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In 1947 the UK suffered devastating floods – caused by a combination of heavy snowfall and deep freeze, followed by warmer weather melting the snow at the same time as torrential rains slowly moved across the country. The ensuing floods left large parts of the UK paralysed for several weeks. Two years ago an analysis was made of the likely impact if floods of a similar magnitude, however caused, were to occur today. In theory, there should have been a significantly reduced impact – as the Conservative governments of Eden and Macmillan invested heavily in flood defences following the 1947 floods and subsequent  1953 North Sea floods. However, the authors found great difficulty in assessing how different the impact of modern flooding would be compared to that of 1947. The reason for their difficulty was quite astonishing. The government does not keep a national record of where flood defences exist.

"No national database is available which contains the type, height,design level, and maintenance conditions of U.K. river flood defenses even for main rivers."

(1947 UK Floods: 60 Year perspective p8)

If there is no national database of flood defences it also follows that the government has no national record of the state of repair of those flood defences. Although given the wholly inadequate levels of funding there are certainly some issues there, particularly in rural areas.

Most significantly however, it is clear that if the government has no national record of either where flood defences exist or their state of repair – then any claim by the government that they have a credible flood defence strategy is clearly nonsense.

Standing around our village war memorial on Sunday I was struck by how few WW2 veterans were now able to be there. With them is literally dying out a living memory of why we fought the second world war, the Gestapo, what happened to the Jews and the gypsies and everyone else who didn’t fit in with Hitler’s radical ideology.

At the same time it also struck me that very few who read the western press have any real understanding of what life under the Taliban was really like before they were pushed from power by the western intervention after 9/11.

Life under the Taliban: I lived in Jalalabad, Afghanistan as an aid worker during the time that the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan. It was a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.  People lived in daily fear of the religious police known as the ‘vice and virtue’ police. When they appeared people froze with fear, just as those living under Nazi rule must have frozen at appearance of the Gestapo. The traffic was stopped every day at the Islamic prayer times, at which point the Taliban who patrolled the streets with lengths of plastic hose pipe whipped anyone found not praying. Girls schools were closed, women were banned from being out on the streets without a male relative, which literally meant a death sentence for the thousands of widows whose husbands and sons had been killed in 20 years of fighting – they couldn’t even go out to beg. Those who tried to were savagely beaten up by the Taliban. Others suffered far worse fates. Captured soldiers from the various mujahaddin groups that the Taliban had seized power from were given a stark choice - either join the Taliban or walk through minefields as human mine clearers; There were reports of large scale ethnic cleansing, particularly of the Hazara population; while non Muslim Afghans – chiefly Hindu and Sikh shopkeepers in cities such as Kabul and Jalalabad, were forced to wear yellow cloth badges in public – not dissimilar to the star of David that the Nazis forced the Jews to wear.  The few remaining Jews left in the country, remnants of an ancient community there, were imprisoned and tortured by the Taliban in an attempt to force them to convert to Islam. While any Afghan who dared to leave Islam suffered a more immediate fate. Just outside Jalalabad where I lived at the time, the Taliban searched a man’s house and found a Bible. He was immediately taken outside and hanged. He courageously maintained his Christian faith to the end. There were many stories of atrocities, but I can vouch for the truth of this one as a colleague carefully questioned several Afghans who had witnessed it to establish its truth.

Understanding Shari’a Finance: The Muslim Challenge to Western Economics by Patrick Sookhdeo (McClean,VA: Isaac Publishing,2008). This is a further volume in Dr Patrick Sookhdeo’s excellent series of books on Islamism specifically written to inform non specialists, particularly those involved in the development of political policy.    

Reading this book I could not help but be reminded of the words of the Abul A’la Mawdudi (1903-79), the leading Islamist writer in the Indian sub continent:

Mawdudi went on say that:

Patrick Sookhdeo’s book Understanding Shari’a Finance: The Muslim Challenge to Western Economics begins by quoting Timur Kuran, a Muslim scholar and Professor of Economics and Political Science at Duke University, who states that Shari’a finance is an ‘invented tradition’ that does not go back to Muhammad’s day. In this book Dr Sookhdeo demonstrates how shari’a finance has in fact been specifically developed in recent years by radical Islamists as means of bringing increasing areas of society, in both Muslim majority and Western countries, under Islamist control.

