April 6, 2025 - 9:30am
I think it’s fair to say the BBC has not had a good week — or indeed, month. In late February, the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone was pulled after it was revealed that the 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas official. Yesterday, it was reported that a BBC Arabic contributor had described Israelis as worse than “beasts” and called Jews “devils” after 7 October. What’s more, the Beeb has been accused of spreading “Islamist propaganda” as one of its writers repeatedly referred to Muslim converts as “reverts”, an Islamic assumption that being Muslim is everyone’s natural state.
While worrying, this is perhaps unsurprising. The past month or so has seen Lent coincide with Ramadan. The standard Ramadan lights have filled central London and everyone, from His Majesty the King to the Prime Minister, has written gushing posts about it, while seeming to ignore the Christian period of Lent almost entirely.
Of course, Britons should be free to believe whatever they want about the metaphysics of reality and God, free to assess for themselves what merit lies in the religious doctrines of the Resurrection of Christ or the revelations of Mohammad. But the distinctly “astroturf” feel of the promotions of many of the Iftars and Eid celebrations this year have helped create an entirely uncritical “hype” around Islam as this year’s chic trend. The consequences for many, including the millions of moderate British Muslims, could be wide-ranging.
Take Charlotte Gill’s list of what she refers to as “hijab propaganda”. While there is a debate to be had as to whether the examples she documents are actually propaganda, it is true that her examples show a political tendency to gloss over a complicated discussion around a much-debated religious garment, which many — such as dissident Iranian women — view as oppressive and misogynistic.
Efforts by the Government, local councils, and the state broadcaster to foreground the wearing of such a controversial religious symbol — banned by our French neighbours — does risk a backlash. Many are uncomfortable that official bodies are taking such stances. What message do these official images send to immigrants who have fled oppressive religiously conservative countries?
Meanwhile, behind closed doors, there will be younger people trying to assimilate into modern Western civilisation, held back by older relatives not feeling pressures to adapt. Or there will be parents grateful to live in the free West but fearful of their children being radicalised by online forces, now sanctioned by mainstream institutions. Focusing on differences, specifically that of “Muslimness”, could encourage antipathy towards moderate and secular Muslims, whose religion might be of no more importance to them than nominally Christian, but largely secular, Britons.
Official promotion of the hijab, Eid adverts on the tube and the use of language such as “reverts” from the state broadcaster all does a disservice to British Muslims who are trying to integrate and assimilate into British culture. Until recently, this was something the UK had rightfully prided itself on. For us to continue being a tolerant and accepting society that can assimilate its many immigrants from all over the world, our institutions should resist parading an overt multiculturalism that risks the worst kind of backlash.
James Price is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies and a former senior Special Advisor to the UK Government.
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SubscribeWhile I sympathize with the plight of rural towns, lining roads with rows of large, closely spaced trees three feet from the edge of the pavement makes no sense from any point of view. I traveled roads like these while living in France in the 1970s and it was a terrifying experience, knowing that a single lapse of the driver’s attention could prove instantly fatal for everyone in the vehicle. Whatever else is done to bring life back to village and farm in rural France, a return to cars hurtling through tunnels of trees definitely shouldn’t be part of the plan.
I just returned from walking 350 km across central France. I walked through many silent villages, seeing no people. But they were there, their cars parked in the driveway and one or two exterior window blinds rolled half-way up. Inside, sitting in the gloom, a deeply dispirited people. Similarly, although it was high summer, many herds of cows were still in their barns. Have the farmers simply lost the motivation to manage the cows in the open? Entering towns I saw the signs naming them fitted upside down, apparently by farmers expressing their anger.
This cannot turn out well.
I don’t know any people that are deeply dispirited……where did you get that from?
Some people are annoyed about the election results, but then, some aren’t.
It’s much the same as England.
The farmers are always angry.
I live in a small village in SW France.
Up the road on the way into town is a row of 62 Plane trees. Only on one side of the road tho.
I hadn’t heard of that move to cut them down to improve road safety.
Went to the Petanque club July 13 meal …fireworks at midnight!
Over a hundred people, including members of the ‘old’ families .
Only three English people.
It was a brilliant evening.
Our area returned a Republican.
RN came second.
I sympathise with this article to a considerable degree. One of my best holidays was a drive around Italy and France a few years back, and I recall well the twin rows of trees either side of the roads: they create a beautiful effect as one drives through them, and can be quite spectacular from a distance too. I had no idea that they were popularly regarded as a menace and that so many of them had been deliberately destroyed. How tragic.
