Patrick West’s recent warning in The Spectator about Britain’s willingness to turn a blind eye to shariah courts should be required reading in Westminster.
He details the pitiful prosecution rates for honour-based crimes and the creeping normalisation of parallel legal forums. But the deeper scandal is not statistical. It is civilisational. Britain is drifting into a posture of managed decline, where enforcing its own laws is treated as a reputational risk.
Across the ocean, Donald Trump has provided an excellent model; he revived a nation-first doctrine that unapologetically prioritises borders, identity and democratic accountability.
It is derided by globalists as crude. It is, in fact, rooted in a simple proposition: a government’s first duty is to its own citizens and its own civilisation.
I write as an American who deeply respects Britain — its monarchy, its common law, its defiance in 1940 when it stood virtually alone against Nazi tyranny.
The country that helped save Europe, and in doing so saved countless Jewish lives, now seems paralysed by the fear of offending those who openly agitate for legal separatism. It is astonishing to watch a nation forged in steel develop such a brittle political class.
This is not enlightened pluralism. It is institutional cowardice masquerading as compassion.
For decades, there has been a quiet capitulation to pressure and sectarian grievance politics. Thousands of honour-based offences are recorded; only a fraction are prosecuted.
Shariah councils operate in practice as alternative dispute mechanisms in family and marital matters, often exerting social pressure that undermines women’s rights guaranteed under British law. Everyone knows it. Almost no one in the Labour Government wants to say it plainly.
The reasons are obvious. The modern governing elite is terrified of the R-word. Accusations of racism have become career-ending weapons. So the law is applied selectively. If enforcing it risks a hostile hashtag or an activist complaint, caution prevails. Police chiefs tiptoe. Ministers mumble. Civil servants announce another consultation.
Meanwhile, ordinary Britons are told not to inflame tensions by pointing out what is unfolding in plain sight.
Law becomes optional when the backbone becomes unfashionable.
Other European countries have begun, belatedly, to reassert their sovereignty. France has strengthened state oversight of religious associations and foreign funding.
Austria has enacted measures aimed at curbing political Islam and tightening control over extremist networks. These steps are not acts of hysteria. They are acknowledgements that a modern state cannot permit parallel authorities to flourish unchecked.
Britain's lurch into backdoor theocracy is where cowardice towards Islam leads - Lee Cohen | Getty Images
Britain must go further and be explicit. Parliament should legislate to ensure that no body, council or tribunal may exercise authority in any matter that conflicts with UK law.
Arbitration cannot become a backdoor theocracy. Women’s equality, child protection and criminal justice are not negotiable cultural preferences. They are pillars of the constitutional order under the Crown-in-Parliament.
A nation that tolerates multiple legal standards within its borders ceases to be a nation in any meaningful sense. It becomes a collection of enclaves loosely managed by a timid centre.
And the defence cannot be purely legal. It must be cultural. Britain’s Christian heritage built the moral grammar of the country: the sanctity of the individual, equality before the law, and the idea that rulers themselves are subject to higher authority.
Those ideas were not imported from Brussels or drafted by a focus group. They were shaped over centuries in a Christian civilisation that formed Parliament, the universities and the common law.
Yet today, Christianity is treated by the establishment as a quaint embarrassment, while far more assertive religious claims are indulged in the name of sensitivity. A confident nation teaches its children where it came from. It does not edit its inheritance to appease the loudest pressure group.
Keir Starmer has made clear his instinct for regulatory alignment and deeper entanglement with Brussels. The EU’s jurisprudential culture — expansive rights talk, bureaucratic insulation, suspicion of national particularity — still exerts a powerful pull.
Britain must resist that slide. Sovereignty cannot be restored in theory and surrendered in practice.
A Britain that enforces one law for all, honours its Christian roots and defends its monarchy as a symbol of continuity is.
The tragedy today is a political class that treats equal enforcement of the law as an extremist hobby. It is leadership that would rather risk social fragmentation than risk a rebuke from the progressive commentariat.
Appeasement has a grim history in Europe. Britain once learned, at terrible cost, that concessions to determined ideological movements do not buy harmony; they buy time for further demands.
The men and women who faced down totalitarianism in the 20th century did not do so in order for their descendants to whisper about threats for fear of social disapproval.
Britain need not choose decline. It can legislate clearly against Shariah incursions. It can reinvest unapologetically in its Christian heritage. It can guard Brexit’s gains and reject the dead hand of EU influence. It can stand shoulder to shoulder with a resurgent America that believes in nationhood. But I fear it will have to wait for a change of government.
A country cannot survive if those entrusted with authority are frightened of exercising it.
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