Taqiyya and Blasphemy Laws in the UK

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri



In British law, race and religion are increasingly becoming deliberately confused for the purpose of accusing critics of Islam of racism.

A soccer fan was arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after allegedly ripping up pages of the Quran and throwing them at a match. While on bail, he was also banned from attending any football games, visiting St Andrew's - the stadium of the incident -, and going to any city where his team Middlesbrough was playing.

Insults against Islam are taken very seriously in Britain, and the world of soccer is particularly sensitive to them. After the incident, Middlesbrough Football Club suspended six more people, and vowed to ban anyone convicted of the “crime” from the Riverside Stadium, its home ground, for life.

A Middlesbrough club spokesman said it operates a "zero tolerance policy" towards all forms of discrimination, and supports football's pledge to "eradicate racism in all its forms".

Nobody could answer the question of what race Islam is. Muslims belong to all races, including white. But we know that the word “racism” has lost its original sense, and indeed any sense.

Originally the concept of racism had a place and an important role in both ethical and political discourses.

Now it’s best avoided because it’s lost its positive characteristics, its usefulness, and has instead become a tool for intolerance, intimidation, restriction of freedom of speech and other freedoms, in short a means of oppression.

The 19th-century German philosopher Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of modern logic, distinguished between the two dimensions of a concept: its meaning (or reference) and its sense.

The meaning or denotation is the class of objects to which the concept refers, which is comprised by the concept.

The sense or connotation is the concept's descriptive qualities.

There is an inverse proportion between the two: the larger the meaning the narrower the sense and vice versa.

A concept like "universe", just because it has as reference an all-including class of objects, has practically no sense, in that it has very little descriptive, or delimitative, power.

Defining a word means exactly that, giving it borders that restrict it and in so doing make it precise.

Since the word "racism" has started being used to refer to many attitudes, behaviours and ideas that had little or nothing to do with racism in the strict sense, its meaning has become progressively larger and larger, correspondingly decreasing its sense.

When today I hear about someone or something being called "racist", I hardly ever believe that it’s true. The likeliest explanation, I think to myself, is either an umpteenth case of excessive political correctness, or a personal attack. The descriptive capability of the term has got lost or at least dramatically eroded.

There is at the moment a worrying trend: what has for a long time been a common Leftist ploy, the shouting of “racist” to shut down any criticism of Islam, is now tried to be enshrined in British law.

The soccer case is one example of this attempt. Another is what’s happened to Tim Burton, the Radio Officer of the party Liberty GB, which will contest the May 22 European Parliament Elections for Britain (donations to help with the election campaign are welcome).

Burton appeared at Birmingham Magistrates' Court, England, on April 8, charged with racially aggravated harassment for a few tweets in which he called prominent British Muslim Fiyaz Mujhal “a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist”.

Mujhal, founder and director of the organisation Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), was exposed by The Telegraph newspaper last year for having massaged some facts and figures about “anti-Muslim attacks” following the Woolwich murder of soldier Lee Rigby. For this and other discrepancies between police official figures of anti-Muslim crimes and the inflated ones of Tell MAMA, the organisation, which had received £375,000 from the UK government, had its public funding discontinued.

The obvious paradox here is that Tell MAMA, clearly in desperate search for “Islamophobic” crimes that could justify its requests for public funds, didn’t find a sufficient number of them of a serious enough nature. So, first it exaggerated them both quantitatively and qualitatively, calling “attacks” simple posts on Facebook and other social media. Then, when this manipulation had become well known, it used the same tactic against the people, like Tim, who called the bluff, in a self-perpetuating cycle.

Burton’s trial has been very worrying for anyone who holds dear freedom of speech and basic civil liberties. One of the worrisome aspects is the conflating of “religion” with “race”. Tim Burton was accused of racially-aggravated harassment for tweets concerning Islam. Not only Islam is clearly not a race and Muslims can and do belong to all races, but also the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service considers those two charges (racially- and religiously-aggravated crimes) as distinct and separate ones.

The Crown Prosecution Service, though, despite officially paying lip service to this distinction, in Tim Burton’s case was trying to conflate the two because it did not have sufficient ground to get a conviction on the “religiously aggravated” charge – which requires stronger evidence -, so decided to prosecute using the easier “racially aggravated” one.

As its website says, “So it will be more difficult to prosecute for inciting religious hatred as opposed to racial hatred”.

The attempt to “racialise Muslims” clearly exists but not, as Tell MAMA says, on the part of Liberty GB. It exists on the part of British Islam apologists and their allies, the politically correct Establishment.

