It’s the moderates you need to watch out for. When they turn, the effect can be much more devastating than anything done by the shouters and flag-wavers.
That was my reaction to a column about Israel that Matthew Parris recently wrote for the Times in which he called for meaningful sanctions to be applied by the international community with the explicit aim of getting rid of Benjamin Netanyahu and his rotten government.
Parris embodies for me an almost Orwellian notion of Britishness—that’s Orwellian in the sense of his essay, The Lion and the Unicorn, rather than the dystopian nightmare of 1984, (and, to be precise, he was writing there about Englishness rather than Britishness, but still.)
For decades since quitting as a Tory MP in 1986, Parris has written columns that stand for decency, fair play, moderation, individualism; humour and restraint; as well as liberty in thought, deed and expression, and an attachment to the past and tradition, tempered by tolerance and pragmatism. He voted Lib Dem in 2019, unable to stomach the unprincipled populism of Boris Johnson, but considers himself a lifelong conservative. …more
