This is In Conversation with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

Gosh, she’s a Dame now. I speak of Sara Khan, the Government’s chosen adviser on “social cohesion and resilience”.

Khan co-founded Inspire, a women’s lead counter-extremism group, in 2008. Her official government biography states: “Dame Sara Khan was appointed by the Prime Minister as the Government’s Independent Adviser for Social Cohesion and Resilience in March 2021. She was tasked with producing an independent review with recommendations to build resilience against extremism, understand its impact, and better support its victims.”

That review was published in the last week of March this year.

Several red flags jumped out to me. First, why would any progressive person trust an inquiry into cohesion commissioned by Rishi Sunak? He spends much of his political capital on dividing Britons and inciting hatred of multiplying enemies within.

Then, there is the fact that that cohesion and its twin “extremism” usually refer only to British Muslims. Have you seen similar levels of concern about white Britons who stay within their own, tight communities and support far-right parties?

A stalwart of democracy?

But the most problematic point for me is the report’s underpinning assumptions that Great Britain is a stalwart of democracy, tolerance and free speech. Does Ms Khan really believe this guff?

I do respect her intelligence and confidence. The report is, in part, a response to an awful injustice suffered by a religious studies teacher at a school in Batley, West Yorkshire in 2021. He showed pupils a cartoon of the prophet Mohamed from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo during a lesson on blasphemy. Ironically some parents and agitators thought that was blasphemous.

They protested outside the school, terrorised him. Online extremists issued death threats. The head and governors capitulated. The teacher was suspended, eventually cleared of causing deliberate offence and given his job back. But by then he was traumatised and suicidal. He and his family have been in hiding ever since.

The protesters were Muslims whose fundamentalist beliefs and practices are as alien to me – also a Muslim – as to most Britons. Khan rightly criticised the school authorities for placating the bullies instead of protecting their victim.

Many blind spots

But this investigation exhibits selective concern and contains many, many blind spots. It avoids inconvenient truths about education, parental interference, identity politics and the rise of intolerance across Britain.

No attention is paid to the Government-backed growing censorship of views and debates in our institutions (otherwise known as “the war on woke”). Free speech when it comes to Israel’s grotesque war on civilians in Gaza is under threat. Supporters of slavery reparations or Jeremy Corbyn’s socialism are regularly demonised. At schools and universities staff feel paralysed.

Stolid institutions like the National Trust and the Tate museums face undeserved onslaughts by rabid right-wingers. (Last week they accused the National Trust of betraying British traditions because their scones are vegan, and have been for some time.)

The anti-trans moral panic grows. Now that the King and Princess of Wales are ill – I wish them and all other cancer sufferers a good recovery – we are not allowed to criticise the Windsors. I am constantly attacked for being “unpatriotic” and “anti-British”. Free speech? Yes for a few, not the many.

Playing to white tribalists

This review should have included the intimidation of educators by non-Muslim parents. Before lockdown, I saw a group of them shouting, swearing and spitting at staff at a school in Essex. The reason? The school had introduced healthy food rules for lunchboxes. Last week’s reports on children being violent to teachers made me think about that awful scene.

The narrow view of identity politics is another major failing. Most people think it afflicts black activists or unintegrated minorities, especially, again, Muslims. Never Lee Anderson or Robert Jenrick, who cynically encourage and play to white tribalists.

Britain is now more intolerant than it was at the start of the millennium. But Khan and other key voices are still fixated on “the Muslim problem” and reassuring national myths. Read this response to the Khan review by the respected writer Matthew d’Ancona: “The unofficial endorsement of neighbourhood theocracies is not a path to stable co-existence. The harder path is also the only one with a chance of success: which is to stand up unflinchingly for the democratic rights and norms that underpin all that is best about this country.”

Illusions are comforting; blaming The Other distracting. An honest and serious review would have given us more than that.

Moving Forward

Someone gave my husband a subscription for Private Eye for Christmas. I find that not even the very witty stuff makes me laugh any more. The same goes for Have I Got News for You and The News Quiz, both on the BBC. Is it me or is this afflicting others? With everything broken in our nation and democracy in crisis, how do we laugh along with wits and satirists?

Martin Amis once opined that laughter was this nation’s way of coping with the loss of empire, or, as the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh puts it: “If we can’t run the world – we decided unconsciously – let’s treat it as a joke.” But now, so long after that loss of place and position, and the nation in freefall, smart witticisms about the state of the nation sound like the cackles of a madman, who has forgotten where he is, who he was and where he is headed. It’s unseemly. Politics is just not funny any more.

Yasmin’s pick

A Very Private School, by Princess Diana’s brother Charles Spencer, is a compelling, incredibly sad book about how privilege destroyed young lives and hopes. Oh what savagery such upper-class children have had to endure for the sake of the family line and name.

Before he was sent off to boarding school at the age of eight, he was nicknamed “Buzz” by his mum who thought he had “the happy effervescence of a bee”.

The sadistic school, a stormy parental divorce and withheld emotional care changed the buzzy boy into someone who didn’t know what love meant. The upper classes despise feelings. They get in the way of status and the male order. Poor little rich man.

A conversation I had this week

A friend was coming for supper and wanted “an Indian”. I’d had a busy day. A lamb curry can be made in a covered casserole in the oven, with all the ingredients thrown in. No stirring or grinding roasting spices. I use readymade crushed ginger and garlic, garam masala and fried onions. It works. She loved it till I told her it was a fast-food recipe.

There followed a strange conversation about how that wasn’t right or authentic. I showed her the scribbled recipe I’d used, given to me by my mum. As she parted she said: “I’ll always follow traditional recipes.” She is Scottish. I called it colonial superciliousness. Dear friend laughed. I didn’t.

This is In Conversation with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.