Approximately half of the coastline of England and Wales is made of rocks that make the coastline vulnerable to coastal erosion (various types of sandstone and clays, chalk and limestone). This is roughly the area from South Devon eastwards, including most of the south coast and the entire east coast of England. Sea defence is a hugely important local issue in many of these areas. Nearly 2/3 of constituencies along it are Conservative controlled and many of the rest are seats we need to win. While even on the west coast of England and Wales, there are many low lying areas that are subject to coastal flooding. So this is a serious issue that a future Conservative government should have a clear well thought policy on.

There are also important principles of conservatism, such as localism and community – allowing people to act on behalf of their own community rather than restricting some activities to the government, that we should be seeking to apply in developing a much clearer and more coherent approach to sea defence policy than the present government is doing.

Six principles for future sea defence policy

1. There should be a presumption in favour of landowners being allowed to build their own sea defences – as they have done for at least a thousand years. Regulation is principally needed a) where defences interfere with longshore drift of sediment and so could adversely affect erosion rates in other areas; and b) where proposed sea defences have a significantly adverse affect on the visual appearance of the coast. However, where neither of these apply, landowners should not have to face a lengthy application process to build basic sea defence structures such as clay banks to protect their land.

2. County councils, rather than district councils, to be designated as the key local authority responsible for sea defence. This would enable allow local councils to employ specialist sea defence staff, rather than simply relying on employing costly engineering consultancy firms. Equally importantly, it would enable much of the DEFRA funding currently channelled through the Environment Agency to be devolved to elected local councils. A forthcoming Conservative green paper will advocate devolving powers from unelected quangos to elected local councils. The Environment Agency would be an excellent example to start with.

3. Joined up government: The impact of climate change means that sea levels are already rising, something that increases Britain’s vulnerability to both coastal flooding and to more extensive coastal erosion. Moreover, as it takes up to 100 years for atmospheric carbon to break down, it is almost inevitable that sea levels will rise still further even with significant reductions in carbon emissions. Yet, the present government currently only spends around 0.1% of public spending on sea defence. To put this into context, this is enough to build just 10 miles of sea wall. Whilst there is no question that public spending will have to be cut in the immediate future, there is an urgent need to give relatively greater weight to sea defence spending if we are not to find ourselves in a few years times facing significantly greater expenditure.

We should not forget that the 1953 North Sea storm surge affected not just coastal areas, but also flooded huge areas of the Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire up to 30 miles inland.  307 people drowned, 30,000 had to be evacuated, while 24,000 homes were destroyed with total damage estimated at between £30 and £50 million (in 1953 prices). The present urgency of giving greater priority to sea defence was well illustrated in November 2007when a similar North Sea storm surge was only a few centimeters short of over topping existing flood defences in East Anglia.

This week the BBC obtained a rare video clip of Afghan warlord Gubadddin Hekmatyar leader of the notorious Hezb-i-Islami group. The appearance was hugely significant, not simply because Hezb-i-islami was the most brutal and radical of all the Afghan mujahaddin groups, but also because a number of other recent events, including terrorist attacks that Hez-i-islami have claimed responsibility for, suggest that he may be seeking to stage a come back. If so, it could potentially lead to a new front to the east and north of Kabul that coalition forces would have to fight. 

Who is Hekmatyar and his Hezb-i-Islami faction?

Hekmatyar was one of the leaders of the original student Islamist movement in Kabul in the early 1970s and led most of the student demonstrations between 1965 and 1972. It was this student Islamist movement that was largely responsible for the initial spread of radical Islamism in Afghanistan.

However, the movement split over its response to the overthrow of the Afghan monarchy in 1974 when the King’s cousin Daud, with the assistance of the Communist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, seized power creating a republic. Within the Student Islamist movement, the more ‘moderate’ elements and Persian speakers led by Burhanuddin Rabbani (who later became Afghan president) planned to infiltrate the army until the country was ready for an Islamist revolution, while the radicals led by Hekmatyar and others attempted to start military uprisings. This split eventually formalised in 1976-77 into the Jamat-i-Islami party led by Rabbani whose most famous military commander was Ahmed Shah Massoud and the Hezb-i-Islami party led by Hekmatyer. These two parties each came to have their own quite distinct ethos.

