One Nation Tory

Our readers of the same vintage as us will have two images of Norman Tebbit: Maggie Thatcher's reliable rhetorical bad cop, and him being extricated on a stretcher from the Grand Hotel in Brighton following the IRA bombing in 1984. The now Lord Tebbit unsurprisingly feels vindicated by the outbreak of Islamist terrorism in England and supplies a few juicy quotes:

The Muslim religion is so unreformed since it was created that nowhere in the Muslim world has there been any real advance in science, or art or literature, or technology in the last 500 years.

Now while this will generate a bit of a row in the UK, it's well within the pale of accepted discourse in the US, although, as we noted recently, some of the more cowardly peddlers of it, like Powerloins, hide such views behind 100 year old Winston Churchill quotes.

Things get stranger when Tebbit looks to the Other Island for examples of how multiculturalism had sent the UK off the rails long before radical Islam became a problem:

Lord Tebbit said multicultural society was "an impossibility" because if there were two cultures there would also be two societies. "A society is defined by its culture. It is not defined by its race, it is not a matter of skin colour or ethnicity, it is a matter of culture. "If you have two societies in the same place then you are going to have problems, like the kind we saw on 7 July, sooner or later," he said.

He warned London was "sinking into the same abyss that Londonderry and Belfast sank".

Which would take up too much of what remains of Friday to deal with fully. But note the unintended irony of complaining about the multicultural abyss of "Londonderry" -- a name that symbolises the tensions one gets when one culture tries to lord it over another. And the new wave of Islamist terrorism in Britain has yet to attempt anything as audacious as the aforementioned Brighton bomb, which remains the most frightening "what if" moment of recent British and Irish history.