Since there are no blasphemy laws in the UK and criticism of any religion, including Islam, is theoretically tolerated, only two alternatives are left to British Muslims who want to protect Islam from the expression of the uncomfortable truths of its supremacist and violent nature. One is to invoke the introduction of a blasphemy law; the other, subtler and more effective, is to turn existing equality, anti-racist, “hate crime” laws into a sharia-style blasphemy law.

The Macpherson Report, which followed the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993, reached the conclusion that the British police force is “institutionally racist” and, with the alleged intent of redressing the balance, established that absolutely anything perceived by a “victim” as a racist incident is de facto a racist incident: simple perception becomes legal reality, whether it’s true or not.

This makes the endeavour to legally treat anti-Islam criticism as racist even more dangerous, as it may render it subject to the ruling of the Macpherson Report.

An attempt had previously been made by the Labour government, when the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 was passed, to formulate it in such a way that it could criminalise the criticism of Islam, the Quran and Muhammad. This was made impossible by the opposition of the Catholic Church and the Church of England, as well as various evangelical Christian groups which threatened to use this law against the Quran, which is full to the brim with incitements to religious hatred. Therefore the bill had to be amended.

But what went out legally by the door of Parliamentary procedure is now being reintroduced surreptitiously through the window of politically correct police and prosecution establishment.

This is why Liberty GB held a public protest outside the courthouse and considered this trial crucially important.

Firstly, to show to the British and Western public what taqiyya – deception for the good of Islam - is and, given the special position in the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims of this divine permission to lie, to show the whole nature of Islam in relation to us through it. For this reason, Islam’s scholar Professor Hans Jansen appeared at the trial and gave evidence as expert witness on taqiyya. We christened this a “taqiyya trial”.

Secondly, to defend free speech and stop the effective use of anti-racist legislation as blasphemy laws.


Photo by Gareth Davies (Creative Commons CC BY 2.0).

Tatchell: "Gay" Is Used to Distract People from Homosexuals' Sexuality



I've written about the hijacking of language by the Left and some of its manifestations.

There are many other aspects of it, like the wounds inflicted on grammar by the use of "they", "them", "theirs" in reference to a singular subject. For example: "Everyone knows what they are doing" or "The user must log in with their password". This is done only because it's politically incorrect to use "he", "him", "his", to cover both men and women, as it allegedly gives men a status of superiority (the same as in saying "man" to mean "the human species").

Politically correct writers - like the Australian-born philosopher Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University - instead use "she" to refer to both men and women, at least remaining grammatically correct. If we want children to be properly educated, PC should not override grammar. Writing logically helps thinking logically.

The practice of employing "they" referring to a singular has spread so much that it is now in use even when it's got nothing to do with PC, like in cases where the sex of the subject is known, so either "he" or "she" would be fine. I suppose people say "they" just to be on the safe side as they don't know the rationale behind its use, or they do it even in a totally automatic, thoughtless manner.

There is a particularly interesting case of PC language: the word "gay". The homosexual movement has hijacked what was once a common English adjective meaning something completely different - in fact in many ways opposite - from the sense that has become predominant today thanks to that movement's highly successful efforts, and now we cannot use this word in the original sense any more. That is tantamount to a small group's theft of the language that belongs to everybody.

In the video above George Galloway interviews Peter Tatchell, the UK's number one homosexual activist, about what terms to describe homosexuals would be accepted by the thought police of his movement. In it Tatchell, among other things, explains the origin of the word "gay" in the modern sense of a man sexually attracted by other men.

According to Tatchell, homosexual men's intention in adopting this term for themselves was to distract people's attention from the sexual nature of their condition. I can understand why they wanted to do so: they knew that being associated with anal sex, which is repugnant to most normal people and is medically unhealthy, as medical authorities keep saying - although this is not much reported in the media -, would not be good for their PR and image.

It is a case of dissimulation, if not outright deception. And it is a rare gem that someone involved in introducing one of the most glaring examples of this kind of politically-motivated changes in our language talks about it frankly and openly.

It is not just one of us saying that the Left intentionally changed the meaning of words for political reasons, but Peter Tatchell admitting it in a video interview with George Galloway. We can document a claim with evidence directly from the horse's mouth.

We should not accept this dissembling any more than we accept taqiyya from Muslims. I never use the word "gay" except in inverted commas (unless I want to describe someone who is merry). To do so would be to give in, to help homosexualists in their disguising attempt.