General Sir David Richards, recently said that the Army’s role in Afghanistan may need to go on for several decades. Yesterday Bob Ainsworth, the Defence Secretary on BBC's Andrew Marr Show explicitly referred to that professional assessment by the new head of army as ‘ludicrous’ and stated that British troops might begin to be pulled back from front line fighting…in the next 12 months. For the Defence Secretary to openly reject the best professional military advice at a time while we are fighting a major conflict is frankly alarming.

Even more concerning is the timing of this pull back of British troops – within the next 12 months, which just happens to be when the present government has to call an election. Let’s not forget that two years ago Gordon Brown announced a similar pull back of troops from Iraq…immediately before he decided to call off the general election.

For the Defence Secretary to make these comments on the weekend that the death toll of British troops passed the 200 mark is deeply offensive to the hundreds of British troops who have been wounded and the relatives of those who have died.

Instead of his extraordinary behaviour - going on television to publicly insult the head of the army and doing what many people could be forgiven for thinking was playing politics with soldiers lives; Instead of that, the Defence Secretary should be seeking to work with opposition parties to explain clearly to the public why fighting in Afghanistan is essential to our security. Generating that public support is the very least that soldiers on the front line should be able to expect from the Defence Secretary.

However,as the government is not making the case clearly – let’s just remind ourselves why we are fighting in Afghanistan:

Patrick Mercer MP, is absolutely right to call for a government enquiry into how al-Qaeda sympathisers, who had attended training camps in Pakistan, were recruited to the security services – and more importantly whether any similar infiltration attempts have gone undetected.

In their recruitment of new staff after the 7/7 London bombings the security services have been potentially vulnerable to infiltration because they appear to have used an inaccurate and far to narrow a definition of what an Islamist extremist actually is. No matter how rigorous the security services' vetting procedures have been, if their fundamental definition of what constitutes an extremist is wrong, then potentially at least, security may have been compromised and the organisation infiltrated.

Time after time following 9/11, 7/7 and later terrorist plots, government statements about ‘extremists’ clearly indicate that the government have meant ‘extreme’ in relation to what they have sometimes openly called ‘mainstream Islam’, rather than meaning ‘extreme’ in terms of the distance of these views from mainstream British values. This in turn has led to a frequently repeated assertion by government ministers and others that ‘Islam has nothing to do with terrorism’. The latter led to the government’s official narrative report on the 7/7 London bombings presenting the most extraordinary conclusion, namely that the security services simply didn’t know what motivated four British young men to commit a major terrorist atrocity in London.

This was a conclusion that frankly shocked a number of us who had undertaken detailed academic study of Islam and pointed to a dangerous unawareness of the way the Qur’an and Hadith have been interpreted since the earliest times of Islamic history. Since its earliest days Islam has had a very strong doctrine of political domination of non Muslims i.e. imposing Islamic government and law on them, which is to be achieved by means of military jihad where non Muslims refuse to submit to it. (See for example Q9:29, which urges Muslims to fight those who do not believe in Islam until they submit and pay the jizya tax imposed on non Muslims in an Islamic state, a text which is interpreted in both classical i.e. medieval, Islamic commentaries and by modern Islamist writers such as Mawdudi as being a command to either engage in or support military jihad to impose Islamic government). Had the security services understood that this teaching is deeply embedded in Islamic history and theology, they would not have been at a loss to understand what motivated four British young men to bomb London in the summer of 2005. Of course, it must also be said that throughout Islamic history many other Muslims have instead emphasised a range of much more peaceful and devotional interpretations of Islam. These include the vast majority of British Muslims who have family origins in the Indian subcontinent. There, following the failure of military jihad against the British in 1856 (aka ‘the Indian mutiny’), Indian ulema (Islamic leaders) made a conscious decision to abandon jihad and instead concentrate on the devotional aspects of Islam. This stance led to a longstanding tradition of peaceful, devotional Islam among British Muslims, until the radicalisation of a significant minority of Muslim youth following the Rushdie affair.

The existence of these twin paths throughout Islamic history, both the violent and the peaceful, means that one can be well within the bounds of historical ‘mainstream Islam’ and still advocate support for violent jihad against non Muslims. So, when the government and the security services have defined Islamic extremists as people who are ‘extreme’ or even ‘deviant’ from ‘mainstream’ Islamic teaching – then their very definition of ‘extremism’ potentially excludes a significant number of those who claim that they only follow ‘mainstream Islam’ as taught in major Islamic centres such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt etc.

