The fightback against people who hate Britain has begun

Whitehall’s doors have for too long been open to extremists. Michael Gove is making the right call

Every so often our Conservative Government awakes from its policy slumber, twitches, and, perhaps by pure instinct, does a useful and conservative thing. It may not be perfect; it may not go far enough, but at least it is going in the right direction.

So it was with Michael Gove’s announcement of a new definition of extremism. It has been criticised, including by people I respect, but still he is trying to do something important and something conservatives should want done.

Let’s take a step back. “Extremists”, however defined, should in my view be entitled to their views as long as they don’t advocate violence. But many of us simply don’t understand why people who don’t seem to like this country, its history, or the Western civilisation of which it is a part, so often seem to show up as advisers to government bodies, appear on quango boards, or receive public money.

This didn’t happen in the past. During the Cold War, Britain always had smallish groups of Marxistleninists who wanted to smash capitalism and overthrow the government, often in league in some way with the Soviet Union or its proxies.

No one remotely thought that such people should be invited into government counsels or get public funds. The government didn’t have to justify that policy: it was entirely taken as read. It wouldn’t be now. In our litigious society many would see their exclusion as unreasonable discrimination, there would be endless judicial reviews, and inevitably some would get through the net.

At that time, too, and hard though it is to believe now, we still had a small-c conservative Civil Service, which still understood certain verities about how to conduct government in the best interests of the nation.

We can’t take that for granted nowadays. As we can see from the seeming reluctance of Home Office staff to police our own borders, far too many people have been marinated in a broth of identity politics, of doubts about our own values and history, and of assumptions about the equality of all-value systems. There is huge illiteracy about religion and belief, unique in history, meaning that officials are often unable to understand what is a well-founded system of religious belief and what is actual extremism.

We can’t rely on the old informal ways to keep extremists out of government. Yet governments are perfectly entitled to choose who they want to work with. If a Conservative government doesn’t want to be advised by extremists, if it doesn’t want state policy to be undermined by advisers telling public authorities the opposite, and if it doesn’t want to spend the public’s money on any of these people, then that is entirely reasonable.

This is what Gove, it seems to me, is trying to achieve. The existing definition of extremism is too broad and is often implemented by people who don’t really agree with it – so it is rightly being tightened so there is less room for doubt. We need to have a system for defining organisations as extremist and therefore not to be invited into government or otherwise interacted with by state authorities – so Gove is creating one.

None of this has legal force: it’s guidance for government. Nor is it about freedom of speech. It doesn’t ban any organisation. It doesn’t stop anyone saying anything. It just means that, on the basis of what an organisation says or does, the government can decide not to interact with it, appoint its representatives to quangos, or give it taxpayers’ money. I can’t see what is wrong with that. Indeed, I approve of it.

Now nothing is without risk and it is right to be concerned about two aspects. The first is that officials in practice take all the decisions about which organisations go on the blocked list. It’s crucial that ministers supervise properly and have the final say – all the more so since the new definition catches ideologies based on “intolerance”, which to my mind is rather too broad, particularly in progressive hands.

The other is the risk that we are creating a weapon that a Labour government will use in a different way, to block our allies and friends, and to squeeze out, for example, gender-critical or anti-abortion groups from public life.

That is a risk – except that Labour is going to do this anyway. It’s very clear that it intends to double down on the Equality Act, bring in a new Race Equality Act, adopt a broad definition of Islamophobia, and much more.

In a democracy, the correct way to stop this is not to have a Labour government in the first place. But if the electorate so chooses, as seems all too likely, we can’t reasonably argue that Labour shouldn’t have the right to be advised by people who agree with its policies.

Of course these steps only deal with part of the problem. In particular, we still need to use existing laws better to ensure public order and security on our streets. But it’s a start. So well done Michael Gove. Now, please just junk your dreadful Renters Reform Bill, and I really will start applauding.