"Homosexual" is an honest word. It is not offensive - in fact, homosexuals who believe this are implicitly admitting to thinking that there's something wrong with their condition. At the same time, it tells things as they are: it describes people who are sexually attracted to the same sex (from the Greek "homos", meaning "same").

Tim Burton's Trial Pronouncements: Good on Taqiyya and Harassment, Bad on Race

Overall, the acquittal of Tim Burton and the judge's rulings on the case were a victory on two fronts and maybe not so much on a third.

The judge ruled that a few tweets, even intemperate and even relating to a Muslim person, cannot be construed as harassment. He clearly said that the Harassment Act was intended for entirely different situations from this one, like stalking somebody or shouting through his letterbox.

He also, if not explicitly accepted, took into account the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya. This can be a turning point for the counterjihad movement. Muslims are generally believed by people in the West when they talk about Islam; in fact they are considered as the experts on this system of beliefs, as one could naturally assume, so they are often asked questions about Mohammedanism by the media in the expectation that they'll throw light on it and help Westerners to better understand it.

But if the Western public can now gradually come to realise that there is a good, inherent reason, rooted in Islam itself, why Muslims are not reliable and trustworthy sources of knowledge on Islam, the discourse on this pseudo-religion in the West may slowly take a different path.

Taqiyya may now be officially established in the British legal system. Although taqiyya itself may not have been part of the judge's ruling, what sets a precedent is that the doctrine has somehow been given official recognition.

There is a hierarchy of the courts in the UK. The basic rule is that a court must follow the judicial precedents from a higher court, but it is not bound to follow decisions from courts lower in the hierarchy. Roughly, the hierarchy is:

1. European Court of Justice
2. Supreme Court
3. Court of Appeal
4. Divisional Courts
5. All other courts (County, Crown, Magistrates, tribunals)

The website e-lawresources explains:

Where the precedent was set by a court of the same level, the court is generally bound by the previous decision, but this is subject to exceptions. Different considerations apply, depending on the level of court, as to whether the court may depart from a previous decision of a court of the same level.

These are the two victories. Where we didn't win is in the District Judge's acceptance that Muslims, although clearly not representing a race in the strict biological sense, can be considered a race when, as a group, treated in a different manner as other groups.

This evidently did not affect his decision, but it shows that the worrying trend of using the terms "race" and "racism" in any way that fits the goals of the politically correct brigade is still alive and well, and supported by even reasonable and intelligent judges like Mr Ian Strongman.

Three Tweets Are Not Racially Aggravated Harassment, Birmingham Court Rules; Taqiyya Doctrine Accepted

On 8 April at Birmingham Magistrates' Court, District Judge Ian Strongman heard a trial of racially aggravated harassment against Tim Burton, 61, a computing consultant from Birmingham and the Radio Officer of the British party Liberty GB.

The reason for the charge was three tweets he sent over a period of a month from early June to early July 2013 to Tell Mama UK, a helpline organisation for victims of anti-Muslim attacks that also serves to monitor and collect data on them, whose director is prominent Muslim Fiyaz Mughal.

Investigations by The Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan discovered that, in the wake of the murder of soldier Lee Rigby, Tell Mama had inflated numbers and seriousness of “Islamophobic” crimes, many of which were just posts on social media.

Discrepancies were also found between police figures and the association’s statistics, and this led to Tell Mama’ state funding – which by then amounted to £375,000 – being discontinued.

These revelations inspired Mr Burton to write the tweet “I wish to report Fiyaz Mughal for being a mendacious, grievance-mongering little Muslim scumbag & I want my £214,000 back now.” (a reference to taxpayers’ money) and two other tweets of a similar tone, calling Mr Mughal a “taqiyya-artist”. For these three tweets Mr Burton was accused of racially aggravated harassment.

The concept of taqiyya, part of a well-established Islamic doctrine, is the divine permission and even encouragement for Muslims to deceive non-Muslims to further the cause of Islam, particularly when Muslims are a minority.

The trial lasted all day. The Crown Prosecution Service called Mr Mughal as a witness via a video link. He repeatedly expressed that the tweets made him feel intimidated and targeted for his Muslim faith. On cross-examination, it was revealed that he did not know the meaning of the word “mendacious”, one of the insulting remarks that provoked the trial.

Next, the defendant Tim Burton took the witness stand. He said that his tweets, although in retrospect intemperate, were not intended nor expected to generate distress or anguish in someone like Tell Mama’s director, whose job is to search for and read online posts of analogous kind.