And many congratulations to Chloe Smith MP!  There are seats with 5,000 + Labour majorities that we are likely to win at the general election, but a constituency like Norwich North that has such a high proportion of council estates is not automatically in that category. I would suggest that what is most significant about this by election victory is not simply that large numbers of Labour votes stayed away, but that some on the council estates started to switch to vote Conservative. We could see this from canvassing those estates. In fact, yesterday we actually met Labour canvassers using what were evidently old canvassing returns who were knocking up what they thought were Labour voters, but who we knew to be now Conservative voters. Of course not all of the 6.5% increase in the Conservative share of the vote came from council estates, but the fact that some of it did is tremendously encouraging.

The challenge for the party now is to change this widening stream of working class voters into a river.

Last year I argued on Centre Right that the repeated assertions by Liberal-Left public figures that Islam has nothing at all to do with violence, would in the light of continued terrorist outrages ultimately lead disillusioned voters to believe the twisted half truths of racist political parties. Last week’s election results now raise a very real question as to whether we are now reaching the point of it becoming too late to prevent the rise of this sort of racism in Britain.

It is simply no use Labour ministers blaming stay at home Labour voters for the election of two MEPs from a racist party. Two leading academic researchers have recently said that a sophisticated strategy is now needed to win back voters who both agree with the policies of the racist party concerned and have lost all faith in what the mainstream parties have to offer.

Part of that strategy needs to be a recognition that a significant part of the blame lies with Labour's deeply flawed policy agenda of actively promoting 'diversity' in society coupled with the popular perception that certain groups are more favoured by the government than others. In a free society we rightly tolerate diversity, however, active promotion of it by the government is something quite different altogether. So, here are three reasons why government should NOT promote diversity:

1. It undermines community cohesion. As if to illustrate the point, only last week, a government minister told parliament that Muslim "communities and other groups have the option to use religious councils or any other system of alternative dispute resolution". Whilst the minister's statement certainly promotes 'diversity', it also significantly undermines community cohesion, not to mention leaving Muslim women under pressure to accept a legal system (sharia)that gives them significantly lesser legal rights than men. Equally, the giving of government funding to Islamic groups such as the MCB, may well promote 'diversity', but it is effectively treating Muslims as a separate community, rather than primarily as individual citizens. The government simply does not seem able to get its collective head around the fact that you simply cannot create community cohesion by promoting diversity! The latter creates a more fragmented society. Community cohesion is its exact opposite. It is about people focusing together on what they have in common, around a set of shared values - and that includes equality for all under one system of law.

As Conservative Home reported on Monday, Alan’s Duncan on BBC called Miss California a ‘bitch’ and joked that if she was found murdered he would be responsible because she disagreed with gay marriage…

Dear Mr Duncan,

Many people in our party and also outside it hold you in high esteem. You have risen to hold high office in the shadow cabinet. It is one of the virtues of our party that although we hold to certain core values, such as freedom of speech, the party is by no means intolerant of those who hold a range of opinions on other issues. It was therefore deeply disappointing to hear your comments made on BBC about Miss California (Carrie Prejean) who had been called a b****** and a c*** by one of the Miss USA judges simply because when asked about her views on gay marriage she politely stated her honest and deeply held belief that “I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offence to anybody out there”. The very gracious way that she responded both to that question and to the subsequent abuse from the judge who asked her the question set a standard for the rest of us to follow.

Alan we all know that you personally disagree with her. However, the manner in which you expressed your disagreement with her comments caused very deep offence to many people, including many whom the Conservative Party will be asking to vote for them in the next few weeks.

Mr Duncan, you called the lady a ‘bitch’ and joked that she should be murdered because of her deeply held beliefs that ‘marriage is something that is between a man and a woman’. A few weeks ago Stonewall circulated a briefing note to MPs citing a rap song with lyrics suggesting that gay people should be murdered. They cited it as an example of the sort of comment, however intended, that should be criminalised. I have no doubt whatsoever that as a gay man you would have found such a song deeply offensive. Would it therefore be too much to hope that reflecting on this might help you in turn to understand how deeply offensive your comments were to those who, out of religious or moral convictions, disagree with your own views on gay marriage?

