Excerpt:
Imagine that you had fallen into a coma the night Tony Blair was elected, and now woke up during the last days of New Labour – what differences would you notice around you? The most striking would be the change in women's fashion. Back in 1997 the country was coming out of recession and the downbeat grunge look, and young ladies were starting to wear short skirts and plunging necklines.
Twelve years later and you'll notice the women are dressed more conservatively - far, far more conservatively. Take a tour of any of inner London borough and see how many women are sporting hijabs, jilbabs or niqabs, loan words that have entered the English language since 1997. In many cases these are not women who were brought up in "that culture", but British people who, in their teens and twenties, have chosen to adopt dress that would be considered reactionary in most of the Islamic world, let alone London.
We saw a gaggle (although that collective noun seems slightly inappropriate) of niqab-clad women last week in Luton, screaming abuse at British soldiers who had been fighting for the rights of Iraqis and Afghans to be able to protest freely.
In the same week that those "bunch of nutters", as Baroness Warsi rightly called them, caused a scene in Luton, the Policy Exchange claimed that £90 million spent on fighting Islamic extremism had had the same effect of opening a window in a burning room. Money had gone to groups influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jamaat e-Islami in Pakistan, a scheme which Policy Exchange compared to giving money to the BNP to fight fascism. This is not entirely fair on the BNP - they only want to return this country to either the 1950s or 1930s, depending on how sinister one believes them to be. Most Islamists would feel more at home in Viking-ruled East Anglia, where the "blood eagle" method of crucifixtion and disembowelment was the punishment for wrongdoers.