He added that the tweets were a political expression of outrage at the abuse of public money and the encroachment of Islam into British society.

Dutch scholar of Islam Professor Hans Jansen gave evidence as expert witness on taqiyya. He explained that the doctrine of taqiyya is accepted by all Muslim theologians and Quran commentaries, and rejected the prosecution’s and Mr Mughal’s theory that this word refers to a behaviour only found among minority Shia Muslims persecuted by majority Sunni Muslims, or that it is just used by far-right groups to victimise Muslims.

Asked by the defence lawyer if a Muslim could reasonably be offended by being described as practicing taqiyya, the witness replied that he had no reason to, since it is part of the faith he follows.

The District Judge, who had read some of Professor Jansen’s writings before the trial, seemed to find his arguments persuasive.

He found that Mr Burton had a right to free expression and that Mr Mughal had not been caused harassment by the three tweets sent to Tell Mama which were critical of him and his organisation. Mr Burton was acquitted on all charges.

Is Islam a Race? Birmingham Trial Will Tell

On Tuesday 8 April at 10am Tim Burton’s trial at Birmingham Magistrates' Court will settle the question of whether the defendant, by calling Muslim Fiyaz Mujhal “a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist” on Twitter, committed racially aggravated harassment, as he is accused of having done by the West Midlands Police.

Mujhal was exposed by The Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan for exaggerating the numbers and seriousness of “anti-Muslim attacks” following the Woolwich murder of soldier Lee Rigby, and had his organisation Tell MAMA’s public funding discontinued. Many of these “attacks” were in fact simple posts on Facebook and other social media, similar to the tweets for which Burton is on trial.

Tim is the Radio Officer of Liberty GB, a British newly-formed conservative and patriotic party.

Burton’s trial is very worrying for anyone who holds dear freedom of speech and other basic civil liberties. One of the worrisome aspects is the conflating of “religion” with “race”. Islam is clearly not a race and Muslims belong to all races, including white. Furthermore, the Crown Prosecution Service considers those two charges (racially- and religiously-aggravated crimes) as distinct ones.

But, despite officially paying lip service to this distinction, in Tim Burton’s case the CPS is trying to combine and confuse the two because it does not have sufficient ground to get a conviction on the “religiously aggravated” charge – which requires stronger evidence -, so decides to prosecute using the easier “racially aggravated” one.

As the CPS’s own website says, “So it will be more difficult to prosecute for inciting religious hatred as opposed to racial hatred”.

The attempt to “racialise Muslims” clearly exists but not, as Tell MAMA says, on the part of Liberty GB. It exists on the part of British Islam apologists and their allies, the politically correct Establishment.

Since there are no blasphemy laws in the UK and criticism of any religion, including Islam, is theoretically tolerated, only two alternatives are left to British Muslims who want to protect Islam from the expression of the uncomfortable truths of its supremacist and violent nature. One is to invoke the introduction of a blasphemy law; the other, subtler and more effective, is to turn existing anti-racist, “hate crime” laws into a sharia-style blasphemy law.

An attempt had previously been made by the Labour government, when the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 was passed, to formulate it in such a way that it could criminalise the criticism of Islam, the Quran and Muhammad. This was made impossible by the opposition of the Catholic Church and the Church of England, as well as the evangelical group Christian Voice who threatened to use this law against the Quran, which is full to the brim with incitements to religious hatred. Therefore the bill had to be amended.

But what went out legally by the door of Parliamentary procedure is now being reintroduced surreptitiously through the window of politically correct police and prosecution establishments.

This is why Liberty GB will hold a public protest outside Birmingham Magistrates' Court on 8 April at 9am and considers this trial crucially important.

Our intention is twofold. Firstly, to show to the British and Western public what taqiyya – deception for the good of Islam - is and, given the special position in the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims of this divine permission to lie, to show the whole nature of Islam in relation to us through it. For this reason, Islam’s scholar Professor Hans Jansen is scheduled to appear at the trial and give evidence as expert witness on taqiyya. We’ve christened this a “taqiyya trial”.

Secondly, to defend free speech and stop the effective use of anti-racist legislation as blasphemy laws.

Here are more details on Taqiyya Trials in Europe

The defendant Tim Burton will be on the courtroom steps at 9:15am and then inside the main building from 9:30am ready to be interviewed.

Are only True Beliefs Effective?

I’m interested in the relationship between truth and effectiveness of a belief (or a theory).

Are true beliefs the only ones to be useful, solve problems, achieve goals?

Is there a correspondence between what is true and what is effective?