Those of us involved in politics know that at times we all make mistakes, we say something that was inappropriate, something that offends those we did not mean to hurt or abuse. However, it is how we respond to that situation afterwards that shows our true character. Boris made his famous Liverpool comment, but responded by apologising, saying how stunned he was by the offence he had caused. No one thought the worse of him for it, in fact it raised him in many people’s esteem, it showed him to be the greater man. Alan, for the sake of those you’ve hurt, it’s time to do a Boris…

To mark St George’s Day 1933 Winston Churchill made a broadcast speech entitled ‘England’, edited excerpts of which I have reproduced below, (courtesy of the Royal Society of St George to whom Churchill made the speech). Read today, his comments are a sobering verdict on the present government who have undermined and even discarded values that Churchill believed were indisputably integral (though not exclusive!) to ‘England’. Churchill began by speaking about the legend of St George and the dragon:

"I have been wondering what would have happened to him and his story if he had lived now-a-days. St George would have arrived in Cappadocia accompanied, not by a horse, but by a secretariat. He would have been armed, not with a lance, but with some flexible formulas. He would, of course have been welcomed by the local branch of the League of Nations, and, encouraged by them, he would have proposed a conference with the dragon. He would have made a trade agreement with the dragon and would certainly have lent him a lot of money raised from the Cappadocian taxpayers. The question of the maiden’s release, which is very important in the story, would no doubt have been referred to Geneva. It being understood that the dragon reserved all his rights in the meantime. Finally, St George would have been photographed with the dragon, inset the maiden."

At 0810 on Tuesday morning Jacqui Smith went on Radio 4's Today programme to explain the government's new counter terrorism strategy. The Home Secretary was at pains to emphasise that non violent Islamist groups must be allowed freedom of speech. Ms Smith told listeners:

"I've been very clear that one of the important values we have in this country is free speech. People should be able to say what they believe, but they shouldn't necessarily do that without challenge. An argument we're making is not that these views become illegal, but that we as government, citizens and others will challenge the views of those who seek to undermine our shared values."

At 17.41 that same day, less than ten hours later, the government used a 3 line whip to force through the Commons the abolition of the 'Free Speech' clause that the House of Lords last year made the government insert into the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act. The 'Free Speech' clause essentially sought to ensure that whilst stirring up hatred against people who were homosexual would become criminalised, free discussion of the morality of homosexual practice (i.e. beliefsabout sexual ethics) would not be. In particular, it sought to protect Christian ministers from being prosecuted for simply stating what the Church has for the last two thousand years held to be the teaching of Scripture, that sexual relationships outside of hetrosexual marriage are in the Bible's words 'sinful'.

Advisers to President Obama are reportedly split over whether the US should try to bribe moderate elements in the Taliban to defect.

It is certainly true that many Afghans joined the various mujhaddin factions and later the Taliban because the offered a pay packet - in a country where aid agencies are the largest employers and often the only ones offering a living wage.

However, history tells us that bribery can never provide a lasting solution to 'the Afghan problem' as local people call it. Neither can it provide President Obama with his desired exit strategy from Afghanistan. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the British colonial administration pursued a similar policy in the tribal areas between what is now the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan (NWFP) and what in 1895 became the border of Afghanistan. The Pushtun (Pathan) tribes were given muwajib - an 'allowance' to live peacefully. They accepted the allowance, then a year or so later rose up against the government until they received another allowance...!

Suffolk police have revealed that an eight-year old boy in a rural area of Suffolk raped a girl aged under 10. They also recorded the case of another eight-year old boy who sexually assaulted a girl under 13. Both were among 24 very young children that Suffolk Police were unable to prosecute because they were below the age of criminal responsibility.

When such serious sexual offences are committed by very young children in one of the most rural and socially unspoilt areas of Britain we should ask ourselves some serious questions about quite how broken some parts of our society have become. Unfortunately, at the moment we have a prime minister in Gordon Brown who, whenever the issue is raised, simply insists that society 'isn't broken'.

Rebuilding Britain's broken society will be as important a task for a future Conservative government as rebuilding an economy was for the last Conservative government at a time when many believed it to be in terminal decline. A key feature of rebuilding our broken society will be the need to sensitively address the premature sexualisation of children, whether by the advertising industry, or even some of the government's own policies. Many of us seriously question whether the government, in the form of what has been renamed the Department for Children, Schools and Families, should be seeking to impose its writ specifically on children and families. However, if there is any value at all in having a government department for children - then it surely must be to protect childhood.