As to the rest of the article, there are one or two points where I disagree.
“If Paris and the Left wanted to derail its opponents, and if it had sufficient common sense and humanity, it would aim to bring work and life back to rural France. It would see people as more important than automatic machinery and superficial technological efficiency.”
This problem is actually not the sole fault of metropolitan technocracy as implied, it is a longer-running problem in France that has applied for almost 50 years: the near-impossibility of firing employees due to France’s onerous employment laws, with the consequence that the job creation rate is tiny, and business investment has instead for decades been targeted at automation as much as possible.
A common political attitude in France is that businesses exist primarily to provide jobs to people. This might look good on a placard at a demonstration, but it is obviously nonsense: a business exists for whatever reason its investors decide it exists, and anyone else’s opinion on the matter is irrelevant. It is investors, acting in accordance with the incentives resulting from France’s regulatory landscape, who set the pace of job creation in France, not Paris-based policymakers, who have no power to improve the situation without reforming French employment rights.
And we know what would happen if that was attempted.
Inevitably, superfluous jobs cost money, and either the customer pays higher prices, or higher taxes to finance the subsidy, or pay decreases, or the job disappears. It’s how people’s skill are deployed most efficiently (when not hindered by government policy). Even if the jobs were within the state sector, the financial mechanics would be the same, and we would be complaining about paying for the inefficiencies, or job losses.
Investors, by definition, look for a return on capital, even if it’s an unexciting 1% in a building society.
There’s also investing in skills: I can remember when school leavers gained skills useful in wealth creating jobs in the oil industries, car manufacturing, and even the nuclear industry but, in the future, in Britain at least, utilising those skills will likely require moving abroad.
Some things are best made by large organisations, like petrol, computer chips and cars, while other products can gain quality when made in smaller quantities, like many food products, including cheeses and beer. The moderately wealthy could spend their spare cash to improve their own lives. Just think of all the DIY we do, or attempt to do.
And why are we in this situation? It’s because the State skims off so much money as it’s circulating around the economy. If my neighbour and I did jobs for each other, we would likely send half of our income to the Treasury, what with Income Tax, VAT, National Insurance, etc.
One must not forget the huge changes in agriculture over the past 60 years – farm amalgamations, mechanisation (machines today are huge), and greatly reduced need for labour. Today there might be one farm where formerly there were ten (or more). Much as I regret this change, one cannot create a living museum in the countryside except at enormous cost. And who wants to live in a museum anyway? The young certainly don’t. But some rural areas still thrive as do some small towns. Try visiting Aunay sur Odon, obliterated in the war by the RAF, rebuilt in more thoughtful style than anything in the UK, and quite a thriving community with boulangeries, doctors, vets, small Supers, cafes etc, in fact, all local services, including, when I lived close by, a cottage hospital (though there were plans afoot when I left to close it down in the name of “rationalisation” a la the NHS)
I worked for a French manufacturer in the 1990s and was struck by the risk aversion. The idea that they might take on staff and tool up for a new product terrified them – the product might fail and you’d be stuck with a workforce with nothing to do.
Junior staff in Paris had to go after a year before they could acquire employment rights.
A couple of years we drove from Calais to SW France. We relied on Google maps and mainly stuck to the autoroutes, but every so often Google would decide that an hour through France Profond would be quicker and would take us off the highway and through silent ancient villages, empty agricultural landscapes, twisty roads through woodlands. It was beautiful, huge, and rather intimidating. Like a giant hidden world that tourists rarely see. There just didn’t seem to be many people around.
Too easy to criticise as a Peter Mayle derivative, but there is an important cultural issue at stake.
Apologies Geoff W
Written after long hot drive back home through France, and England.
But no excuse.
Names will be corrected.
Best wishes
JG
What beautiful English, so different from an increasing number of articles in UnHerd, consisting of ‘university speak’ drivel of the type you find in student essays. An unusual cause of the accidents were epileptic fits in those prone to fits caused by the regular flash of sunlight through the trees
The flashing of sunlight through trees. I am not an epileptic but it gives me a headache, breaks my concentration and could easily cause an accident if I did not hold a hand up to shield me from the flashing. It’s particularly dangerous in spring when the sunlight is bright and the trees are not yet clothed in leaves
Well known stroboscopic effect.
Beautiful but not precise enough to tell us the length of time that elapsed between the pair lentement dégusté that bottle of wine and the car crash. It might have been informative.
I doubt the expertise of someone who refers to Marine “La” Pen and “Jason” Bardella.