Positivism says yes (look at the relationship of correspondence between science and technology, its application).

I also say yes: historically it seems true, humankind is ever more effective and has ever more power as scientific knowledge of reality progresses.

Whenever this is not the case, it is because one acts “as if”. That is, it happens if a false belief makes one behave in the same way as a true one.

A good example is: to suffer for the death of a loved one does not serve any purpose. But if somebody simply says that to him/herself, it may have no effect.

If, on the other hand, one thinks: “I’ll see that person again in Heaven”, s/he behaves as one who says: “Suffering serves no purpose”, even though s/he does that by following a, let’s assume, false belief, which in this case leads to the same behaviour that would be inspired by a true belief.

I've assumed, for the sake of argument, that this belief is false, but in reality it would be more accurate to say that it's not certain.

A British Tea Party?

First published on American Thinker.

By Enza Ferreri


If you had had the dubious privilege of watching the BBC’s political debate programme Question Time on March 6, you would have been afforded a glimpse of what immigration and multiculturalism have become in Britain, their consequences for its native residents and the Establishment’s response to both the crisis and the protests about it.

It followed the usual Question Time format, in which members of the public from an always-changing part of the country ask a panel of politicians and other “experts”, such as media people and assorted celebrities, questions of particular importance to them. This episode was filmed in Barking, an area of East London that has been subjected to an invasion – a member of the programme’s audience did use this appropriate term – by many ethnic immigrants over a short time. A look at the studio audience gave an idea of its multicultural composition.

Only one person was allowed to ask a question expressing her deep concerns over immigration, despite the fact that, as the moderator David Dimbleby explained, the programme had had more questions submitted on immigration than on any other topic except Ukraine, which was hot news at the time. He said this twice – once in reply to a politically-correct person who even dared reprimand the BBC for allowing the question to be aired.

The questioner, a native British woman, said that her community had been totally changed by immigration, “they” were a minority there now and Barking was the most terrible place on earth to live at the moment. Amidst a less-than-warm reaction, a man was the only other member of the audience taking her side, saying how the indigenous population was discriminated against while the immigrants had “money thrown at them”. He was jobless and homeless. He became so annoyed by the response he received from the hostile audience and the patronising, condemning panellists that he very ostentatiously put his coat on and left the studio. I’ve never seen this happening before, and I’ve watched perhaps hundreds of Question Time broadcasts.

On May 22nd, Britain will elect its share of Members of the European Parliament. One of the parties on the list will be, for the first time, Liberty GB. I am a member of Liberty GB’s Executive Council and a candidate at the May 2014 European Elections .

Liberty GB (donations towards the electoral effort are welcome) was born a year ago exactly out of this predicament and to give it a real solution, rather than the shrugging of shoulders of the main parties.

Mass immigration and Islamisation are the two greatest threats for the country, clearly related. Other priorities are to sort out the UK’s disastrous economy and to protect its traditions of democratic liberties and freedom of speech: all these problems are somewhat beautifully and – from the viewpoint of their solutions - conveniently interconnected, and we’ll see why.

Liberty GB has been compared to the USA’s Tea Party, and in fact has many similarities with it.

Looking at the Tea Party’s “15 Non-negotiable Core Beliefs” reveals that, apart from the belief about Obama’s stimulus which is specifically American, 13 out of the remaining 14 – the exception is about gun ownership, on which our views vary – are very close to our own core beliefs.

The 15 open with: “Illegal immigrants are here illegally.” It may appear a truism, but there’s an important reason why tautologies like this need to be enunciated, namely that the Left nonsensically tries to deny them and their implications, in the UK as in the USA. You couldn’t find a party in Britain which would agree with that sentiment expressed by the Tea Party more than Liberty GB.

Our manifesto contains “Deport all illegal immigrants” and “Establish a National Border Police Force to tackle illegal entry and other cross-border crime.”

Several Tea Party’s core beliefs, like ours, stress the importance of economic issues and of balancing the respective countries’ budgets.

The Tea Party is internationally renowned for its strong anti-tax stance. Liberty GB has, among its manifesto policies, the implementation of two projects researched and devised by the UK’s TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA): The Single Income Tax Report for the purpose of tax reduction and simplification, and Work for the Dole, similar to the Workfare enacted in America, to train and help people on out-of-work benefits back to work, thus reducing the size of the welfare state and the burden for taxpayers.

“Pro-domestic employment is indispensable.” is another Tea Party’s core belief. That is certainly not less true in Britain.