The Times Educational Supplement has revealed that teachernet - the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF)'s own in house training and resource centre for teachers - has been promoting a series of lessons whose activities included encouraging children to imagine that they were one of the 7/7 London bombers. The course called 'Things do Change' was developed by Calderdale Council seemingly in response to a 'toolkit' on how to prevent violent extremism sent by Schools Secretary Ed Balls to all schools last October. The 'imagine you are a terrorist trying to blow up London' lesson is according to the TES now being used not just in West Yorkshire schools but also in other schools and madrassas (Islamic theological schools) in the UK...

So there we have it, the government department responsible for our schools is promoting lessons that encourage vulnerable young Muslims to pretend to be terrorists...

In several respects the responsibility for this catastrophic failure goes right to the top of the DCSF - Ed Balls the Schools Secretary and Jim Knight the Schools Minister:

1. Ministerial oversight: These two ministers were responsible for overseeing the department that promoted these lessons - they clearly failed in this duty.

2. A dangerous degree of muddle and confusion in the advice these ministers gave to schools on how to prevent violent extremism: Ed Balls and Jim Knight cannot simply claim that they didn't know what was going on in their department. It was very specifically their muddled policy on how schools should prevent violent extremism that directly led to Calderdale Council developing these lessons.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has used the anniversary of his sharia speech to defend the views he advocated then - that Islamic law (sharia) should be implemented in the UK for issues such as family law. Dr Williams argued that implementing parts of sharia would be similar to the Jewish Beth Din arbitration courts that have operated for some time and subsequent debate focused on the question of whether the 1996 Arbitration Act could be used by sharia courts.

Subsequently, and as a direct result of Dr Williams comments, some of the UK Islamist organisations that operate what they term 'sharia courts' have started to claim that their actions are legally binding under the Arbitration Act. Their claim is that they have, by this route, in effect introduced sharia into the UK legal system. This is a situation that as far as I am aware has yet to be tested in the courts.

However, whilst only some of the UK 'sharia courts' currently claim that their decisions are legally binding, no one should be in any doubt that many of the decision made by these sharia courts are profoundly at odds with fundamental principles of British law. Whilst much has written about the discrimination faced by women divorced under sharia the issues of inheritance and child custody, which are equally central parts of Islamic family law, similarly highlight the discrimination against women inherent in Islamic law.

Now that the dust has begun to settle on the BBC's refusal to air the Disaster's Emergency Committee (DEC)'s Gaza appeal, it is time in the cool light of day to take a good hard look at the issue of political bias.

The spat between the BBC and the DEC should never have happened. The modern Aid agency movement was set up in the aftermath of war, Save The Children was set up in 1919 to relieve the suffering at the end of the first world war, OXFAM in 1942 and CARE in 1945. Moreover, aid agencies always work within a political context. Aid workers have to make local contacts and get local permission to work. Sometimes this is with groups that it would be wholly inappropriate for western governments to negotiate with. As an aid worker in Afghanistan I had to negotiate with radical Islamist groups such as the Taliban and the notorious Hezb-i-Islami party of Gulbadin Hekmatyer, in order to be allowed to travel to areas that they controlled access to. However, anyone who has worked in such areas is acutely aware that whoever is seen by the local people as introducing or facilitating the entry of aid workers to an area will get an enormous amount of political kudos when the aid work starts. In fact, it is often a very difficult task for aid agencies to avoid increasing the political influence of some rather unpleasant political groups. For example, in going to an area in Afghanistan where no other aid agencies were then working, I had to negotiate hard for my agency to be allowed to travel there without being accompanied by Hezb-i-Islami soldiers.

The situation in Gaza is particularly difficult for aid agencies as Hamas very deliberately and successfully used aid projects as a means of gaining power in the 2005 elections. Whilst Hamas' share of the vote for the nationally decided seats remained at almost exactly the same level as it had been in previous elections, it won by winning an unexpectedly large number of locally decided seats. This was achieved by local Hamas candidates deliberately pursuing a long term strategy of starting local humanitarian projects, often funded by western sources, as a means of increasing their personal vote. Many Palestinians who had voted for local Hamas candidates were then shocked when a succession of local seat wins led to Hamas winning the overall election.

The trouble with calling for a 'truce' between Israel and Hamas as Foreign Secretary David Milliband and numerous non governmental organisations now have is...the underlying assumption that if Israel and Palestinian groups such as Hamas can simply be made to talk to each other, then the whole squabble can be solved.

