Londonistan

How Britain's intelligence failures led to domestic Jihadism

In early January, the UAE put 11 individuals and 8 organisations on its Local Terrorist List for Muslim Brotherhood affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. Every single organisation named was based in Britain.

Britain has a relationship with Islamist groups that, at times, seems bewilderingly lackadaisical. A leading fundraiser for Hamas, a known and wanted terrorist, lived in social housing in Barnet. Ed Husain’s The Islamist, published almost twenty years ago, mapped out author’s radicalisation from small Stepney Green school boy from a religious family to full-blown domestic Islamist via a series of escalatingly extremist groups - many of which are still in existence, and are similarly affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood is still permitted to exist, despite the fact a 2014 review was conducted that found;

The Muslim Brotherhood generally tries to transform and remodel individuals and communities through a bottom up approach and where possible participate in politics. But if needed the Muslim Brotherhood is willing to use violence and terror in pursuit of their long term goals

This leniency is not exclusive; the review also found that Hamas had been active in Britain, despite being proscribed, for over ten years. Hizb ut-Tahrir, a key organisation in the radicalisation of Hussein that advocated for the establishment of a Caliphate, was only banned last year in response to the anti-Semitic pro-Gaza wave of violence that swept the country (their website openly advocated for Muslims to kill Jews). The leniency we showed them has apparently made Britain the ‘nerve centre’ for the entire global movement.

This leniency is new, either. In 1995, the French counter-intelligence service first called our capital ‘Londonistan’. It has never lost that moniker.

The reasons for the rise of Londonistan are actually two-fold; what I have previously – and cheekily – called the Tom Jones and Aaron Bastani factors. The Tom Jones factor is that our laissez-faire en-masse immigration system has totally failed to prevent people who hate us, and our way of life, from entering our country or removing them from it afterwards. It is, put simply, an immigration-first approach.

The Aaron Bastani factor, by contrast, is international affairs-first. Put very simplistically, it is that this is the result of Western interventionism; it is blowback for unjust wars and neo-imperialism, for manipulation of domestic affairs in foreign countries that should never have happened.

But there is a third, possibly more interesting factor at play too; Britain’s reliance on leveraging intelligence for international influence, and Whitehall's unsuccessful attempt to shape global affairs and protect our status as a first-rate power.