The UK has a peacetime-record national debt of one and a quarter trillion pounds, or 76.6% of GDP - predicted to rise to 94.30% this year -, growing at a rate of over 5,000 pounds per second.

A University College London’s study covering 16 years, the most far-reaching study ever conducted on the impact of migration on taxpayers, based on official and government figures, concluded that immigrants from outside the EEA (European Economic Area) take £100 billion, or 14%, more in benefits than they pay back in taxes.

What about European immigrants then? They pay 4% more than they take out, while indigenous British pay in 7% less than they receive from the government.

Despite the spin given by the authors of the study and some media that concentrated only on the favourable effect for Britain from European immigration, a look at the whole picture shows that immigration hurts British economy.

While for Third Worlders the negative verdict it’s easy to reach, for Europeans it requires more analysis but is the same.

European immigrants take jobs and pay taxes that the natives would, without foreign competition and with the help of Workfare schemes.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance report Work for the Dole analysis shows that employment today stands at a higher level than ever in UK history, and that 3.5 million new jobs have been created since 1997, but 68% of them were taken by immigrants. Therefore the number of out-of-work welfare claimants remained about the same, as many British people weren’t interested in the new jobs.

This is where all comes together: British identity, economy, welfare and tax systems, size of government.

We need to stop unrestricted immigration, to push welfare claimants to work, to reduce big government and high taxation: it’s all in Liberty GB’s manifesto.

There’s a good reason why human populations have come to be ruled by local bodies, and world government is favoured only by totalitarians like communists and devout Muslims. No country can be morally or politically responsible for what happens in so many others. Human beings, even the relatively more affluent and freer, are not omnipotent supermen or deities, and there’s only so much they can do.

People living in poor parts of the world should not be encouraged by rich nations’ wrong immigration open-doors policies to move there. It’s not just bad for the host countries, but for the ones the immigrants leave behind too.

As Roy Beck aptly and visually explains in the video Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs, even our well-intentioned efforts to relieve world poverty through immigration are never going to be anything more than a drop in the ocean. Not only that: they may paradoxically be counterproductive, by depriving destitute nations of their most resourceful, entrepreneurial, active and skilful inhabitants, who would do well to remain in order to help their own countries out of their quagmire.

After all, we’re not asking them to do anything that European and European-descendent people didn’t themselves do in past centuries, when they also had to fight against poverty, disease and despotism.

The neediest are not the immigrants from the Third World to our shores, who, having the money to pay for the travel, are likely to be less indigent and isolated than their non-emigrating countrymen.

The greatest areas of difference between Liberty GB and the Tea Party are firearms and Islam, perhaps due to the diverse contexts of Britain and America.

Regarding Islam, there isn’t so much a distinction in stance as in emphasis. Islam pervades British life more, and as a consequence it’s far more present in our policies, news, articles, Facebook posts, and the like.

Gun ownership doesn’t have in the UK the same resonance as in the USA. There’s hardly any public discussion, no Constitutional amendment to argue about, and public opinion is rather indifferent.
Britain changed its gun laws to highly restrict their use as a typical kneejerk reaction to a mass shooting - the Dunblane killings -, the kind of response which in the US found a staunch opposition during the hysteria in the wake of the Newtown massacre a year ago.

In 1996 a man walked into a school in Dunblane, Scotland, armed with four handguns, and began shooting, killing 16 children, their teacher, and himself. A year later, private ownership of handguns was almost completely banned. Penalties can be up to 10 years’ imprisonment. Tens of thousands of firearms were handed into the government. It’s not so surprising, if you think that, after all, Piers Morgan is British.

I am in favour of the Tea Party’s position, maybe due to the fact that I have followed the situation in the USA and researched the topic, but, since we have various views within Liberty GB’s Executive Council on this, it’s been decided that we don’t have an official stance.

An idea Liberty GB shares with the Tea Party is the belief in the fundamental importance of Christianity for the historic development and the future resilience of Western civilisation.

We favour immigration of Christians, not only for ease of assimilation, but also because they are by far the most persecuted group in the world. For the same reason we have the manifesto policy of ending foreign aid to countries without a proven record of protection of their minorities, in particular Christians.

Liberty GB also supports Christian values, marriage and traditional families.

What the two, the British party and the American movement, more fundamentally than anything else have in common is the awareness that compromise on core principles does not pay in politics. Conservatives’ abandonment of what defines them doesn’t lead to more popularity and election victories, but to the moving of the political middle ground further and further to the Left, making success more, not less, elusive.