However, there are 3 reasons which fundamentally prevent that ever happening and at least the first two are deeply grounded in Hamas' very raison d'etre:

1. Domination: Islamist groups exist to create an Islamic government with Islamic law (sharia) imposed not merely on Muslim majority areas, but ultimately on the whole world, including Israel. Islamic theology held both by Islamist and historically by Sunni theologians holds that it has been divinely decreed that the whole world should be subjected to Islamic government and law (not the view of a great many ordinary British Muslims who understand Islam primarily in devotional rather than political terms). Therefore once an area has at any time in past history been subjected to Islamic government, it then become an act of 'defensive' jihad to fight to reimpose Islamic rule on that area. Palestinian Islamist groups such as al-Jihad and Hamas therefore see their actions in firing indiscriminately into Israeli towns as an act of divinely commanded defence, restoring Islamic government and sharia over an area where it once held sway.

2. Deception: Hamas have very different concepts of 'truth' and 'treaty' from the western world. Lying is not necessarily regarded as 'bad' if it gains one a strategic advantage. There is an Hadith (Islamic tradition traced back to Muhammad) which states that it is permissible to lie to reconcile friends, to any woman and in jihad. The concept of 'truce' used by Islamist groups such as Hamas largely reflects the last of these. When Hamas broke their truce with Israel on 19th December, it was not a treaty in the western sense of the term, but what is termed in Islamic theology hudna (a temporary truce before war is recommenced). It is based on the sunna (example) of Muhammad who agreed a peace treaty known as 'the treaty of Hudabiya' with the pagan Quraish tribe who then controlled Mecca. Muhammad then dispensed with the 'treaty' a year later when he had become strong enough to take Mecca by force. The concept of Hudabiya is so widely known in the Middle East that even a predominately nationalist leader like Yasser Arafat is reported to have silenced the criticisms of the Arab press when he signed the peace accord by simply saying 'well brothers, let's just say this is Hudabiya'.

This week the question of whether pre nuptial agreements should be made legally binding was raised in a report reviewing family law reform for the Centre for Social Justice. Hardly a hot topic you may think unless you happen to be fantastically rich and about to get married? Well actually such a proposal could effectively legalise a situation of grave injustice experienced by a number of Muslim women.

Although it may come as a surprise to many, the islamisation of family law in Britain is at the forefront of the strategy being pursued by some 'non violent' Islamist groups in the UK. Put simply, the strategy of such groups is to bring about a step by step alignment of British law with sharia - either by lobbying for changes to parliamentary law or by pushing test cases through the courts. Illustrative of this was a meeting that government ministers had with leaders of key Islamic organisations immediately after the arrest of a number of Muslims on suspicion of being involved in a terrorist plot centred on Heathrow airport in August 2006. The government ministers aimed to allay the fear that the arrests had generated in the Muslim community. However the Islamic leaders chose this occasion to make two wholly unrelated requests - Islamic festivals to be made UK bank holidays and a partial implementation of sharia in Britain in respect of Islamic family law. The then Communities Secretary, Ruth Kelly rather naively responded by setting up a commission to look into implementing the first of these.

However, if we are to avoid importing and institutionalising the injustices experienced by some women in the Islamic world, then we need to have our eyes much wider open to the agenda of 'non violent' Islamist groups than the present government has, and this includes even seemingly innocent matters such as whether pre nuptial agreements should be made legally binding in the UK.

It's not often that an opposition has potentially more influence with a foreign government than the incumbent British government. But this may be the case with the Maldives. The newly elected president - Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldivian Democratic Party - relied heavily on Conservative Party expertise to win the country's first democratic election in thirty years. It is reported that his election campaign was run by a former aide to London mayor Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party was also instrumental in securing funding for his campaign.

The democratic election took place under the auspices of a new constitution ratified three months ago by the country's former President Abdul Gayoom, who had presided over a dictatorship responsible for significant human rights abuses. However, there is a fly in the ointment of the new constitution in the form of a clause, which states that

'a non Muslim may not become a citizen of the Maldives'

This is a significant deterioration from the situation under the previous constitution, which only denied non Muslims the right to vote. The new law effectively strips around 3,000 Maldivians of their citizenship and basic rights. This is an area where there is a real opportunity for Conservative shadow ministers to exercise quiet diplomacy behind the scenes. This may not get media attention, but helping change a human rights abusing Islamic state into something approaching a liberal democracy is the sort of foreign policy success that provides a very sound foundation for good Conservative government in the future.

When parents educate their children about sex - the overwhelming majority of responsible parents are likely to aim to help their offspring make the transition from puberty to forming, what is ideally, a life long loving relationship exemplified in many cases by marriage.

However, when the present government takes charge of sex education - its primary aim is altogether different. Announcing that the government will make PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) including sex education compulsory for all children from 5-16, the Children's Minister Baroness Delyth Morgan stated that:

'Ultimately this will help the drive to reduce teenage pregnancies, STIs...'

That, is an altogether different aim from those of most parents. So parents SHOULD be concerned that the government is also considering abolishing the right of parents to withdraw their children from sex education lessons.

The government's argument is based on the report of an 'external' review committee on sex education chaired by School's Minister Jim Knight MP. This claimed that OFSTED have identified the primary/secondary transition (i.e. age 11) as a weak point in school sex education and also criticised schools for concentrating on factual sex education information, rather than on

'helping children and young people to develop the skills and confidence they need to manage real life situations they face in their daily lives, such as ...how to negotiate condom use when they do choose to become sexually active.'

The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) has just launched what it describes as a new 'toolkit' to equip schools to prevent violent extremism.

Sadly, as with so many DCSF documents, what is included in this 'toolkit' is largely a rehash (or perhaps the word should be 'respin') of what is already going on in schools. Schools are encouraged to use the Every Child Matters framework, to develop school strategies that promote critical thinking, to challenge any behaviour that harms the ability of individuals or groups to work together and to manage harmful media and internet information etc. Does the government honestly think that the overwhelming majority of schools are not already doing all of these and more - and were doing so long before Ed Balls became Schools Secretary?

The toolkit's most glaring omission is that while ostensibly seeking to promote community cohesion, it fails to provide a list of the key British values that underpin our free democratic society - such as parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion etc - a list which many schools would greatly value the government providing. One cannot promote community cohesion in schools, or anywhere else for that matter, unless it is clear what key shared values, one is seeking to get people to cohere to.

Patrick Sookhdeo Faith, Power and Territory: A Handbook of British Islam (McClean,VA,USA:Isaac Publishing,2008) 360pp. 

Patrick Sookhdeo is always worth Reading on political Islam. He is the author of Global Jihad (see previous review) which provided a groundbreaking analysis of Islam and international relations. Dr Sookhdeo, who was until recently based in the UK, has now written an equally insightful book on British Islam. In Faith, Power and Territory he looks at how many modern expressions of Islam in Britain have both political and territorial ambitions.

The book demonstrates how, unlike Christian missions, Islamic missionary work (da'wa) aims not merely at encouraging a personal faith decision, but also at islamicising the social and political structures of society. Patrick Sookhdeo identifies attempts to 'contextualise' this da'wa to make it appear more acceptable to non Muslims in Britain. he observes for example that Islamists commonly refer to the creation of an Islamic state in Britain with the euphemism of creating 'a just world order', a practice based on the historic Islamic doctrine of taqiyya (saying one thing in public and another in private in order to advance the Islamic cause). The book also identifies specific Islamist strategies for achieving this islamisation of society, such as Islamist calls for the creation of 'no go' areas, where insults to Islam would not be tolerated.

As well as having clear 'war aims' in Afghanistan , the west needs to have a clear idea of what is a realistic political settlement. Unfortunately the present Labour government seem to have only hazy ideas about the objectives of fighting in Afghanistan and even hazier ones about what might be realistically achievable political objectives. A year ago Defence Secretary Des Browne told the Labour Party conference that a future political settlement in Afghanistan would have to involve both the Taliban being part of government and government imposed Islamic law - statements he rather patronisingly neglected to consult the Afghan government on. One might equally well ask exactly what sort of a government minister could make such statements while at the very same time sending thousands of British troops to risk death and disablement in southern Afghanistan. Let me say very clearly at this point that I don't believe that Des Browne or any other government minister is the complete moral chameleon that these comments imply (although some will doubtless disagree!). It's just that the Labour government don't seem to have any clear political vision for what can realistically be achieved in Afghanistan.

So, let's set out what in practical terms is at least potentially achievable:

1. We are fighting radical Islamists such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda to prevent them creating a radical jihadist state from which to launch attacks on the west, with the ultimate aim of enforcing an Islamic government on the whole world. This is what was being worked out in Afghanistan when the Taliban 'governed' most of country. There is no alternative - we have to fight to prevent this happening.