics of a diverse migrant community’s struggle to develop a common voice – and it makes plenty of mistakes. But Ware has thrown so much mud around in the course of his programme that much more of it will stick than is deserved.

What is deeply troubling is how exacting British society is becoming of its Muslims. A new set of “cricket tests” are being imposed on British Muslims – they are expected to sign up enthusiastically to every aspect of western secular society and to jettison any part of their intellectual heritage that is critical of the west. They are expected to keep their faith entirely out of politics (yet faith plays a crucial role in US politics). Set the bar high enough and all will fail – the consequences of that on the streets of Luton and Bradford will be disastrous, and not just for Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims.